Old man energy

The interview

I was in an interview yesterday and the topic came around the the candidate's website. The development manager (the person who would be managing this person) asked them about their "digital garden", and the candidate proceeded to describe their personal website in the following general terms:

A personal space where I can add my thoughts.
Where I can learn in public.
Where it can grow and evolve as I do.
Where I can just add whatever I want to.

Everything old is new again. I vividly remember the early days of the internet. I remember the early blog space, with people furiously creating, experimenting, and sharing. I remember Geocities, where everyone had an opportunity to do all of the above, creating a space that was just about them. Admittedly, inevitably, it was mostly just a bunch of people's favourite gif files and a bunch of promises to add more content, complete with pictures of hard-hats and orange and black booms emblazoned with "Under construction" - hell even the Simpsons referenced this - but it was still an exciting time.

All of this to say that suddenly I felt like an old man. That early internet was too soon replaced with the convenience, polish, and in-built discoverability of social media, starting with MySpace and eventually becoming today's wasteland of an online social landscape. Depressing though The Website Formally Known As Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn have become today, they were started with laudable intentions,

In the world of AI (and, subsequently, AI slop), where the rise of influencer culture has created a straight line between loud voices and profitability, and where the resultant culture shift has made it such that sincerity is largely sacrificed on the alter of popularism, where people use their platforms - big and small - to broadcast to the world their opinions and outrage, conflating tribalism and authenticity. It was such an encouraging conversation to talk to someone about their humble website and blog, to hear them talk about the small rewards of experimentation, communication and learning.

Learning in public

One idea this person presented that really struck home was this idea of "learning in public". It's such a nice idea: putting out to the world what you're learning as you're learning it. Creating a cycle of experimentation, creation, learning and communication. It really is what we were doing in those early days, but to hear it put so eloquently was fantastic. Maybe it's a well known term that I'm only just getting around to learning now (see: OME), but it's encouraged me to pick up these tools and do exactly that.

In the course of my career, some of the most enjoyable moments were when I was playing, putting something out there for people to use, and play with, and develop their own ideas off of. It's why I've always been drawn to open source software, outside of the core philosophical ideas inherent to the OSS community, ideas just improve if they're made free.

OME

It's always funny having those moments where I'm in conversation with someone and they say or do something that feels so familiar, but so disconnected in time that my first reaction is to say something like "that's something we used to do in the old days!". That there is some good old man energy (OME).

CTA

So this is a call to action, to myself I guess, to go back to my roots and start learning in public again. I don't know if this site will go anywhere, and I don't know if anyone will read this, but I'm going to try.

Here's what I really hope to achieve here:

Gather my thoughts when/how(/if?) I have them.
Communicate my learnings.
It can be very easy to get lost in the process of learning and experimentation, so hopefully this can be a way to shortcut the resultism I often feel when achieving a goal.
Track side-quests.
When learning/experimenting, some of the greatest discoveries come from "happy accidents", but those can often be very distracting from original goals.
Inspiration is the better part of mistakes (that's the saying, right?).