One year of TILs
2nd May 2021
Just over a year ago I started tracking TILs, inspired by Josh Branchaud’s collection. I’ve since published 148 TILs across 43 different topics. It’s a great format!
TIL stands for Today I Learned. The thing I like most about TILs is that they drop the barrier to publishing something online to almost nothing.
If I’m writing a blog entry, I feel like it needs to say something new. This pressure for originality leads to vast numbers of incomplete, draft posts and a sporadic publishing schedule that trends towards not publishing anything at all.
(Establishing a weeknotes habit has helped enormously here too.)
The bar for a TIL is literally “did I just learn something?”—they effectively act as a public notebook.
They also reflect my values as a software engineer. The thing I love most about this career is that the opportunities to learn new things never reduce—there will always be new sub-disciplines to explore, and I aspire to learn something new every single working day.
My hope is that by publishing a constant stream of TILs I can reinforce the idea that even if you’ve been working in this industry for twenty years there will always be new things to learn, and learning any new trick—even the most basic thing—should be celebrated.
More recent articles
- AI for Data Journalism: demonstrating what we can do with this stuff right now - 17th April 2024
- Three major LLM releases in 24 hours (plus weeknotes) - 10th April 2024
- Building files-to-prompt entirely using Claude 3 Opus - 8th April 2024
- Running OCR against PDFs and images directly in your browser - 30th March 2024
- llm cmd undo last git commit - a new plugin for LLM - 26th March 2024
- Building and testing C extensions for SQLite with ChatGPT Code Interpreter - 23rd March 2024
- Claude and ChatGPT for ad-hoc sidequests - 22nd March 2024
- Weeknotes: the aftermath of NICAR - 16th March 2024
- The GPT-4 barrier has finally been broken - 8th March 2024
- Prompt injection and jailbreaking are not the same thing - 5th March 2024