Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

6 items tagged “til”

2023

Write about what you learn. It pushes you to understand topics better. (via) Addy Osmani clearly articulates why writing frequently is such a powerful tool for learning more effectively. This post doesn’t mention TILs but it perfectly encapsulates the value I get from publishing them. # 14th August 2023, 2:50 pm

2021

Annotated explanation of David Beazley’s dataklasses (via) David Beazley released a self-described “deliciously evil spin on dataclasses” that uses some deep Python trickery to implement a dataclass style decorator which creates classes that import 15-20 times faster than the original. I put together a heavily annotated version of his code while trying to figure out how all of the different Python tricks in it work. # 20th December 2021, 5:05 am

One year of TILs

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!

[... 224 words]

2020

Weeknotes: Working on my screenplay

I’m taking an Introduction to Screenwriting course with Adam Tobin at Stanford, and my partial screenplay is due this week. I’m pulling together some scenes that tell the story of the Russian 1917 February Revolution and the fall of the Tsar through the lens of the craftsmen working on the Tsar’s last Fabergé egg. So I’ve not been spending much time on anything else.

[... 226 words]

Restricting SSH connections to devices within a Tailscale network. TIL how to run SSH on a VPS instance (in this case Amazon Lightsail) such that it can only be SSHd to by devices connected to a private Tailscale VPN. # 23rd April 2020, 6:28 pm

Using a self-rewriting README powered by GitHub Actions to track TILs

I’ve started tracking TILs—Today I Learneds—inspired by this five-year-and-counting collection by Josh Branchaud on GitHub (found via Hacker News). I’m keeping mine in GitHub too, and using GitHub Actions to automatically generate an index page README in the repository and a SQLite-backed search engine.

[... 1100 words]