Digital Garden Home

Like many other people with a Digital Garden, I initially came across the concept through a Maggie Appleton post that gave the basic outline;

A digital garden is a collection of imperfect notes, essays, and ideas growing slowly over time.

A garden by it's very nature is a opinionated, I give my take on What is a Digital Garden but it's helpful to have the context from Maggie.

Garden Architecture

Functionally these are non linear notes that represent the accumulation of knowledge over time. The garden metaphor is helpful as a framework to contextualize the maturity of the content. In my garden I have;

• Seeds

  • The Earliest nugget of an Idea, usually jotted down with little to no context

• Budding

  • Active development and working on learning the concept, not yet enough to stand alone. (Tutorial Hell)

• Evergreen

  • (Hopefully) fully formed ideas containing enough context to be read and appreciated alone. Often these will be refined and published as a more traditional Blog Post elsewhere.

• Signpost

  • Notes that help point towards desire paths that have formed. These are good entry points for exploration, You don't have to stick to a garden path but the signposts can help show what's in that direction

• Rocks

  • These are typically other peoples content. These will typically be a mix of my highlights of others content. I do my best to take that info and Transclude it where I can to keep sources accessible.

• Gems

  • Collection of rocks, evergreen notes, and other resources, I think of these as high density value areas, potentially difficult to understand, knowledge dumps. Amazing for the right people but potentially too dense for a novice. These are typically what I distill and develop into my paid courses (have pay rent somehow) If you have the patients or already know most of the basics, you can self teach through these notes with some effort.

I actively prune and keep the garden up to date as I walk through it. If you come across an area that is particularly unkempt, feel free to reach out and let me know and I'll bring some love back to the area. These notes are open source and public. I have other pieces of content on the internet that are much more formulaic, the majority of that content begins its life here as an unstructured thought, as it matures the are in which it fits often becomes more clear.

Part of the garden notes is an Epistemic Disclosure Essentially I will do my best to articulate not only how well thought out the idea is but how confident I am in the content. Some things are going to be me tentatively writing down notes as I begin to comprehend a topic. Other notes are going to be based on Years of experience and are not nearly as tentative. Disclosing this type of Metadata can help bring a context and encourage useful feedback.

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