til

I’ve been writing TILs for almost two years. It’s a small collection, but it’s a nice place to keep short-form things I’ve learned.

I think I first heard about TILs from Hashrocket, years before I started working there. The style of mine is borrowed stolen from former rocketeer Josh Branchaud - it’s simpler than Hashrocket’s, but it works for me. Text files get the job done here.

Most of my TILs now first get posted to to Hashrocket’s TIL, but I’ll also post them here for my own records. There’ll also be some exclusives here that maybe don’t make the cut for HR, probably those that are too specific to my setup/use case.

There are a few steps to creating a TIL, so to make things more streamlined I wrote a ruby script. It’s in my /bin directory so creating a TIL is just a tiller away. It takes a subject (ruby, vim, etc) and the title; then creates the markdown file for the TIL, adds a link to the new TIL in the README, and opens the TIL in vim. Then all I need to do is write the thing, move the link in the README to the appropriate section (I can probably automate this…but for now beyond the scope of MVP 😅), commit and push. No more faffing about creating and opening files, tiller does that all for me.

This is part of an effort to better automate things that I repeatedly do - either with a script or Makefile, or something else. Reduce the friction it takes to write a TIL, and reduce the chance of errors along the way.

In the future, I’m debating making a static site to host these. They’re all markdown files, so in theory it shouldn’t be too much work. Just something simple to click around and browse, with a bit more eye candy than a Github repo. Might be a good reason to give lume a shot 🤔.