Learning in public

Learning in public, also sometimes called building in public or working with the garage door open, is a methodology to learning where you share openly through blogs, social media, digital gardens, talks, videos and other means your process while you’re learning or building something.

It’s about showing your work where work means both

1. work (noun): the outcome
2. work (verb): the process

In Work with the garage door up, Andy Matuschak explains this as:

it’s Screenshot Saturday; it’s giving a lecture about the problems you’re pondering in the shower; it’s thinking out loud about the ways in which your project doesn’t work at all. It’s so much of Twitch.

Nicole van der Hoeven explains why learning in public is so effective:

When you learn in public, throwing out a single simple question and listening to responses helps you skip a lot of the trial and error in those steps. You are taking advantage of an entire community’s knowledge and wisdom instead of relying on your own (or lack thereof).

SWYX has come up with a notation similar to algorithm study’s Big O notation he calls Big L:

In this post I sketch out Big L notation, which plots your learning as a function of N years of experience, with P peers. Note that while Big O is a cost curve (higher is worse), Big L is a benefit curve (higher is better).

Lu Wilson gave a wonderful talk at Heart of Clojure about What it means to be open.

In his TEDx talk Creative exhaust, the power of being open by default (notes) Brad Frost shares a real-life story explaining how sharing the process and learnings of a design project he worked on with his partner caused a positive ripple effect and how working in the open has the benefit of getting more people involved.

Public Notes

From Ryan Cheley’s DjangoCon US talk Contributing to Django or how I learned to stop worrying and just try to fix an ORM Bug and from Simon Willison I learned about the concept of public notes that I’ve also tried to adopt.

The idea with public notes is to write running notes openly in GitHub issues while learning something new or working on a project.

Today I Learned (TIL) repositories

Lots of developers are maintaining TIL repositories in GitHub. They are a form of digital gardens. Good examples are Lacey Henschel’s TIL and Josh Branchaud’s TIL repositories.

I subscribe to a few of these in my RSS reader as you can subscribe to GitHub repository’s commit updates. To make the experience better, I built a custom RSS hydrator software to make following them more enjoyable.