Announcing a New Section: TIL

Trying out something new: today I’m launching my own Today I Learned section. In this essay I will sum up what my plans and hopes are.

For a while I’ve been frustrated by the fact that the bar for posting on this blog has become too high. If you look at my earlier blog posts, I wasn’t shy about posting something I just figured out just to help someone googling for the same problem.

I have tried microblogging before, but it also didn’t work out for various reasons.

Thus, pushed inspired by people like Jürgen Gmach, or the legendary Simon Willison, I’ve soft-launched a new section on my homepage:

Today Hynek Learned

I have already written three posts as a test run over the past days – so go and check it out!

While I’m naming it in the vein of the others, it could just as well be called Today Hynek Taught or Today Hynek was Reminded, because it happens quite often that I explain something to someone, realize it’s useful to share, it’s too long for Twitter, but don’t feel like it’s a good fit for my blog.

So I’m trying to give myself an avenue to share tidbits of knowledge without copy-editing for a week.

One interesting aspect of this is that publicly admitting that you’ve learned something is in a way an admittance of a weakness, because it means you didn’t know it before. I’ve fortunately grown past that and want to help normalizing learning new stuff all the time.

Overall, I think the best delineator between blog and TIL is that TIL aims to answer questions like:

How to do X?

Why is X happening?

With “X” being well-defined and as light on opinions as I can control myself1.

It’s important to note that the whole point of TIL is to post often with little restraint. Therefore, it’s excluded from my regular RSS feed and I won’t announce new posts on my newsletter. I’m considering to append a summary of new posts to newsletter issues that are about other stuff, but the best way to keep up with my TIL content is either to subscribe to its dedicated RSS feed at https://hynek.me/til/index.xml or to follow me on Twitter.

Finally: it is an experiment. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll take it down again. It’s also completely expected that its nature will change over time. Let’s learn together.

1. Yeah, I known. LOL. ↩︎