Learning in public

Since I start my new job in about a week, I've been brushing up and dusting off some of my more infrastructure-as-code (IaC) knowledge. I've also been thinking alot about learning and how best to practice it for myself. My new gig is focused on helping my employer mentor new hires, provide continuous learning opportunities for all employees, manage certification and knowledge paths, and more. And I figure a good habit I'd like to practice, and preach at work, is that of Learning In Public.

Blogging

I'm going to continue blogging here. It's actually been really fun and almost therapeutic as well. I hope to increase my pace and post more frequently. Not that I have an audience to really keep up with (and I don't even use analytics to track if I do have an audience haha).

I'll probably rearrange the categories/tags too at some point. It's a bit sprawling already and I don't want it to get out of control. And though I like that I have the css set up to support light or dark mode, I just don't like the default being light mode. I'm either going to change that or just force dark mode and stop the switching. Sorry, not sorry. I just prefer the look and maybe it calls out to my high school days as a pseudo-goth.

Speaking of an audience: might be easier to to get one now because I turned on atom feeds. God I love how nice Pelican is to add things to. I should do RSS too. I know RSS and atom readers aren't as popular as they used to be but hey, it was easy to add.

Week Notes

I only recently remembered week notes. I heard about the concept a couple years ago, but never took up the habit. I plan to change that now and of course I'll be posting them here. I may cross-post on Twitter or somewhere else too.

It'll probably take me a while to hit my pace with it and know what I do or do not want in those notes. How light or verbose I want to go with them. I'm going to research some examples and see what fits me.

TILs

I'm late to the party, just like with weeknotes, but I'm going to start recording Things I Learn in a til repo. Initially I won't bother organizing it and will just leave the Markdown files right at the root level. Eventually I'll create folders and structure. And of course a Table of Contents will follow (and likely be automated in a future post).

This will be frequently updated is my hope and since I'm moving into this new role, I'll have a lot more ideas to jot down. I may even convert some of my old gists into these retroactively. Is that allowed? "Yesterday I learned"? Oh well, I'll do that but not go too crazy backfilling. I want to see this grow while I'm in this learning-focused job.

More to come

I haven't decided on anything else yet. I'll cross-post some blog posts to Dev.to and get real eyes on my public learning. There are also a lot of ideas I'll be looking at in this essay that encouraged me to learn in public.