This repo is a container for Issues created while I'm learning. I use them as a kind of running log of thoughts, resources etc... everything that comes up as I'm learning and experimenting with something. So mostly me talking to myself.
Inspired by Simon Willison who does something similar, and my mate Tyler Sellhorn 'coz Learning Out Loud 👊
Probably not, but you're most welcome to. Anything I feel is worth sharing will probably end up as a note or article on my website. By which point will likeley be much more coherent.
Until about 2016 I kept all my notes and scribbles here, so it's kinda an onbious choice. (I only switched because my work was in Notion, Miro & GDocs all day and I never had a text editor open.) Also...
- GitHub is public by default
- GitHub is free
- The web interface for issues is extremely easy to use and supports images, embeds, rich links etc
- Search & filtering is fast and available inside Cursor/VSCode.
- The content of issues & comments is just Markdown. Portable, simple, open standard etc
- Raw JSON+Markdown is available via GETs to
https://api.github.com/repos/dannysmith/lol/issues/NUMBER/[comments]. No auth or weird API calls or HTML scraping to get at it programatically. - Which means robots and AI tools can efficiently read issues via
curl,gh, MCP etc. - Easy automation & backup via GitHub Actions & API tools.
When I'm learning, I much prefer an interface which encourages me to append rather than edit, because it stops me accidentally getting distracted by tidying up the past. Issue comments do this perfectly.
- Learning notes specific to other repos on GitHub -> the other repo.
- Learning notes which contain potentially sensetive technical info, personal info etc
This git repo should be pretty-much empty. It may contain scripts and github workflows which help with administering the issues.
- Active - Issues I'm still interested in.
- Archived - Issues I've explicitly marked as no longer of interest to me.