0xdevalias
commented
4 years ago - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_document
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A living document, also known as an evergreen document or dynamic document, is a document that is continually edited and updated.
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I find I often keep arbitrary scattered 'half-finished' notes about things in various places, that often don't provide much value (when even in their half finished state, they could):
Other times I end up doing quite a decent deep-dive/research to solve a problem, but then move on without capturing that knowledge well for future posterity:
It often seems that my main barrier to entry is the 'perceived effort' of getting started on a blog post, and having to 'do it well' (eg. see it through to completion) before it adds value. But in reality.. just surfacing those half finished things would be potentially useful to others, and potentially help motivated me to keep working on them/finish them due to reducing that 'barrier to entry'. Also, if I know I can just throw some half finished thoughts/ideas down and not have to 'perfect them', then i'm more likely to do it.
Could have a GitHub repo (either this one, or dedicated) for these WIP things. Perhaps a new issue/PR tagged a certain way becomes a WIP blog post. Some automation could watch for updates to comments/issues/research and commit them into the git history for posterity (so we aren't tied to all our info being locked in to GitHub/etc)
These WIP posts/research could be surfaced somehow on my website, but in a way that doesn't 'clutter' the fully written posts too much.
When it comes time to 'finally publish', we could potentially either create an automated post, or at least provide easy references back to all of the research/etc that went into building the post. Perhaps by using branches/specific naming we can keep things clean/easy to follow in the git history.
When posting a 'final blog', it would be nice to automate some of the crossposting type 'social discovery' stuff. Normally this would entail:
On the topic of cross posting.. it might make sense to capture 'small useful chunks' of knowledge along the research journey and encode them into Stack Overflow questions (for visibility, future locatability, and also the associated potential points/cred). There seems to be an API, so maybe we could automate some aspect of it (or have them feed back into this system)? That could then make this 'flair' badge more useful: