What is a digital garden?
I’ll quote Jacky Zhao’s explanation here explicitly:
A digital garden is not a file cabinet, nor is it fully an index. A digital garden is less so a well-kempt1 plot for farming and more a mess of entangled growth. It is a network of interconnected ideas and thoughts, clustered by how they are associated with each other.
This is not because I don’t like order, but because I think a dash of chaos and entropy is good for new ideas. They help connect two separate ideas that you normally would not have associated with each other, and to imagine the ‘what if’ more frequently.
Why keep a digital garden?
I used to write exclusively via a Jekyll blog2, which is at blog. This was originally started as a way for me to explore ideas and clarify my own thinking as well as keep up with writing, which I missed from my undergraduate days of synthesising research through weekly essays. However, given the emphasis of blogs on being read rather than centring on writing, I found this led to a bad tradeoff between processing ideas through the writing process and polishing wording for the reader.
Hosting a digital garden on the other hand enables me to better achieve that balance of processing ideas but maintaining some “creative disorder”.
In particular, I wanted to do the following:
- publish notes, thoughts and ideas in the open both for my reference and possibly for the benefit of whoever reads them
- search notes from anywhere with just an internet connection (try the search, it’s a wicked fast fuzzy find)
- share notes and learning resources e.g. from courses I’ve taken or lectures I’ve attended
- remove pressure to put together polished posts
- …as a result of all of these upsides, publish more often
So this is a space that prioritises writing over reading, at least for now.
Footnotes
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The presence of the spelling mistake only serves to reinforce the point ;) ↩
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Using a simple Minima theme slightly styled to resemble Karpathy’s a little more closely ↩