My favourite blogs and digital gardens
My personal notes are heavily inspired by the personal notes, blogs, and digital gardens of many others.
The ones I love the most
- Andy's working notes by Andy Matuschak is extremely enjoyable to read. He writes short notes that are easy to digest, presenting them with the sliding panes UI pattern for you to keep track of where you came from. He also posts long form articles on his blog.
- Essays by Gwern Branwen is a marvelous and unique part of the internet. Spectacularly well researched posts, that have taught me a lot about how impactful and different a well written blog post is than an atomic note, and many other things. Almost frustratingly, Gwern is almost never wrong about anything.
- The Garden by Maggie Appleton is beautiful and insightful. Maggie herself is a UI designer and illustrator whose work you have likely seen before, and thus her site features gorgeous typography and charming illustrations throughout.
- Wonderful things by Scott Hanselman I have read for many years. He posts less frequently these days, but his content stays relevant for a long time. There are a small amount of ads and sponsorships throughout but they are easy to ignore.
- Project Nayuki by Nayuki is a blog that started in 2007 and is still updated with wonderfully insightful essays, mostly about computer science. The article I re-read most often is about Tags not hierarchies, but you might want to start with why they don't like dividends.
- Dynomight writes articles that are far better than most online magazines. The claims are interesting, the writing is long but not jargony, full of pictures and with almost excessive amounts of citations, which is a trauma response from some early commenters accusing them of not citing enough. No ads or sponsorships to be seen anywhere. The article I re-read the most is So you're thinking about writing on the internet.
- Dan Luu's blog is a treasure trove for all nerds with an interest in computer science. He does his own research and details it all in extremely long blog posts. If you own an expensive keyboard, you should read his post about keyboard latency, and if you know what a command line is you should read about terminal latency. Personally I find myself re-reading this the most: 95% isn't that good.
Other people's notes I enjoyed browsing
Anne-Laure Le Cunff's Mental Nodes has an especially nice note about how creating makes you live longer.
LYT kit by Nick Milodragovich is a directed set of notes to teach a person how to make a PKM system that scales well into the future. It is especially thoughtful to people with ADHD and overactive organisation habits.
Public musings by Soren Bjornstad has an interesting note about why freedom requires rules.
Petrichor by Bryan Jenks has some especially interesting notes about ADHD.
Brad Wood's Digital garden is extremely charming, with an aesthetic that reminds me of old brown paper computer manuals. Brad Woods is himself seems to be an excellent UI software engineer. Anyone with an interest in JavaScript and UI should look through his notes.
Everything I know by Nikita is enormous while remaining quite charming. Lots of emojis and links and pages. I recommend that you simply go there and explore, but if I had to pick one note it would be his note about relationships.
Julia Evan's blog about is phenomenal, particularly for computer science. You might want to look at Celebrate tiny milestones to start, and Things that used to be hard that are now easy.
Notes by Eleanor Konik is a wealth of information on World Building and PKM. It's made using Obsidian Publish.
Alexis Rondeau's digital garden is made with Obsidian Publish and is rich in notes. He has an interesting note exploring whether increased light improves mood.
Other digital gardens I'll check out later
Luke Rambling has a labyrinth of digital gardens in his digital garden
Chips and Cheese, a blog about semiconductor manufacturing and architecture. Their article on RDNA looks relevant to me as an owner of a 6700XT
Not blogs but worth checking out
If you hate ads and like reading long form and extremely well researched content, Slow journalism may be your jam.
If you're okay with ads, you should check out my favourite magazines.