What is a digital garden?

Digital Garden
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Plant Seedlings

A digital garden is a different way of writing and creating content. I first learned about digital gardens from Joel Hooks, swyx, and Maggie Appleton.

Everyones garden is different but they tend to focus on the process of creating content and curating it as you learn and grow. Like real gardens, each post is at a different stage. They're either "finished" (🌻), or in progress (👩‍🌾) and are being pruned and updated as I learn more.

Why digital gardening?

I've always enjoyed talking about what I'm learning and showcasing my progress as a developer. Flatiron required all their students to write blogs and this was the perfect chance, I wrote quite a few blogs on dev.to and some even got some views!

Post-graduation I started getting more anxiety out posting blogs and agonizing over their correctness and my general writing skills. Suddenly blogs became less fun and more of a way to market myself for the job search. I whole-heartedly agree with what Joel Hooks said:

Everybody is treating writing as a "content marketing strategy" and using it to "build a personal brand" which leads to the fundamental flawed idea that everything you post has to be polished to perfection and ready to be consumed.

To escape this need for perfection and get back to writing and exploring for fun, enter the digital garden!

As I'm writing this post I feel a lot less pressure and it feels more like a conversation. I hope people are encouraged to start their own garden and release more thoughts and notes into the world. We hold ourselves to their high standards of perfection and I much rather be focusing on growing and learning.

I want this garden to be a place where I can learn. Expect some mistakes, ramblings, and incomplete articles as you peruse the garden.

If you'd like to learn together by correcting a mistake or sharing some of your knowledge on a subject feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or click the Edit button at the top of the piece!

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