I realized that maintaining a blog requires a lot of effort, mostly because the expectations are very high. I can't publish half-baked articles, nor short notes. Moreover, a blog should construct a persona of myself. That is why I blog about Python on Python for the Lab , and about more professional topics on Aquicarattino .

However, sometimes I would like to write about how I achieved something that may be useful for myself or others. Still, it does not quite fit the content of my websites. I end up documenting scattered notes that never become public. Fortunately, I crossed this article on how to build a digital garden , which lead to a series of surprising discoveries.

This website is a digital garden

This website is meant to be a forever growing work in progress and is also known as a digital garden . Some of the notes you'll find here are incomplete or have mistakes. I am not ashamed of them. They are a way of learning. If you think you spotted something you don't agree with, or that is simply wrong, you can contact me , reach out to me on Twitter or through my e-mail .

No indexes

The idea of breaking with the mold of a blog is that there are no indexes, no categories, no chronological ordering. The only way to navigate this website is by following links . Some are orange, some are blue. The orange ones are internal links; the blue ones bring you to other websites.

On the other hand, each page has a list of the pages linking back to it. And there shouldn't be dead links. If I make a link to an empty page, it will be created automatically. This allows to have nodes between pages, and the tree becomes apparent even without explicit content.

On 20 October 2020 I started monitoring website visits using my own tracking service called Privalytics . After reflecting for a while, I thought that measuring the amount of guests different pages receive can be a boost for the motivation. However, if I feel that traffic pushes me in one or the other direction regarding my thinking or my writing, I will stop the experiment.

I love this kind of communication personally, but I suspect it also creates more invested, interesting followings over the long term. That effect’s probably related to Working on niche, personally-meaningful projects brings weirder, more serendipitous inbounds . It’s also a way to avoid the problems described in Pitching out corrupts within .