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Today I Learned

Today I learned that Google will translate to and from Zulu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulu_language).

I believe that the words “Ubuntu” and “Mongodb” triggered this translation offer. My page is referring to the database and computer operating system and not the Zulu philosophy of a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(philosophy))

While working on another project yesterday afternoon, I ran into set of documentation (https://docs.feathersjs.com/) that I spent a lot of time reading and will likely forget about sometime soon after I abandon using the library in other projects. Of course I stuffed a bookmark of the documentation into my quasi organized set of chrome bookmarks based on each project, but the fact that the documentation was hosted using Gitbook, reminded me of a practice I’ve seen others do.

One of the best sub-reddits is TIL and other organizations have published thier own TILs (https://github.com/thoughtbot/til & http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/til) . I figured that since I spend most of my working time with the terminal, git, and text files, a more efficient and easier method of documenting the time I spend reading other documentation would be to build my own gitbook TIL. This way the information I acquire will be easy to record, search and edit.

I’m often searching online documentation for answers to commands, configurations, and error messages. The problem is that I’ve found myself repeating those searches because of the breadth and depth of the amount of functions and libraries involved in development. My wife suggested I call it TIHIDI (this is how I did it) after explaining what I was working on. It makes sense to put my daily explorations into this publication in lieu of publishing them in the database of my main site because Gitbook is quicker, easier to search, and I can keep all the files in a version control repository on my local machine as well. It’ll help keep me keep my bookmarks as little less cluttered and it’ll leave my desk page free for longer form essays.

Today I Learned – https://davidawindham.com/til