reflections from a personal learning journey

You should make a little home for yourself on the web!

“Civitas is stupid, everyone should just create their own static site!” I read this one time. And I think it’s wrong! I say it’s wrong with conviction because I used to belive it was right.

But first, what’s the truth in that statement?

Our mother’s milk as Clojurians is simplicity. Do create simple systems! Don’t complect! Don’t pull lots of dependencies! By building with simpler pieces, you learn more. You avoid frontend hell where the browser must load 53 MB of compiled Javascript to say “Welcome!” This is how you build a simple system.

The web is a wonderful place, and I encourage you strongly to make a part of it your own! I find it *completely amazing that I can type up some random shit about the kind of things I like to learn, make a URL for that idea, and give it to a friend. How wonderful is that! And how *quick* is that! Before the World Wide Web, Tim Berners Lee had to print a piece of paper and give it to his colleague. Delivering more knowledge required more paper.

A simple web site is just a folder of files. You don’t have to run any programs to make that! Just write an HTML file and publish. If you want to avoid writing plain HTML, you are in control, you can write a program to make the HTML. For me personally, Babashka my tool of choice for that. I can write the HTML generation program in the programming language I prefer (Clojure), and regenerate my web site quickly without a running JVM. Oh, the joy! The experience with Babashka-powered knowledge on the web got me so excited I had to present Build Your Own Little Memex with Babashka on the first Babashka conference. 🤗 Absolutely recommended, you should totally do that yourself.

But.

After having written, … let me check, …

(let [index (clojure.edn/read-string (slurp "https://play.teod.eu/index/big.edn"))]
(kind/hiccup [:p "After having written " (count index) " documents, what have I gained?"]))

After having written 475 documents, what have I gained?

• I’ve explored what happens when I let myself have ideas
• I’ve learned to build my own knowledge system
• … and I’ve learned that this is my thing. My site is heavily personalized, and works great for me. For others? I woudn’t recommend using it. Consider stealing a piece or two or fishing for some inspiration, but please do make your own thing.

Has it helped me build knowledge? For me, it’s superb: I’ve learned to learn. Write an explanation for myself, then I understand it. The two explanations I’m most happy with are Easy, explicit parallellism with pipeline-blocking (collaboration with Ruben Svealdson) and Rainbow tables: what they are, and why we salt passwords before hashing, explained with Clojure (which I decided to move from my site to Clerk.Garden).

Simple, great for learning—but ultimately isolated.

My personal web site is great for myself, but not not great for others. An old-time Lisper once wrote the following:

Lisp allows you to just chuck things off so easily, and it is easy to take this for granted. I saw this 10 years ago when looking for a GUI to my Lisp. No problem, there were 9 different offerings. The trouble was that none of the 9 were properly documented and none were bug free. Basically each person had implemented his own solution and it worked for him so that was fine. This is a BBM attitude; it works for me and I understand it. It is also the product of not needing or wanting anybody else’s help to do something.

That’s me! I made my own tiny world, lived in it, and it was awesome. But I couldn’t invite anybody else in.

Solving for cohesion and curation

You exist in a context. People might be interested in what you have to say, and they’re also going to be interested in what others have to say. If you’re Alan Kay or Bret Victor, you may be able to create a microworld and invite people in, but most people aren’t Alan Kay or Bret Victor! That means people are going to be experiencing your creations in a context of other people’s creations.

That means my tiny, little static web site is never going to be someone else’s world. Sure, a curious reader may look around prompted by interest, but the reader will finish that trail of curiosity and finally, do something else.

To reach more with the explanations we create, we want to ensure cohesion with other people’s explanations, and curate the very good explanations.

The Clojure Civitas that Timothy Pratley has created hits the bullseye for that aim.

Everyone writes in the same Git repository. That means you can follow one Git log and catch every change, should you want to. You can write prose and Clojure, and share it.

Explanation playlists is the key.

Curation has not yet been visibly tackled (as I see it), but the foundation has been laid. In my talk Build Your Own Little Memex with Babashka, , I argued that we need knowledge playlists. Today, I prefer the term explanation playlist. I define an explanation playlist as

an ordered list of contextualized explanations that can be consumed from start to end.

What’s the right medium for an explanation playlist? Something special, right? No! It’s just another explanation. It weaves other explanations together, letting you more easily orient yourself in the bigger picture. It’s just yet another hypertext document.

Clojure Civitas can help us beat the Curse of Lisp, and give Clojure the reach it deserves.

Consider contributing!

After being very pleasantly surprised by the Noj-powered tooling that drives Clojure Civitas, I’m excited to lean into Civitas. My personal web site continues to be a place of exploratory play, but now I have a goal for Clojure content: Put it on Civitas. On Civitas it can outlive me, and help grow a commons of knowledge, instead of yet another isolated island.