Learning Backlog
For a couple of years now, I have been interested in the idea of “learning in public”. And over these years I have been slowly trying to define and understand for myself what learning in public entails. It’s hard to stress just how slowly I have been doing this. I set up a website (https://www.shreyasharish.com) and linked it to my Obsidian notes. I have restructured that website a bunch of times over, to get it to “best capture my purpose”. And I have had a series of pep talks with myself to convince myself to start making more small bits of progress.
In fairness, I haven’t made zero progress. I have also learnt and posted a few diverse little things on my website and even published a couple of small books. And even the vague, roundabout work of restructuring my website is a part of the overall progress towards figuring out what my learning in public project is really all about for me.
That brings us to today. I am now in the process of going back to the basics of what inspired me.
- Take up a wide range of personal projects that interest me
- Document as much as I can, as an improved way of learning
- Share what I document, because feedback helps, and an open source world is just nicer
- Borrow principles of the agile methodology to keep making steady, non-zero progress
In this journey, my latest baby step of progress is expanding the reach of my notes beyond my website, and towards medium. And so, my plan is to keep publishing tid-bits of what I’m learning in the form of medium articles. The hope is that I will get some feedback, and be able to incorporate my refined learnings into a broader model of my learnings and notes on my website. Or fail and learn something in the process.
Now, to address the title of this article. One of the ideas that appeals to me tremendously is that of having a backlog of projects to take up. Whenever I think of a little project idea, I add it to the backlog of ideas I want work on. Whenever I get a little time, I should pick up some idea from my backlog and make progress on it. Of course there are layers of prioritisation and documentation on top of this, but that’s a topic for another day.
Today, I am wiping my current learning backlog clean and starting from scratch. In round 1, I found that each of my projects were fairly grand and time consuming. This time around, I am aiming to maintain a lower threshold, in the hope of more frequently working on my little projects and making some progress. The second thing that I’m changing up is that I’m making my learning backlog publicly available this time. So that others can see what I have in the pipeline, maybe apply some good old peer pressure, and even suggest other cool ideas.
That’s enough talk for today. Here’s my current (empty as of when I posted it) learning backlog.
I anticipate that my progress might still be slow. After all I am getting married in about 2 weeks! And on a less exciting note, there is also a full time career in consulting to get back to after the wedding month. But little baby steps is the way to go.
