I keep a commonplace book on my GitHub.

Commonplace books have existed since antiquity and persisted through modern times. They are simply personal notebooks where the author collects anything interesting or potentially useful.

These notebooks serve the purpose of capturing a thought or an observation for future reference. I believe that, at their core, every learning or knowledge-production system implements some version of a commonplace book. Wikipedia says:

They can variously contain notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and other professional references."

I’d go further: the author can even sketch proper arguments or concepts there. That’s why it’s so fascinating to look at the commonplace notebooks of prominent thinkers: they reveal something at the core of their thought process.

In the digital era, we have all heard the popular adage: “build in public.” Which is great advice, for sure; we get to see the repos and code produced by great engineers (these days, the agents they orchestrate). But once you find those great engineers, you may become interested in what they are learning. You may want to see their notes, or how they implemented something before adapting it into a particular project. That part of the thought process is not necessarily something you can figure out from a project repo alone. I think a variation on the theme is worth exploring: “show how you build in public.”

For me, that takes the form of a GitHub repo where I keep code snippets, templates, and some of my notes from things I’m learning. I made it public for two reasons:

  • To benefit from the minimal standard of coherence and quality that comes from knowing a third person might see it. That standard is always higher than the one I apply to something I keep private.
  • In the hope that someone else may find it useful in the future. That may include future collaborators. At the very least, it has already proven useful to my future self more than once.

Needless to say, none of these ideas are mine, and while writing this, I think credit is in order.

  • The advice of having a public learning repo I got from Mischa van den Burg, and him from RWXROB.
  • I heard about commonplace books first through Parker Settecase. Although I already had had the privilege of seeing some of Da Vinci’s notebooks at Le Louvre, with some explanation about his note-taking process; certainly the most fascinating part of the exhibition for me.
  • Miscelaneous: during the reading and the rabbit holes any worthy writing entails, today I learned that code version control was pioneered by Bell Labs (what did they not pioneer?) and that code notebooks were introduced by Wolfram Research.