About this space

Hello, and welcome to my digital garden!

This is where I grapple with ideas that fascinate me to refine, crystallize, and eventually turn them into more polished artifacts. You’ll find concepts in various stages of completion, from quick thoughts captured during my readings to full-blown theories about the different fields of work I’m engaged in.

You should know that this is, first and foremost, a private space for my own thinking, which I’m building in public in the hope that:

• it might be helpful to other people, and
• it might force me to be more disciplined with its pruning.

Because of this, you may very well find notes that are incomplete, nonsensical, or contradictory—when you do, know that the messiness you’re seeing is a feature, not a bug, and a necessary step toward a more polished output.

Why keep a digital garden?

While my professional background is primarily in engineering, I’ve always been fascinated by a number of different fields, such as writing, management, leadership, marketing, commerce, and of course, knowledge itself. As I started dabbling in more and more disciplines, I quickly realized that:

• I need to grapple with ideas to crystallize them. Otherwise, they just flow in and out of my mind without encountering the slightest friction.
• One of my lifelong passions, writing, is an excellent tool for grappling with ideas over a long period, acting as an extension of my own mind.
• The real value in having a broad range of interests is not becoming a master in any given field but rather in connecting distant fields.

My first attempt at using writing as a learning tool was to publish my own blog which, after a number of iterations, eventually landed on Medium.

Unfortunately, I quickly realized that blogs are suboptimal for learning: they discourage non-linear thinking in favor of building a highly linear, highly polished body of work. I kept blogging with varying levels of commitment for several years while keeping my eyes peeled for a better alternative.

I don’t quite remember how I first stumbled upon the concept of a digital garden, but it resonated with me immediately: it felt like I had finally found a way to build a home for the million thoughts, theories, and questions that floated in my mind, and work on them at my own pace without losing any context.

A few years after starting my own garden, I can confidently say it’s one of the most satisfying and impactful projects I’ve had the pleasure to work on throughout my life.

How to navigate this space

You’ll find different types of notes in my digital garden:

• Evergreen notes: An evergreen note explores a specific idea. They are usually formulated in a conversational tone (e.g., Structure sets you free) so that they can be strung together to create a unified theory. Evergreen notes will typically be densely linked together with notes from the same and other fields.
• Literature notes: These contain the highlights from all the books, articles, and podcasts I consume so that I can reference back to the original content when working on my evergreen notes. (Because I have thousands of them and because they’re useless in isolation, articles are not directly accessible except from another note.)
• Nows: The Now section is a diary of events I am going through, content I am consuming, and projects I am currently working on.

There’s no right or wrong way to go through a digital garden, which is what makes the process so fun in the first place. Just start from a random evergreen note that captures your attention and follow the links!

Want to chat?

If you get excited about any of the stuff you find here and would like to talk about it, feel free to drop me a line at hello@alessandro.codes. Have fun!