How to track your online learning with GitHub
I bet that you have found your self a lot of time thinking: "I read some that will help me with this problem", but you can't remember where you saw it and have no way to find it.
GitHub to the rescue
What? GitHub? and the answer is a big YES. You can create a GitHub Repo and use the issues to track what you read, watch, listen to online.
So I started to use GitHub issues, which according to the official information, are:
Use issues to track ideas, enhancements, tasks, or bugs for work on GitHub.
How to do it?
- Create a GitHub account (but I bet you already have one). Mine is: fmontes
- Create a repo, mine I called: learning-tracking.
- For every piece of content, you want to save create an issue.
- And that's pretty much it.
What to add to the issues?
When I consume some content online, I always want to remember certain parts, so in my issues, I normally add:
- Code snippets with comments about it
- Quotes of the article
- Notes with conclusions
- Links, of course
- Source
GitHub issues support Markdown
Markdown will allow you to add:
- Code snippets
- Comments
- Quotes
- Links
- Images
- Tables
- And so much more.
Use tags
You can create and assign issues as many tags as you want. It would help if you used tags in your issues so you can filter them later.
Search
Not only you'll be able to filter by tags, GitHub has a really powerful search feature that will find keywords in the title, tags, and even content of your issues. You can't lose anything again!
Conclusion
I tried any notes app you can think of, but none of those work for me. With this approach, I've seen good results:
- Haven't lost content anymore
- Snippets with notes are helpful
- Being public (you can make it private) allow your peers to see what you're up to
- Improve your developer brand. People can see what you're up to 😉