Growth Stages
Inspired by Maggie's Six Patterns of Gardening from her essay: A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden, I added growth stages to this Digital Garden as a way of describing how polished I consider a piece of writing.
Within that essay Maggie talks about imperfection and learning in public which is something that resonated with me. For a number of years now I have been an advocate of #BuildInPublic to the point where the majority of the projects I work on are open source.
I have always considered PhotoGabble to be a place where I publish my musings and various tinkering for the world to purview if it wants, that lends it to be more of a Digital Garden than blog. I will still have Ephemeral notes in the form of journal entries and development logs, but I am enjoying cultivating this growing collection of notes.
When I first converted this website into a Digital Garden in 2023 I borrowed Maggie's horticultural metaphors for indicating how "done" content is:
- 🌱 Seedlings for very rough and early ideas
- 🌿 Budding for work I've cleaned up and clarified
- 🌳 Evergreen for work that is reasonably complete
Over time, I added two more to that list: Stubs as placeholders for content coming "soon" and Ephemeral for point in time updates that will likely not be updated such as Journal entries.