What Is a Digital Garden
Certainty: Read plenty, just starting hands-on practice
The biggest difference between a digital garden and a blog isn’t the format — it’s the attitude toward “done”:
- A blog’s unit is the “post”: published means finalized by default, arranged along a timeline, with old posts sinking to the bottom.
- A garden’s unit is the “note”: never finished by default, organized by topic and backlinks, with old notes pruned again and again, getting better over time.
Maggie Appleton calls this learning in public — putting the process of learning, not just its results, out in the open.
For me, a garden solves a very specific problem: ideas are most alive at around 60% completion, but a blog’s “finished-product expectation” leaves them lying in the drafts folder forever. So the first rule of this garden is written in Gardening Principles: once it’s 60% done, it can be published.
What to plant? Start with the AI Coding Workflow map.