A year in a digital garden
Breaking free from walled gardens and rediscovering purpose on the open web
On this page
At the end of 2024, a period of reflection on my professional life and relationship with technology—from both sides of the glass: as a user and sometime worker in the industry—led me to start this digital garden project as a way to reconnect with work I find meaningful and engaging, helping me reset my professional identity based on my own interests. As summer gives way to autumn, a natural time for planning ahead in any garden, I want to reflect on what I've accomplished so far.
Things I have learnt
My original motivation was simple, but the project has led me in some unexpected directions—as creative endeavours inevitably will. Pursuing ideas all the way through to completion, then documenting and sharing my discoveries, created a ladder I could use to climb out of despondency and taught me new things about technology and, to some extent, myself that I hadn't anticipated in the process.
Articles published
Cultivating a digital garden
Design, burnout, and the journey back
Dynamic colour palettes with OKLCH and CSS custom properties
Using colour theory and modern CSS to generate colour systems
Creating connections with music and technology
Building a personal digital music library with Eleventy and APIs
FavouriteBuilding a digital bookshelf with Eleventy
Managing a personal reading list with Eleventy and the OpenLibrary API
Scheduled deployments for Eleventy websites
Automating builds with Netlify Build hooks and GitHub Actions
Skills acquired
Growth and impact
At the outset, I set myself a number of guiding principles. As a result, I don't track the conventional statistics used to measure growth—visits, clicks, impressions, and so on. Even if I had these metrics to hand, they still would not serve as my yardstick.
Instead, I prefer to gauge progress through meaningful indicators of personal development. Similarly, in terms of impact, this cannot be measured in revenue. I would rather focus on the kindness and supportive feedback from people around the world since I began this project. If anyone who shared any of these messages is reading this, I want to thank you and tell you they have greater value to me. It meant a lot.
Personal growth metrics
| Words written | Pages built | GitHub commits |
|---|---|---|
| 11049 | 1420 | 250 |
Encouragement and recognition
Your music page is so cool! Everyone should see it. It's so wonderfully organised. I learned a lot from you and want to thank you so much for writing about it all.
Special thanks to Damian Walsh, whose post about building a personal music library, inspired me to create my own page for my music collection.
Your management methods have given me some ideas, especially around using APIs to fetch external data.
Nice! If you're interested in doing a talk for the 11ty meetup on it, let me know!
This is excellent. Thanks again for sharing this! Super cool.
I'm late to the party but this looks awesome!
Cool write up, I enjoyed the music one too!
Awesome! You've taken this to a new level.
Excellent write-up!
Amazing work Damian!
Reflections
Some argue the open web is slowly being suffocated by the creep of walled gardens driven by engagement algorithms and rising tide of AI. I disagree. My experience with this project tells a different story—one of creative possibilities, personal growth and human connection that stands as an alternative, hopeful vision. And I share these reflections not just to strengthen my own determination, but hopefully to inspire others considering similar journeys.
Instead of scrolling meaningless content, as if endlessly descending a ladder to nowhere or having your thoughts, feelings, hopes, and dreams confined within a grey plastic box, self-publishing on the open web is a doorway to a playground where you choose your own adventure. You could be:
- A writer using words to clarify thoughts and shape your worldview
- An artist painting on the web like a canvas with HTML, CSS, and JS
- A librarian curating knowledge based on your own unique perspective
- A detective solving code puzzles and technical mysteries
- An astronaut at the controls of your own rocket ship
Above all, you can be authentic and real—you can simply be yourself. By doing this, you add to the web’s tapestry, using the warp and weft to weave enigmatic personal details waiting to be discovered, or creating a reminder for yourself of who you once were or are yet to be. That's something worth fighting for, isn't it?
Except where noted, all content is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.