Ben Borgers

Publishing my Fall 2022 class notes

January 5, 2023

For a long time Iā€™ve had the idea of publishing class notes on my website.

I wanted to motivate myself to keep good notes (and an audience would motivate me to do that), and I wanted to have something to look back at a few years later (when I had inevitably forgotten most of what I had been taught).

This fall semester, I finally did it for an entire semester! My class notes are public at fall22.ben.page.

I donā€™t have particularly grand conclusions to draw from this experience; it went pretty much as expected. But thatā€™s to say ā€” it was an enjoyable thing to do, and Iā€™m going to try to do it again next semester!

The fact that these notes were going to be published somewhere definitely pushed me to keep up with taking notes, even on days when I didnā€™t want to, so that the collection would be complete.

And I think itā€™ll be interesting to flip through these notes someday and take a quick look at the things I learned this semester.


As a sidenote, Iā€™m also glad that I made this set of notes its own thing instead of trying to create an all-encompassing ā€œclass notes systemā€ on my website. From the beginning, even before I put the site on its own domain, it was powered by code that was only meant to house Fall 2022 notes.

I thought (correctly) that I would change my mind within a semester about how I wanted to take notes and how I wanted to publish them. So keeping this website small in scope will allow me to do things slightly differently next semester.

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