My name is Joshua Peter—I’m a fourth-year undergraduate mechanical engineering major at the University of Houston and aspiring Renaissance man. You’ve stumbled upon my digital garden: a website that is part-portfolio, -notebook, -poetry journal, -sandbox, and so much more. But what exactly is a digital garden, you might ask?
A digital garden is a digital space centered around the idea that we have much to gain from owning, accumulating, and maintaining (cultivating, or “gardening”) personal knowledge. Personal knowledge can be defined as broadly or narrowly as you please—grocery lists, calculus notes, book marginalia, transcripts of impromptu 3 AM therapy sessions with your friend—anything goes so long as it holds meaning to you.
In the age of algorithms, subscriptions, mass production, and instant gratification, digital gardens are the antithesis to the quick-and-cheap gratification model that drives our society today. If I sound a little pretentious, I apologize—I personally enjoy the worldly pleasures curated and offered up by Instagram, Substack, and Reddit as much as anyone else. But the digital garden aims for something higher (and I argue, more rewarding) than social media and the like: a living, breathing compilation of the content that actually matters to you, as opposed to what some LinkedIn lunatic or career influencer says should matter.
It is this aliveness and vitality that drew me to the digital garden format, and why I felt “portfolio” or “digital resume” would be unsuitable descriptions for this site. That would be to diminish its purpose: to build a continually growing, fertile space that inspires me to learn, to share that learned knowledge, and hopefully find like-minded people along the way.
Simply making this website required me to clone a GitHub repo and deploy it to Vercel, which I sincerely doubt I ever would’ve done otherwise in my impending mechanical engineering career. Building this garden—tilling the digital soil, watering the flowers, pruning the foliage—is a labor of love that I believe will make me a more well-rounded, resourceful, and knowledgeable human being.
So in addition to my resume, design portfolio, and professional qualifications, you can peruse my penned poems, musings and essays, coffee/tea reviews, and more. Thank you for visiting my digital garden—I implore you to take a stroll and smell the roses.
Yours in learning,
credits
This website was made possible by the digital notetaking app, Obsidian, and Jacky Zhao’s static site generator, Quartz.