How

The tech behind this blog was an opportunistic find. My friend asked about bootstrapping sites quickly using templates, and another friend suggested Vercel as the fastest way to deploy them.

So I played around on https://vercel.com/templates and stumbled across the source for this blog. I hit "deploy" and had a working site up in minutes. Then wired it up to a domain I'd purchased for fun a few days prior.

I've always been a fan of using good quality tools to accomplish a task rather than dedicating hours or days to re-invent the wheel. My ability to hack & customise these tools to serve later needs is a huge priority in selecting them, so this seemed like a great fit for me.

I could see a good amount of thought was put into its technical design, capability, and customisability. Big thank you to Timothy for building it!

I've long been a user of Obsidian for my personal notes, with SyncThing to sync them across all my devices, and GitHub to version-manage them. I realised I could use Obsidian as my text editor and not have to learn a new tool or work with the raw markdown. I just had to install a plugin to let it handle the mdx files and I was good to go. Another easy win.

Why

Once the "How" had fallen in my lap, I realised this would be an expedient way to express and share my ideas. I write down a lot of ideas; my Obsidian vault contains 1305 markdown files (thanks find . -type f -name "*.md" | wc -l) that I have been writing and expanding upon since 2014.

Most ideas are bad (as a general rule), but some might be worth sharing, not least because sharing an idea is a very efficient way to determine whether it's bad, or whether there's a better permutation of the idea to be had.

The act of sharing an idea is also a great way for me to practice expressing it clearly. And it's a great way to help you expand on it by putting it down in front of you.

So for the time being, this blog exists to help me share, develop, and express ideas.