I wanted to go to bed every night knowing that I made the world a better place. That ruled out pretty much every company most people were vying to work at at the time like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. Nothing against those companies, but they do not check point number one.
I also wanted something that would be the best measure of my skills. I wanted to know that I was good. I needed to prove it to myself for some reason. Who knows why.
Then, I meet Nick Bulcao. He explained to me that time critical shipping was broken and that people were suffering because of it. Doctors, for instance, try to minimize the time an organ for transplant is outside of the body so they will coordinate the surgery around the time that the forwarder gives them. Then something as simple as traffic happens and the patient might wake up finding out that their organ, that was a one in a million match, expired. Now it is going for research and they are back on the transplant list.
In that moment, I knew how I wanted to spend my time. That was almost 11 years ago, almost 20 patents ago, millions of lines of code ago, and to this day I still feel lucky to go to bed knowing that what I did that day mattered to someone.
]]>I have tried the other way. I have had blogs on platforms that let me drag images around and pick from nine hundred fonts, and I wrote almost nothing on any of them, because opening the editor felt like arriving at an office. Writing in a text file feels like writing in a notebook — the tool disappears, and the only thing left in front of me is the sentence I have not finished.
The whole thing is four moving parts, and three of them are things I would have running anyway. Obsidian writes the file. A script on an always-on Mac mini imports it. Git moves the result. A GitHub Action builds the site with Jekyll. Nothing here is clever, and that is the entire point — see boring by design for the longer argument.
A note becomes a post when I add three lines of frontmatter to it. Everything
without publish: true stays private, which means the vault stays a vault — most
of what is in there is grocery lists and half-formed grudges.1
The important half is what the repository is allowed to contain. The vault never enters git. The importer runs where the notes live, and the only thing that gets committed is what it generated:
# on the machine with the vault
ruby script/import_vault.rb ~/Obsidian\ Vault # reads Blog/, prunes the rest
git add _posts assets/img && git push # nothing else is tracked
`import_vault.rb` rewrites wikilinks into Jekyll permalinks, turns Obsidian callouts into the blocks you are looking at, and copies only the attachments that published notes actually reference.
A vault-wide sync will happily publish a note you renamed at 1am. Read from an allowlisted folder rather than skipping a list of private ones — a denylist makes every folder you add later public by default.
Two panes, no browser. The left one is the note; the right one is the local preview, which I check about twice per post and otherwise ignore.
The best writing tool is the one you already have open for another reason.
I do not know whether anyone should copy this setup. I know that I have published more in six months of owning a folder than in six years of owning an account, and that when this site eventually dies, the writing will still be sitting in a folder, in files I can open with anything.
Both of which are, admittedly, good writing prompts. ↩