Well the first blog post on here was with a specific goal, a specific format, one that is quite commonplace around the end of year on social media. Now here’s me going off the rails, free form, just typing directly on a .md file in VS Code! Look at me go!
I’ve been using some software called Obsidian a lot lately, which is a note-taking application that is essentially a neat and handy way to organize pages of notes (mainly - though you can do a pretty insane amount of other things), and for me lately notes have been in the form of daily journaling, taking notes on what I am reading, and essentially making a personal Wikipedia of everything I know and would like to know more about (the whole “second brain” aspect of it that everyone talks about). One of the biggest selling points of Obsidian and why it’s as popular as it is: you own all your data, in the form of .md markdown files, nothing is stored elsewhere. From a privacy perspective this is great, but even more interesting for me, from a practicality aspect it’s pretty awesome, as everything I have is just a directory on my computer. If I want Obsidian to use somewhere else, I can take this folder of notes and put it on the cloud, a thumb drive, my server, etc. Essentially if Obsidian the company were to disappear, I still have all of my notes and could choose some other way of accessing them and editing them at that point.
Bare with me, I don’t want to get too caught up in the technical/meta aspects of this, but this is all part of why I even have a website to begin with. One other nice thing about having everything in markdown is that it makes the potential to turn your notes into a webpage incredibly easy with Hugo, which takes markdown files and turns them into html. So essentially all you need to make a webpage is your writings in markdown, Hugo, and a place to host (which I’m doing on GitHub pages, they make it quite seamless and the added benefit for me has been learning the git process). I’ve gotten inspired by creators like Nicole van der Hoeven and Dan Berg to consider utilizing Obsidian to facilitate a public facing blog, or especially in Dann’s case, a more personal newsletter that gets emailed out to friends and others that might be interested in what I have to say. Or they don’t have to be interested and I send it to them and they can delete it :D All of this ties in with what I’ve been trying to learn, for both personal and professional reasons, in regard to Linux and programming. It’s real basic stuff, but the fact that I’ve been able to create something such as this web page almost entirely from the command line and a little bit of VS Code has been quite satisfying and inspiring, it’s the “practical” element that has largely been missing from trying to learn various programming or command line based things in the past. Learning things in general. I’m sure I’m not unique in the sense that sheer willpower and a bunch of information at my fingertips isn’t enough to make things actually stick or give me some drive, I need to see some path toward actually using the knowledge.
The biggest thing for me though that I’ve found inspiring in all of this is that the idea of even just one other person reading what I have to say provides the motivation to do it. The simple fact that I have started journaling, and doing the journaling brings me some utility, looking back on my journaling provides me some benefit, should be enough to keep doing it, and so far so good. But the idea of making it semi-public and outside of myself provides a bit more of a push. So I’m not going to get ahead of myself and make any grandiose plans as of yet, but I’m merely just posting right now, moving forward in that direction. I like the idea of a newsletter, a simple one-way communication at a reasonable frequency (I like Dann’s monthly system), where I can just update friends with what is going on in life and maybe some media or world events I find interesting. No pressure to respond or ask for tips or advice, but merely sharing things, like a big group chat with all of the chat cut out. Ha.
I’m not really sure what, if anything at all, an audience of mine would care to read about from me. One thing I am realizing though is that isn’t the point, mainly it’s that I’m making something and it’s that process itself that is therapeutic, educational, and enjoyable. I don’t want any of this sudden output to make it seem like this is some new desire of mine to become a writer, or that “oh shit Alec’s been working a government job for only 6 months and he’s already trying to pivot to being an influencer”. Maybe you can just consider any of this to be just an overly verbose Instagram story. And maybe my writings will just remain in Obsidian, in a private GitHub repo (I’m such a GitHub-er now, I’m using it to back up my notes!), which is completely fine too, I’m not really sure yet. All I know is that journaling has been nice and something I probably should have started doing for myself a long time ago. Thanks for reading, enjoy this Kurt Vonnegut quote that is relevant and has been popping up in my head quite a bit through this process.
“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”