My family first got online with Prodigy dial-up when I was 8. We connected to it via a local phone number, and so I thought that meant the offices of our local phone operator down the street was where “internet” lived. As I got older I began to understand it was far more complex than that.

One of my next-door neighbors growing up was a tall man named Craig. He spoke in a loud, but friendly, North Carolina accent that likely wouldn’t make you think he was the kind of guy who gets really into computers. With his characteristic strawberry-blond horseshoe mustache, he looked, talked and even dressed like a long-lost cousin of Dale Earnhardt.

But in the same way my dad just knew how to work on any car, Craig knew computers. Every so often he’d help my family out, upgrading our first desktop from a 2GB hard drive to 8GB and later helping us make the jump from Windows 95 to Windows 98.

I’ve been thinking about Craig recently because he was the first person I ever knew who worked in a data center. When I think about data centers, I still picture them exactly the way he described them: large, cold rooms filled with rows of whirring computers packed into racks and watched over day and night by people like him.

I can’t remember where Craig worked, and I may not have known at the time. For all I know, what he oversaw was a private network for a single company and not even part of the public internet. But the image sticks with me because it was likely the first time I understood, even vaguely, that rooms full of computers somewhere were doing something important enough that somebody had to watch over them day and night.

From the birdwatching colophon:

Posts are written in Markdown because writing requires restraint.

I added some new pages to the site recently, including a colophon. I’m pretty sure the first time I ever saw the word “colophon” was the one on Daring Fireball. His is a lot shorter than mine.

Admittedly, I wrote a colophon to be like all the other cool kids, but I’ve always loved the concept and am excited to have one of my own.

The quote from my colophon above is one of the core ideas of this blog. Constraints can be a good thing.

One of the things I’d say I loved now, but hated at the time, was my university newspaper’s hard print deadline. If I didn’t have the files on the FTP server by 5pm, there simply would not be an issue. Plenty of mistakes are more forgivable than not printing. To work at the paper was, more than anything, to work for the stress of that deadline.

When I graduated college, I fully expected I’d land in a newsroom somewhere where the always-on, deadline-driven kind of work never ceased. The corporate marketing job I landed instead still had deadlines, but they might be weeks or even months away. When I have too much time to work on an idea, it doesn’t become richer, and more defined. It languishes, rotting in my drafts folder before it ever gets the chance to actually be flawed. Ze Frank called this “brain crack.”

The reason my college paper’s deadline was effective for me is because it was externally imposed and had real consequences. Writing for myself is neither. But with this blog I do have two key constraints I’m willingly adopting:

Constraint 1: I can’t host the blog (and allow hosting it to become its own hobby)

Constraint 2: I should only write in Markdown.

Markdown is a famously opinionated plain text alternative to rich text markup. Earlier this year, Anil Dash wrote about how Markdown took over the world. He and Markdown’s creator, John Gruber, were also on The Vergecast to discuss some of Markdown’s history.

I love Markdown and have been using it more and more since I first tried Bear.app in 2017, though now I mainly use Drafts (for writing) and Obsidian (for knowledge keeping and organized notes). Gruber’s original version doesn’t have all the same functions as other “flavors” of Markdown (such as the version GitHub uses, or the CommonMark spec), but they all have a common goal: the text you type with a standard keyboard should more or less resemble the formatting it would render.

Markdown doesn’t reliably solve for every type of common text formatting (hence the opinionated-ness). Notably, most “flavors” of Markdown don’t even have a standard way to underline text. Other things like tables, LaTeX and certain kinds of images and embeds vary in compatibility, but still aren’t that easy to do by hand. These range from difficult to type/scaffold on your own or are highly specific to certain flavors.

Ultimately, this is the key tradeoff of the format, and to me it’s a feature. I don’t think this blog needs all of those formatting options anyways. My intention is to limit formatting in posts to “standard” Markdown. Some non-post page content may break this rule sparingly.

My colophon states that my goal is to write at least twice a week. A pretty low bar if I count short/micro posts. I’d really wanted to commit to at least do 300+ words in a fuller post like this one with some regularity but I intentionally didn’t. I’m still easing back into writing and I wanted to set the bar low enough that I will always be able to clear it. At some point, hopefully, I’ll have done this for so long I can’t stop. I’ll raise it then, and no earlier.

Setting big, lofty goals is one of my biggest personal failure modes. So this time, I set a small one.

Writing requires restraint. Every kind.