Productivity

Why This Stack? Before diving into the how, let’s address the why. There are countless ways to publish online—Medium, Substack, WordPress, Ghost, Notion. Why choose this particular combination of tools? Obsidian gives you the best writing experience. It’s local-first, Markdown-native, blazingly fast, and your content lives as plain files you actually own. No vendor lock-in. No subscription required for basic use. Your thoughts remain yours. Hugo is the fastest static site generator. Written in Go, it builds thousands of pages in seconds. No JavaScript runtime, no complex build pipelines—just raw speed. The result is pure HTML/CSS that loads instantly. ...

There’s a technique so powerful it feels like cheating. It requires no apps, no subscriptions, no complex systems. It’s been available since humans invented writing, and yet we constantly forget to use it. Write things down. That’s it. That’s the whole technique. Why Your Brain is a Terrible Storage Device Your working memory can hold roughly 7±2 items. That’s it. Seven things, give or take. Meanwhile, you’re trying to: Remember that bug you need to fix Keep track of your meeting at 3 PM Hold onto that brilliant idea you had in the shower Recall what you were supposed to buy at the grocery store Not forget your partner’s birthday (it’s this week, isn’t it?) Your brain is not a hard drive. It’s more like RAM that’s constantly being garbage collected by an overeager process that seems to prefer deleting important things. ...

Why Engineers Burn Out The engineer sits at their desk, staring at a screen they’ve stared at for thousands of hours. The code compiles. The tests pass. But something has broken—not in the system, but in them. Engineering burnout is not merely exhaustion from long hours. It is a particular kind of depletion: the erosion of meaning, the collapse of curiosity, the slow death of the joy that once made debugging at 2 AM feel like solving puzzles rather than serving a sentence. ...