Dear XYZ,

I often go back to the idea of “inner necessity” coined by the painter Kandinsky. I understand it as being moved purely by some kind of internal force to act in a particular manner.

I’ve been wanting to write some kind of blog for a while. Recent changes in my life has pushed me to make this a more urgent priority. I have a kid coming, my life is about to change. I’m excited to be a dad but I also know that this period of time before his birth could be crucial for finishing up some personal projects that I’ve always wanted to do.

Another motivation is that I hope to be as truthful as I am here to my child and develop a sense of vulnerable candor. Whether or not this is the best approach for that, I’m not sure. Perhaps one day I’ll share my writings with my kids, although my guess is that they probably won’t be that interested.

And because I like to make tools, I knew that I wanted to write in my own terms. Plus, I knew what I was looking for in a blogging tool. I liked the idea of keeping a blog using a git repo and static site generation (SSG). Wordpress is too much and nowadays with tools like Hugo and Astro you don’t need a live database just for a blog, SSG is sufficient.

However, my past experiences writing through a git repo meant doing so in an IDE. That really wasn’t ideal and was a bit of an overkill. So I thought… what if I combined the best of both worlds by creating a very simple interface which helps me write markdown files into a git repo? By creating abstractions over frameworks like Astro to provide a great writing experience. I hope btsv is a good answer to that.

Ultimately I’m not 100% sure why I did this (does anyone truly know?), but I knew I wanted to, and so I had to. I think that if one doesn’t feed their inner necessity, it will be malnourished, maybe it’ll fade and die. I’m afraid to wake up one day and find that I’m completely hollowed out, with no conviction for doing anything hard or meaningful. Just driftwood floating out in the ocean, completely subject to the whims of the tides.

I don’t believe in spirits, but I think we do have something like a soul… and that if you don’t attend to it, it will wither.

xoxo,
K