Good tools don’t shy away from changing the way you look at the problem at hand. Although there is value in tools giving you all the options in the world, sometimes it’s better to let the ‘experts’ do the thinking and use that instead of creating the perfect custom solution.
Some of the different tools I’ve used to create this website:
- Blogger
- WordPress
- Markdown that is transformed to HTML using 🧰 Pandoc
- Customer wrapper around 🧰 Pandoc (🌐 My Website Generator)
- 💎 Quartz
and in this same time, I went from writing using the custom editors for Blogger and WordPress, to 🧑💻️ VSCode to 🪨 Obsidian.
My main learning from this journey is that bad tools make you feel restricted because they are restrictive, while good tools make you feel powerful while nudging you in a certain direction.
In a way, those good tools also restrict you or push you in a certain direction. The point is that if that direction makes sense, you simply change the way you think about the problem. The creators of those tools have spent all their time thinking about a sensible solution so we don’t have to anymore.