Streams
Plain text is the only durable data format.
If your data format is not in plain text, you don’t own the data, even if it’s on your computer rather than a server in the cloud. Your data isn’t locked up behind someone’s server, but access to your data relies on software tools that are out of your control. You own the file, but you don’t own the data.
For example, you might have a SQLite database with your data on disk. It’s not on someone else’s server. Great! But you can’t read SQLite without some type of client. Maybe that’s okay: SQLite is an industry-standard format, and you can be reasonably confident that it’ll be maintained in 10 to 20 years.
But say your data is in a lesser-known data format: perhaps a one-off format serializing your data in a specific application. You have the data, but still need a tool to read it. Will that tool run on future operating systems and hardware? Windows 20? Perhaps it’s a tool on macOS - did it survive the transition to Apple Silicon? Will it survive the next one? Are you confident that these tools will be maintained for the next few decades?
This became more apparent to me after working on legacy projects at large companies. Some of these projects use data formats with clients that haven’t been updated in 20 years. The only way to run these projects is to run them on a Windows XP virtual machine; they’re not compatible with anything newer. If you need to run a virtual machine just to access your data, you’re on thin ice.
If you want to own the data itself, not just the file your data is stored in: use plain text.
As an aside: I’m not yet sure if I’m only referring to plain text, or if I can broaden my point to all human-readable formats.
Welcome to the stream: short thoughts that I think would be useful to share. These aren’t as long or polished as blog posts, meaning they’re a smaller commitment for me to post. Hopefully, this means I’ll do it more often.
Why not Twitter? On my own website, I have more control over the way everything is presented, formatted, and organized. Here, I can build a workflow that makes sense for me. It’s more personal, for both me and anyone reading.
This page also mirrors how I took notes in Obsidian for a while. I wrote a shortcut so that I could quickly append a new note with the current date to the top of one long Markdown file. I called this note “stream” and each note within it a “swirl”, in reference to Swirls of the Stream.
Here are some of the resources that inspired me to start this:
Posts
- Work with the garage door up - Andy Matuschak
- A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden - Maggie Appleton
- Incremental note-taking - thesephist
- Build tools around workflows, not workflows around tools - thesephist
- Why and how to write things on the Internet - Ben Kuhn