essay // publishedmd
/1 min readshippingbuildingnotes

Shipping Beats Planning

A first Markdown post for the writing archive: rough things in the world beat perfect things in a doc.

The useful version of an idea starts after it touches reality.

Planning still matters. Taste still matters. Thinking clearly still matters. But a rough thing in the world has a kind of leverage that a private doc never gets. It collects friction. It attracts better questions. It shows you which parts were fake.

That is why this writing system starts boring:

  • one file per post
  • frontmatter for metadata
  • Markdown for most writing
  • MDX only when the post needs live UI

The goal is not to build a publishing platform. The goal is to make writing cheap enough that it actually happens.

The rule

If the post is mostly words, keep it as .md.

If the post needs a component, chart, calculator, timeline, or interactive artifact, make it .mdx.

That keeps the common path clean without closing the door on weirder posts later.