A Nice Place to Prototype Ideas

I’m working on a new project. I don’t really know what it is or what it will be just yet. It’s called “words.” And at the moment, it’s just a nice place to try a few things.

Let me explain.

I’ve always thought that having a comfortable environment to experiment is an extremely valuable thing to have. It could be a workbench in your garage, or a desk in the basement, or a garden out back, the point is, a little cozy nook where you can be yourself, and let your mind wander.

For me, I’ve been looking for something like this online—a new kind of playground, where I can test a few ideas, erase them away, and try something new. So, I’ve set up words.micahwalter.com. It’s nothing yet, just a blank website from the looks of it, but it’s where I am going to wiggle and squirm for a bit, to see what surfaces.

I imagine this project will have something to do with words! I’ve been thinking lately about building a tool that can help me easily publish a web of interconnected thoughts. For the past year or so I’ve been a huge fan of Obsidian. It’s a tool I use almost every day for taking notes. They offer a very nice web publishing feature, but it’s not for me. I want to use this as a sort of prompt to build something of my own. So yes, it will have to do with words, but other than that, I have no idea really.

As for the environment itself, I am really enjoying getting to know Next.js and the Vercel platform. Vercel is hands down one of the easiest and most elegant platforms for building a website that I’ve seen in a really long time. It’s stupidly simple to deploy a site to Vercel and I really love the ability to look back at previous builds forever—like a little rewind button for my web project. Next.js on Vercel is also extremely smart around mixing together front-end and back-end activities as well as static vs. dynamic content. It all just seems like the future.

I don’t really know what comes next (get it?). But I’m gonna blog about it here as I go. You can follow along by subscribing to this website, and all the code will be published here. This isn’t so much about coding or front-end web design, but really about experimentation and free thought, and maybe…words.