I've been thinking about longevity. Not in a morbid way — in the way you think about it when you open a file you wrote in 2008 and find it still readable, still useful, still yours.
Plain text ages better than any proprietary format I've ever used. The Markdown files that power this site will be readable in fifty years. The Word documents from my first job in 2003 are mostly gone, eaten by format drift and discontinued software.
The software angle
This matters for code too. The most durable software I've written is the simplest — shell scripts, small utilities, things with no dependencies. The elaborate systems I built on frameworks that no longer exist are archaeology projects now.
The writing angle
Stories survive differently. Not through format but through resonance — the ones that stay alive are the ones that press against something true. Technique matters, but it's in service of that. The rest is just craft.
I keep coming back to this: the things worth making are the ones you'd want to find in a dusty folder fifteen years from now and still recognize as yours.