My wife accuses me, rightly so, of asking this question too often. It is one thing, of many, that I do that annoys her. She asks me a question, for example, “can you please get me that bag of flour from the pantry?” My typical retort is “why?” And when I do, and her exasperation bubbles up into tangible, but transitory, angst between us, I silently blame my over twenty years of Product Management experience.

A constant search for the “why” of everything.

I have posed this question to myself that much more frequently lately. With my joining of WordPress platform leader, WP Engine, I have found myself in a vast world of ultimate creativity and daily reminders of the incredibly liberating power of an open-source software (OSS) project. Yes, WordPress started out as a blogging technology and yes, this site today, that you have stumbled upon, is a blog. But WordPress is much more than blogging and now living in its world, I have become inspired to perform some of the fundamental jobs-to-be-done of this world-changing software: sharing, building, communicating.

My “why?” is quite simple. I write because I want to. Pushed further, by the persistence of a grizzled, elder Product Manager, I would expound with: I write because I want to record, for myself, the thoughts, ideas, feelings, questions, experiences of the present such that I may reflect upon them, far into the future. Beyond selfishness, I write also because this allows my wife and my children to know me in ways quite unexpected and potentially more deep. I write because I would have liked to have known my father likewise.

Why? Why not, I say!