Standard Notes is a Better Project than Braindump
I released braindump to the world last year to much fanfare. After the initial excitement from being on HN died down, and the PR’s stopped rolling in, it became a personal project once again with very few users. Over the last few weeks I have made several attempts to fix the spaghetti mess that is the current code base by refactoring the current Flask implementation, then rewriting it completely in Django, and even started a branch to investigate rewriting the whole app in PHP using Laravel. Other commitments took precedence and Braindump remains in a fairly usable but not that special state.
Today on HN I read about a new project called Standard Notes which is the most exciting note related project that I have seen in a long time. It solves so many of the problems around cross platform compatibility that plague many other note tools. In addition its goals are to create a standard file format for simple, secure, and durable notes. Even more it has already created a platform, an ecosystem, that allows anyone to come and create additional applications, plugins, and use cases for notes.
These are some of the problems that I set out to tackle when I started braindump. After reading about Standard Notes, and using it for a few hours, I have decided that my time would be better spent contributing to that project instead of continuing to work on Braindump.
Working on Braindump has been amazing. I learned a ton, became a better programmer, and most of all had a lot of fun. I want to thank everyone who tried it, provided feedback, and sent patches. The source code for braindump will remain on GitHub but I would encourage you to try and contribute to the Standard Notes project along with me.
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- 2024
- Reinstalling Windows at 1am
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- How to Disable Wayland in Debian Testing
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Underused Techniques for Effective Emails from Refactoring English
- Death by a thousand slops from daniel.haxx.se
- The AGI economy is coming faster than you think from Freethink
- Rolling the ladder up behind us from Xe Iaso's blog
- In Praise of “Normal” Engineers from charity.wtf
- Reports of Bluesky's death have been greatly exaggerated from The Torment Nexus
- What Would a Kubernetes 2.0 Look Like from matduggan.com
- We Can Just Measure Things from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Occupation and Preoccupation
Here’s Jony Ive in his Stripe interview: What we make stands testament to who we are. What we make describes our values. It describes our preoccupations. It describes beautiful succinctly our preoccupation. I’d never really noticed the connection between th…
via Jim Nielsen’s Blog July 17, 2025What do we do when the facts don't matter?
As a journalist by training, I have what you might call an addiction to facts. I believe that there are things that are true and things that are not, and that we can determine one from the other through observation, rational thought, and meticulous resear…
via The Torment Nexus July 17, 2025Back to the Future
This past weekend, I decided to take a trip down memory lane and take a look at the evolution of this blog’s design over the years (with a little help from the Wayback Machine). While I’ve really enjoyed the challenge of making an obsessively backwards co…
via flower.codes July 17, 2025Generated by openring