Lev Lazinskiy

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.