← back

why i'm writing my own notes app.

in today’s fast-paced digital world, keeping track of information has become more critical than ever. with a myriad of note-taking apps available, you might wonder why i’ve decided to embark on the journey of creating my own notes app. in this blog post, i will share my motivations and the vision behind this project.

if you want to read through the current development / released source code of it, you can do so here.

how i’m doing it

i’m engineering the app with a golang server. the desktop app is written with tauri, react and typescript, but built offline-first. you can choose to host the server or not depending on whether you need sync. the mobile app is the same too. none of them make it compulsory to login and have a server. speaking of the mobile app, my plan is to use react native to engineer it.

one of the reasons i’m making this is because i need a way to organize my class notes and pdfs all together and having it under one single note file helps me annotate, take additional notes and etc,

postgesql is my database of choice. it’s fast, memory efficient and runs well in production. file store will be implemented by myself on disk so that it’s fast to serve.

why i’m doing it

i wanted to have my own custom tailored blog app. this was because a lot of note-taking apps out there missed more features that i need (or asked me to pay for them). as a university student, i cannot afford to pay for those. with a custom app that i can deploy on platforms like railway or hop, i’m able to maintain this with a cost much lesser than what evernote or whatever could charge me for.

this also allows me to develop my skills as a developer and help me make a fullstack app with ease.

conclusion

in conclusion, the decision to build my own notes app is driven by the desire for customization, privacy, and self-hostability. by embarking on this project, i not only create a personalized tool for my note-taking needs but also learn and grow as a developer. with full control over my data and the ability to tailor features to my liking, i’m confident that this endeavor will result in an efficient and secure notes app that perfectly complements my productivity journey.