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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: February 16th, 2025

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  • That’s true of any large old piece of software, I sometimes read my own code written a few months ago that I’ve forgotten and need to spend time to understand what it’s doing, imagine reading someone elses code written years ago. Companies don’t incentive good documentation or comments, and rarely have I seen proper coding standards enforced, so you end up with a lot of spaghetti code, with 600 line methods that do too many things and there may or may not be proper unit testing that covers this code thoroughly


  • It’s a big company problem. Here’s why even obvious bugs like this one slip through the cracks:

    1. The Tyranny of “Requirements”
      In large organizations, everything revolves around the roadmap. If a bug fix isn’t tied to a specific requirement or feature, it gets labeled as “tech debt” and shoved to the bottom of the backlog. And let’s be honest: “tech debt” is corporate-speak for “we’ll deal with this never.”

    2. The Rotating Door of Ownership
      Over eight years, developers and product managers come and go. The person who originally filed the ticket? Long gone. The person who understood the issue? Moved on to another project. Institutional memory fades, and the ticket becomes a relic of the past. Even if the problem is still very much alive.

    3. The Myth of “Quick Fixes”
      A 13-line patch might seem trivial, but in a legacy codebase, even small changes can have unintended consequences. Without proper tests or documentation, developers are often hesitant to touch old code. The risk of breaking something far outweighs the reward of fixing a non-critical bug.

    4. The Invisible ROI
      Let’s be real: improving load times doesn’t directly impact the bottom line. Selling Shark Cards (GTA’s virtual currency) does. Companies optimize for metrics that show up on quarterly earnings calls, not for goodwill or user experience, until it’s too late.


  • Regarding multi platform targeting, have you considered something like React Native or Flutter, one code base that can run on any platform might be useful at least for the MVP stage.

    Also the reason I mentioned exporting is that I’ve had to deal with a bunch of notes apps in the past where the company behind it shuts down or gets sold and then you either have to figure out how to export all those notes or risk losing them and that’s why I mostly use Obsidian on the desktop now cause even if the company behind it disappears all my notes are in my control and are in markdown format which means they can be imported into any other notes app easily.

    And the 3rd party integrations API would help in getting more value out of your notes, right now I feel all my data is siloed across several apps, the articles I read and their highlights are in Pocket, my Kindle has my book highlights, my long term notes are in Obsidian, my short term notes are in Keep, my Todos are in TickTick. I am looking into a way to consolidate all the different sources of data to get synced into one platform so I have it all centralized, I saw recently that TickTick added a integration with Notion. I’m hoping to find a quick notes app that can be made to easily sync with Obsidian. Right now I tag Keep notes that I want to copy to Obsidian and then manually copy them on weekends.


  • I’ve started looking for a open source alternative to Keep recently as well, following are few features I’m looking for in random order, maybe you could look into implementing some of these. Once I get some free time I can try to contribute to the code as well.

    1. Cross platform with sync - iOS, Android, Web, Windows, Linux (Sync should not need to rely on 3rd party servers, should be able to use free syncing solutions)
    2. Free
    3. Open Source
    4. Easy to export all my notes / data in a open format like markdown etc.
    5. Hackable - can make automations that connect to other apps like Obsidian, TickTick, maybe using some API?
    6. Good notes search functionality, with search inside a note option
    7. Notes organization, via tags and folders
    8. Notes linking like Obsidian ?
    9. Google Keep like virtual pinboard of notes display, AKA masonry layout ?
    10. Markdown support for lists, links etc
    11. Runs in the background (system tray) in Windows / Linux and can be brought up and a new note added quickly using keyboard shortcuts like TickTick.
    12. Reminders / Alerts For Notes
    13. Pin Notes
    14. Notes Can Contain Rich Links, Images, Sound, Video

    P.S I think notes collaboration might be a anti feature, it takes away from the simplicity of it and I don’t think most people take notes to share with others, I think for most people notes are personal, so I don’t know how many would want this feature.