Notes app for developers

Developers take notes. If not all, most of them.

Be it code snippets, tips & tricks, pitfalls, sample configuration files or step-by-step how-to's, having a digital notebook has always helped me. I've been keeping notes for almost a decade now. During this period, I have discarded some of my notebooks and migrated my notes to a different product/service multiple times.

Endless migrations

When I started working at my first job back in 2009, I used email to keep notes. Organizing the e-mail/note by folder is definitely not the best way to organize notes, but it did the job back in the day. Since then, I have used Evernote, OneNote, iCloud Notes, Tomboy Notes and recently BoostNote. Here's a summary of why I moved on from each of these apps.

1. Evernote: Free plan doesn't allow for syncing more than 2 devices. No native client for Linux.
2. OneNote: No native client for Linux. Stability issues in macOS.
3. iCloud Notes: No native client for Linux. Cannot share note to users outside the Apple ecosystem.
4. Tomboy Notes and BoostNote: No mobile app. Relies on Dropbox/Google Drive for synchronisation.

Every time I moved from one product to another, I lost a few notes in the transition. Even worse, I dropped whole collections when I switched from one programming language to another (Java to PHP, PHP to Python, etc). I wish I gave away those notes to someone - a colleague, a junior or a student to whom it would've been useful. Some of them would've definitely saved a few hours in Google and StackOverflow.

A note taking app for developers

Now, tired of all these migrations, I decided to build a notes app for myself. A note taking application that will be,

1. Contextual - Have support for syntax highlighting for multiple languages.
2. Cloud based - Self hosted with a web interface.
3. PWA compliant - Built on progressive-web-app principles with offline capabilities.
4. Open - Source code and notes accessible to anyone on the internet.
5. Easy to share - Every note, folder and category must have a unique human readable URL.

With that vision, I now present the beta build of Notes.

Notes is an open source web application powered by the Django framework. It is not fully PWA compliant yet, but we will get there soon.

Useful links

1. Demo
2. GitHub repo
3. Setup instructions