notion-auto-pull VS excalidraw

My perfection had a name: Notion.

I manage my non-work and work-adjacent tasks in Notion. Whenever I have an idea, regardless of how big or small or silly or achievable it is, I'll add it to Notion, and use labels to categorise it by type of output (e.g. blog, silly project, website update). Today I wanted to write a short post for my site. I clicked on the filtered blog post view, and selected this one (because I hoped it would be a quick one!).

Notion.so redefines workspaces. With its intelligent organization and collaboration features, it's more than a productivity tool—it's a digital haven. Discover the art of streamlined and efficient teamwork.

A quote as I could not directly send a discord screenshot and am not sure that people want to make an account at notion.so simply to see the FAQ:

I work on a large SPA: https://notion.so

It’s a document editing application. A document title might occur in the browser’s titlebar, in the header of the main editor, in a “mention” (a link to the document), and in multiple places in the user’s sidebar - like in both their “Favorites” section and in the the contents of their team.

When the user edits the document title, we need to update all those UI bits to render the new title. I have a hard time imagining some imperative code that iterates over all the possible views that may render a title to mutate them.

Notion (Notion.so) is an all-in-one workspace where you can write, plan, collaborate and get organized - it allows you to take notes, add tasks, manage projects & more. Imagine a lego structure. Notion provides the building blocks and you can create your own layouts and toolkit to get work done.

I think Notion (notion.so) is a good tool for managing Captain's Log games (and RPG games in general) but there is a bit of a learning curve. If there is interest, I would consider writing a more detailed tutorial on how to use Notion for Captains Log (as I figure the game out). I'd also recommend Thomas Frank's website and youtube channel for tutorials on how to use Notion.

my personal thoughts: regardless of how many people prefer not to believe it, and the fact that some startups do use non-dotcom (Notion owns notion.com by the way, but still redirects to notion.so - i suspect it's because it's too much of a hassle to do so rather than .so being their preferred TLD), the truth is that the .com still has a certain brand allure to it to mainstream consumers. personally i paid 10k for my startup's .com even though the other TLDs were cheap as hell (which i also bought anyway). i thought it was crazy expensive, but i still felt it was money well spent for the branding.

ExcaliDraw - https://excalidraw.com/

ExcaliDraw

However, Notion and Obsidian can only help you write documentation. Well, how about some visuals? Let's talk about Excalidraw.

Fun fact: I used GA in Excalidraw, and it's still powering some of the interactions! https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw/blob/master/package...

I was happy to find out recently that there is a way to make Mermaid diagrams WYSIWYG / drag and drop editable that the open source https://excalidraw.com has and did I mention it's open source!? With a LLM, you can go full loop back to Mermaid again after a few rounds of manual editing. "What a time to be alive!"

I'm working on a personal project and found myself looking for an alternative to Postman/Insomnia this morning. This made me realize i've been using the same tools for so long for work (mobile development, finance) that this project may be a good time to try out some new things.

Here are a few tools that i've been using lately that I really enjoy:

https://pocketbase.io/ - A dead-simple self-hosted firebase/supabase-like "backend in a box" using golang and sqlite. So far i've been really impressed. I've gone the route of extending the base offering with more go code and am really enjoying the experience.

https://excalidraw.com/ - An open source whiteboarding tool. Slick to use and after learning some keybinds I've gotten pretty fast at throwing together diagrams to explain things to people on my team. The killer piece though is that the filetype is just json, so I can source control my diagrams. Even better, their "export to png" function has a box to embed the json data _into_ the png, allowing me to slap the diagram in places that only accept images (think confluence) and still be able to change the diagram later if needed. 10/10.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ - Gitlab's CI/CD toolset is really impressive, and I've gotten really intimate with it's deeper features over the past year. I'd be curious though to hear from someone who's familiar with it vs it's competitors.