cow VS excalidraw

yikes! do you have javascript blockers? The site is unusable without javascript.

FWIW, it's a custom rerender of https://github.com/whacked/cow/blob/main/learning%20soroban%...

Seems like I went down a similar path. Emacs user, brltty, the shebang, but not together :-)

Maybe my experience will be useful to you. Do it for the plasticity.

https://github.com/whacked/cow/blob/main/learning%20braille....

one combination I came to really love this year is babashka (https://github.com/babashka/babashka) + websocat (https://github.com/vi/websocat). I wrote about a method of live web programming with this pair at https://github.com/whacked/cow/blob/main/a%20technique%20for...

babashka isn't strictly necessary; you can also pipe plain text, but pushing hiccup expressions to the browser DOM from the REPL with instant feedback has opened a new world of interactive programming for me.

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.