whatgotdone VS codex

I wrote a tool specifically for this, mostly inspired by the Snippets tool at Google. I've been publishing my weekly log in it every week for almost three years:

https://whatgotdone.com/michael/2021-12-03

The code is all open source if you're interested in playing around with it:

https://github.com/mtlynch/whatgotdone

I had the same objection to SQLite, and then I heard about Litestream, and it won me over.[0]

Litestream watches your SQLite database and then streams changes to a cloud storage provider (e.g., S3, Backblaze). You get the performance and simplicity of writing SQLite to the local filesystem, but it's syncing to the cloud. And the cool part is that you don't have to change any of your application code to do it - as far as your app is concerned, it's writing to a local SQLite file.

I wrote a little log uploading utility for my business that uses Litestream, and it's been fantastic.[1] It essentially carries around its data with it, so I can deploy my app to Heroku, blow away the instance and then launch it on fly.io, and it pops up with the exact same data.[2]

I'm currently in the process of rewriting an open-source AppEngine app to use SQLite + Litestream instead of Google Firestore.[2] It's such a relief to get away from all the complexity of GCP and Firestore and get back to simple SQLite.

[0] https://litestream.io/

[1] https://mtlynch.io/litestream/

[2] https://asciinema.org/a/I2HcYheYayeh7aHj23QSY9Vyf/embed?size...

[3] https://github.com/mtlynch/whatgotdone/pull/639

I love this! And have been doing something like this for years.

The zero-effort part is key in my IME: if it's not zero effort, it won't stick. And if it doesn't stick, you won't reap the nonlinear long term benefits. There's the obvious benefit of magically reaching into the past and remembering things. But the hidden power that surprised me was the day-to-day experience of clearing cognitive clutter by typing things out in a place that I trust won't get lost.

Shameless plug: two years ago I hacked together a little node script to give my pile of markdown files a more friendly UI than grep: it would pass them through pandoc and massage the DOM and slap a a bit of JS on it. I've been using it everyday since and it's become my favorite productivity hack. I'm currently in the process of rewriting that ole hack in Go to make it more stable and easy to distribute (and to learn Go!): https://github.com/amirkdv/codex