Why I Wrote Yet Another Note-Taking App

I've been writing code for over ten years now, and I'm working full time as a manager of an engineering team whose products serve millions of people.

Why did I work nights and weekends for months to make Yet Another Note-Taking App? Earlier in my career, I wanted to write The Next Big Thing, an app that would create a new market or blow people's minds. I wrote several of those, except they ended up being The Next Big Nothing. Nobody used them, including me! So I changed my priorities, instead of writing code into oblivion, I wanted to write something that had at least one person value it: me.

So when I got my new job in April, all of the sudden I was managing dozens of people and in 20-30 meetings a week. It was a TON of information to manage. Traditional note apps like Evernote / Google Keep were too difficult to organize and search. Word processors had performance issues at scale and were difficult to search and navigate. Text editors couldn't sync across devices. I wanted something where I could just brain dump all the info that was coming in, and then later quickly filter and search all of the contents so I could debrief and summarize the notes easily across topics. And I wanted to be able to take notes on my laptop in a meeting and pick up from the same spot on my phone moments later. Lastly, I wanted it to be a product that I would use, even if I weren't the creator, which meant that I wanted to keep the note contents private for users through client-side encryption, easily export the notes if I decided I was done with the app, and have a business model that avoided expensive subscriptions or creepy ads.

So I started writing what would become Bosslog. I thought it would be easy, but ended up having to rewrite it nearly three times to get the features and support I needed. I developed a custom syncing algorithm that allows data to be efficiently synced through a server without the server having any access to the data. I optimized performance for huge note sizes (twice the full text of War & Peace) to work out the performance kinks. When it was in a usable state, I didn't push it out the door, but rather used it myself for nearly four months, giving me time to get irritated by, and resolve, the little quirks that start to be grating over time.

I don't know if Bosslog will ever turn a profit, or even get paying users, but I know that I learned a lot making it and that it's an invaluable tool for me to get my work done, and that's enough for now.

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