In Short

In between projects and just before starting a new job at Skyworkz, for some reason I decided that there really was a lack of proper note-taking apps and that I needed to build my own. One that is tailor made towards me. Not knowing a whole lot about Content Management Solution, nor a whole lot about note-taking apps in general. At the same time, I also was eager to build something to get my hands dirty with a great variety of different aspects of running applications.

As such, I built Castor, and for some time I actually used it as well. Here is a screenshot:

Architecture and bit of Background

As you can imagine, I was happy to spent a lot of time on the coding side of things, but I was not ready actually spent a lot of money on it. As such, I decided to buy a cheap domain and a single virtual machine on Digital Ocean. After some market research, I found out that they offered the cheapest rates.

Then, I installed a whole bunch of tooling on the virtual machine to get a couple things up and running:

• Docker, in order to run the majority of my infrastructure through docker-compose
• Postgres, Redis, a Django-based backend to perform CRUD operations on postgres
• Celery to automate jobs and Flower on top to keep track
• An angular based frontend
• Systemd-based service monitoring
• Hashicorp Vault for basic key management, definitely overkill but it’s a hobby-project, so if it fits on the VM without disrupting performing i’m a happy camper.

Using it

After using it in a first project for some time, I was requested to move to other forms of note-taking. To be honest, I did not really mind because in the end notes should be simple.

From time to time, it still triggers me. People tend to make quite some fuzz about which sort of tool to use for keeping check of notes, while all these tools have scaling issues depending on how diligent you are in tracking and updating your notes. Let me tell you that making your own custom note-taking tool does not make you more diligent in that sense. If any, perhaps the opposite.

It was fun though, and I learned a lot.