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Launch HN: Dendron (YC W21) – Structured note-taking for developers and teams

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: Dendron (YC W21) – Structured note-taking for developers and teams

#11

Post by kevinslin »

rememberlenny wrote: post #5

Congrats on the launch! I've love Dendron and the application to turn long timespan complex information into spatially organized formats. My wife is writing a book and a weekly newsletter, and I know she spent a lot of time to organize how she collects/documents what she reads, so that she can minimize the time to producing new content. In that vein, this makes total sense. What do you think are some other areas outs…

in a broad sense, any area where people struggle with having too much information can benefit (if that sounds like it could apply to everything, its because it can). the reason for our focus on developers is because the concepts we introduce (eg. schemas, type systems, refactoring, etc) are already familiar and so there's an easier onramp to a tool like dendorn. the goal is to make these fundamentals intuitive enough that everyone can use

an analogy I use here is excel - no one was born knowing how to use a spreadsheet but the structure and functionality it provides make it a pre-requisite for anyone working with numbers today. dendron's end goal is to be like excel, but for general knowledge

in terms of current non-software use cases, we actually have as many non-technical users using dendron as technical. some popular examples include authors (dendron is popular for world building), gamers (we have a professional street fighter user who uses dendron to keep track of different character movesets), and students (they use dendron for our ability to support math notation and diagrams)

Re: Launch HN: Dendron (YC W21) – Structured note-taking for developers and teams

#12

Post by orang2tang »

Hey this looks awesome and will try. Congrats!

I noticed on your site that the title is somehow getting pulled up into the nav area after initial load (it looks normal for a millisecond then shoots up there):

https://i.ibb.co/VTSkNRH/Capturedendron.png

I'm in Microsoft Edge on Windows 10, 100% zoom on a 1920x1080p laptop :)

Re: Launch HN: Dendron (YC W21) – Structured note-taking for developers and teams

#13

Post by kevinslin »

mcone wrote: post #9

Hey, congratulations on the launch! One thing I'm curious about is why you've raised so much money. Can you shed any light on other future products, or is the teams offering is the main thing in the works? I also thought you had a personal hosted offering (subscription), but I'm not immediately seeing that on your website anymore — is that still a thing?

lots to say here, most of which is covered in our initial blog post about why we raised money -> https://blog.dendron.so/notes/N9VxT7G5SovmncezBAGO2/

tldr: no one knows how to do knowledge management at scale. Dendron has a viable solution and we're building a team to become the knowledge base for every technical team in the world

for the personal hosted offering - its still available though we don't advertise it as we're focused on polishing the local version this year

Re: Launch HN: Dendron (YC W21) – Structured note-taking for developers and teams

#14

Post by tighter_wires »

TruthWillHurt wrote: post #8

Yey another note taking app! And YC no less! Not at all like previous YC-backed note taking app https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26565629 Or any note taking app ever.. Seriously, is that the biggest thing bothering developers? Is this what you got into computing for? The best use for your AWS experience? The digital equivalent of making an ashtray in pottery class.

“Developers should work with notes the same way they work with code.” Ok, so just put your notes in a git repo, and edit them in an IDE.

Re: Launch HN: Dendron (YC W21) – Structured note-taking for developers and teams

#15

Post by kevinslin »

orang2tang wrote: post #12

Hey this looks awesome and will try. Congrats! I noticed on your site that the title is somehow getting pulled up into the nav area after initial load (it looks normal for a millisecond then shoots up there): https://i.ibb.co/VTSkNRH/Capturedendron.png I'm in Microsoft Edge on Windows 10, 100% zoom on a 1920x1080p laptop :)

Interesting - I'll make sure we fix that. Thanks for reporting! If you join our discord(https://discord.gg/AE3NRw9), mention this post and you'll earn a special badge :)

https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/7c00d606-7b75-4d28-b563-d75f33...

Re: Launch HN: Dendron (YC W21) – Structured note-taking for developers and teams

#16

Post by kevinslin »

agustif wrote: post #10

I'm a happy user of Obsidian as other users have commented, but I must say having your Notes + IDE on the same app has its perks. I applied but submitted my code challenge, I must say being already familiar with TypeScript/React code bases and being a heavy user of VSCode, I don't know why, but after a few months passed I found again the code challenge in my mail and just did it in an hour or so, it was really easy t…

we actually have a lot of users that use both Obsidian and Dendron. Dendron is mostly compatible with Obsidian (wiki links, note references aka obsidian embeddings, etc) and we have a lot of users that use Dendron's desktop vscode client and Obsidian's mobile client on the same set of notes to get the best of both worlds.

Re: Launch HN: Dendron (YC W21) – Structured note-taking for developers and teams

#17

Post by kevinslin »

TruthWillHurt wrote: post #8

Yey another note taking app! And YC no less! Not at all like previous YC-backed note taking app https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26565629 Or any note taking app ever.. Seriously, is that the biggest thing bothering developers? Is this what you got into computing for? The best use for your AWS experience? The digital equivalent of making an ashtray in pottery class.

Yeah, note taking apps are like mushrooms these days and it sometimes feels like everyone is doing it.

I think the reason you're seeing all the development here is because how *humans* manage *knowledge at scale* is fundamentally an unsolved problem (this is why people keep building new tools).

My friends give me grief about doing cloud computing for over half a decade to work on a local-first note-taking app. There is some overlap though - it is impossible to keep even a small subset of AWS (which now has over 200+ services) in one's head. The only way to use it effectively is externalizing the relevant details in a way that I, as a human, can retrieve. In many ways, trying to externalize my mental model of AWS was a great proving ground for many of the fundamental ideas around structure used in Dendron

Re: Launch HN: Dendron (YC W21) – Structured note-taking for developers and teams

#18

Post by kevinslin »

tighter_wires wrote: post #14
TruthWillHurt wrote: post #8

Yey another note taking app! And YC no less! Not at all like previous YC-backed note taking app https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26565629 Or any note taking app ever.. Seriously, is that the biggest thing bothering developers? Is this what you got into computing for? The best use for your AWS experience? The digital equivalent of making an ashtray in pottery class.

“Developers should work with notes the same way they work with code.” Ok, so just put your notes in a git repo, and edit them in an IDE.

That is the start :) And if that's all you want to use Dendron for (eg. a markdown editor with better integration to vscode and git), then you can.

But if you want to expand further (eg. you now have a few hundred or few thousand notes), Dendron adds additional syntax and structure to make that manageable.

Re: Launch HN: Dendron (YC W21) – Structured note-taking for developers and teams

#19

Post by [deleted] »

TruthWillHurt wrote: post #8

Yey another note taking app! And YC no less! Not at all like previous YC-backed note taking app https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26565629 Or any note taking app ever.. Seriously, is that the biggest thing bothering developers? Is this what you got into computing for? The best use for your AWS experience? The digital equivalent of making an ashtray in pottery class.

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Dendron (YC W21) – Structured note-taking for developers and teams

#20

Post by dang »

Previous HN threads, if anyone wants to follow the history:

Show HN: Dendron – fast open-source note-taking in VSCode - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26491764 - March 2021 (84 comments)

Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24898373 - Oct 2020 (168 comments)

Show HN: Dendron – open-source, local first, anti-roam note-taking tool - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24517701 - Sept 2020 (9 comments)

Show HN: Dendron – a roam like open source markdown note taking app - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23890035 - July 2020 (39 comments)

Show HN: Dendron – a local-first, markdown based, hierarchical note taking tool - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23824988 - July 2020 (2 comments)

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