Tags: #notes-app #time-travel #communicating-with-our-future-selves #custom-software [[0012. of two places]] | [[0014. walking through grief]] I recently read Steph Ango's [Quality software deserves your hard-earned cash](https://stephango.com/quality-software). He describes building software as a craft and makes a case for supporting independent software makers with your wallet. This got me thinking about some rough notes I wrote in 2021 on "custom software," which I have fleshed out with my perspective today in 2023. As a person who works in product and builds software, I have spent a lot of time in the documentation weeds, much of it written with the best intentions but unfortunately falling short. Product documentation for complex software is consumed and contributed to by various roles. It can quickly become a daunting, unhelpful behemoth of information if the collective isn't aligned on what it is meant to be. Is it meant to document every functionality and user experience present in the application? Is it meant to educate our customers on how to use the software? Is it meant to educate our new hires on how to use the software? Is it meant to describe the concepts on which the features we build are based? Present us can make informed guesses but can never be 100% certain what future us wants to be able to know when reading the documentation. Present us is still uncertain what kinds of future **us**-es there will even be. Right now, I find myself musing on personal documentation and all the past, present, and future me(s). What makes for good personal documentation? What is the point of personal documentation in the first place? There's a quote from the film Tenet, directed by Christopher Nolan, that goes like this: >We believe he's functioning as some sort of a broker between our time and the future. > >He can communicate with the future? > >***We all do, don't we. Email, credit cards, texts. Anything that goes into the records speaks directly to the future.*** The question is, can the future speak back? As humans, we tend to forget. When I write a list of todos for the next day, present me attempts to remind future me of the things present me wants future me to do. When I review my credit card statements, present me is attempting to understand what the heck past me spent so much money on. The point of records is to speak with the future. Personal documentation is past or present you trying to communicate with future you. Serendipitously, documenting for posterity can also give clarity to present you. Assume future you will forget everything you think is crucial right now. You might want personal documentation on: - Finances - investing strategy, personal finance strategy, bank account structure - Digital - account logins, how you handle backups - Friends - keeping notes on birthdays, clothing sizes, favorite memories, photos, beautiful conversations you don't want to forget - Beliefs - Your personal manifesto. Your goals. Bucket lists. Answering the question, what do/did I want? What do/did I believe? - Travel - past trip itineraries, future trip itineraries, favorite meals - Media - favorite quotes, books, that movie you're still thinking about, that play you thought was terrible To name a few. I keep documents on my budgets, how I want to invest, how I spend, what I'm thinking about today, where I want to be at the end of the year, where I want to be at the end of five years, concerts I've been to, etc. And when I say documents, it runs the gamut from a hastily scribbled list in a notebook to emotional notes app poetry to multi-tab spreadsheets. Plenty of software in the wild can contribute to this function - everything from Notion to Excel to Instagram. And that's great. It empowers present me in the endless adventure of attaining clarity about my priorities, my feelings, my vision. But my current process doesn't enable past me to communicate with future me, at least not as effectively as I like. Part of that is because present me is often distracted by something new and wants to ignore past me's vision. That is fine. I can embrace some of that. But the other part is that my personal documentation is not easily searchable. I don't know how to organize it in a way that scales or can best illuminate future me. I discovered [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md), my networked thought tool, in 2021. I contribute to it consistently. I'm less disciplined about it than ideal, but I am consistent. I also occasionally publish notes in my public notebook, where you might be reading this. But I want more. I want a...dashboard, for lack of a better word, of my life, with my daily logs, my life goals, my relationship goals, my photo albums, my finances, my movies and books and theatre experiences and media that's moved me, all in one place, a beautiful mess that can connect with each other and illuminate insights, dare I say allow me to access different states of mind, like a checkpoint in a video game. Obsidian is a start. This public notebook is a start. There's no shortage of Obsidian plugins that allow me to tinker with my daily notes, manage tasks, query data, arrange my workspace, and much more. I'm sure I can make the tool satisfy several of the desires I outlined above. The problem is it can be cumbersome to manage, and I'm daunted by anything that makes upkeep more tedious. One thing I love about Obsidian's core philosophy is that it's meant to be portable and therefore is based on Markdown. But that means you must understand Markdown to make the most of it. I find Markdown for formatting and backlinking pretty straightforward, but this already makes it not for everyone. And if you want to get into more advanced stuff, using frontmatter, metadata, and queries, there's an even steeper learning curve. For the Obsidian community, that's often part of the fun. There's no feeling like hacking your perfect workspace together, picking and choosing plugins, and configuring them to solve your use case. But I'll admit, sometimes I wished more of the cool things worked out of the box and had a self-evident UI. Sometimes, all this tinkering with the tool gets in the way of the work. I don't want to be that naive not-a-dev who occasionally dabbles in code and is like "How hard can it be to make my perfect life dashboard into an app!". I'm not even clear on what the life dashboard is. (Custom workspaces? JARVIS-like digital assistants? A Pensieve and a wand?). Or what goal(s) it's meant to satisfy. (Knowledge management? Insights generation? Memory preservation?) I find myself wanting to satisfy a more profound curiosity about how software can better serve us, give clarity, and not get in the way. Imagine a future with more custom, quality software. In 2021, I wrote: "There's the ascent of no-code, etc. development should become a bazillion times more accessible so that we can all make custom applications perfect for our individual needs and daily lives." And in 2023? We've got ChatGPT providing code snippets, giving feedback on design concepts, and generating games. A few weeks ago, frustrated with the several-hour delay between making a purchase and the purchase appearing in my budget app, [You Need a Budget](https://zapier.com) (YNAB), I spent a few hours configuring [Zapier](https://zapier.com) to parse transaction emails and automatically record the transactions in YNAB. What if, instead of all this tinkering to achieve still imperfect execution of what feels like it should be basic functionality, one could quickly spin up a personal finance tracker or fitness tracker or digital garden or photo editing workspace simply by feeding a digital assistant a laundry list of likes, dislikes, and goals? I know, I know. ChatGPT might be able to spit out a script based on something it read on the Internet 2 years ago, but it's a ways away from creating high-quality, scalable, performant software for the masses. And also, the tinkering is part of the fun of it. But maybe, in the not-so-distant future, it could help more of us code dabblers become independent software makers. ---- Created: July 3, 2021 Last Modified: November 23, 2023