Note-taking tools for devs, with Drew White from Stashpad

And so we kind of met on the, the Greenway had a small little conversation and then later I had a. Set of wheels for sale. I, I believe, And you responded to the post. I don't think I realized it was you until you came to pick up the wheels and bought them and Yeah. So like that whole thing and then, yeah, just started riding like morning greenway grabbing coffee, that sort of thing. And that was a couple years ago now,

Tell me a little bit about your working history. Like what, what have you done and what are you doing?

And so from there, pivoted out of that into starting my own marketing agency which I did smack Deb in the middle of the pandemic right around the time that I met you. And what's interesting is I had been, You know, fascinated with the developer world for a couple years at that point. But really hadn't made it like a high priority on my, I tend to accumulate hobbies. So it kind of fell to the bottom of the stack.

And then I met you and we were kind of talking about some of this stuff on the bike rides and, and such and such. And I had started building a lot of websites and things for. and yeah, just with one of your, your previous employers. Shown me the, the gymnasium actually which was like sort of like tutorial land, educational portal for largely like web dev stuff I feel like. But anyways, took every single course available on there and got a lot out of it.

And just like that love of wanting to build stuff just ignited from that point forward. So fast forward. Let's say a year of really focusing on development education, particularly with JavaScript. I was kind of burn out managing this, this marketing business. Found a actual subcontractor that was interested in acquiring it and. Bailed and decided that I wanted to take a stab at, you know, working for a startup in the tech world.

And so kind of applied to a couple of places and put my resume out there a little bit, However minimal it might have been at that point in time. And fielded quite a few inquiries and really landed on I had one conversation. Kara Bornstein is Stash pad ceo. And really believed in her vision and her as a leader of that company. So it was pretty sold and then in the second interview, got to meet with the cto the Meron and was even more sold.

So I had kind of decided at that point that this is really where I wanted to be and. So took a role there as a developer experience designer, , Mike Bifulco: man, you've done so many things in such a short amount of time, like. Literally from, from finance to being a marketing director, to running an agency to figuring out how to find your way into the dev world is really fascinating.

you know, Along the way, like you, you also had some interesting projects that you put out into the world, which, though your resume may have been short at the time you had some really cool stuff like your skew amorphism project . That, that was cool. Do you wanna talk a little bit about. Yeah, sure. So I was just kind of in all of my free time, I was building a lot of UI stuff just.

For learning purposes of my own, but also just cuz there were things that I wanted that I, I couldn't find or I didn't think existed or something like that. So I was using a lot of like, skew, morphism, glass, amorphism and amorphism in some of my designs. Primarily because I have a background in 3D design and so it was like sort of appealing to me to be able to create some of that stuff. Sort of like the in, in the web, which I thought was awesome. And so yeah, I created this tool.

I got tired of like finagling, like, okay, 0.3 pixels, 0.4 pixels, like, like all of this stuff, like adjusting 'em to get like the shadows and the highlights and all of that stuff just right. And so I created a little tool that's basically a, a CSS generator with these really nice little sliders that, you know, you can quickly dial. The amount of s amorphism amorphism that you want with the right direction of light down to like, I think it's 1000th of a pixel or something like that.

It's pretty crazy. But yeah, built that and it's actually gotten quite a bit of use from my, not only myself, but like other designers and developers have used it as well. And yeah, that was like the first real tool that I built and put out. Picked up any traction but it was super fun to build for sure.

Really into building the data layer, the back end side of things, the connective tissue from the front end to the back end. But you can imagine in many ways that you could show off your chops as an API developer by building out a simple tool that just shows one facet of here's how I would, you know, build out these, these knobs and levers to adjust the experience of building an api.

Better. New Amorphism is a very touchable like you know, tasty kind of thing to be able to go out and use and like as someone who's trying to break into the industry or as someone who was trying to break into the industry at the time, it's the perfect kind of prism put in front of yourself to say like, yeah, cool. I haven't worked in this yet, but I do this kind of work and I do a really good job of it. And it's gotten some great attention too, which is really cool.

The, the thing I still need to yell at you about is you need to put your name on that webpage. In big, bold letters somewhere, minimalism be damned. People should know where it came from. You know what I mean?

Being able to get thoughts out of our head, take notes on conversations that we've had, meetings standups, code reviews, all that kind of stuff very easily, very quickly, and be able to put it somewhere and not really have to worry about where you're putting it necessarily and kind of give you that feeling and vibe. Similar to like if you were dm, DMing yourself in Slack. Where it's the, it's the lowest burden of entry for capture.

And the, the, in my personal experience, I might be biased, but my personal experience, it's the, it's the least amount of friction for getting something out of my head and into somewhere that I can recall it later when I need to. So yeah, we've been working on the app for, oh, probably two years now, I guess is when. Things kind of started, but we just launched in August on product hunt. And reception has been phenomenal. It's been so, so good. So yeah. That's what Stash pad is.

It's at the helm we have Kara Bernstein and Theo Meron as the two founders. And then it's a pretty small team. We're located in Raleigh or Durham, North Carolina. I keep saying Raleigh every

My former employer, Andrew Miller, who is the program director over at Gymnasium and his longtime friend of mine, one of the, the smartest people I know. At one point I remember having a conversation with him where he asked me about how I take notes for work. Like how do I keep track of what I'm doing? And literally at the time, my response was, why would I take notes? Like, I just remember it, you know? And like the, the brash, bold statement that I made that was just like I don't know.

My brain's working at a thousand percent all the time. Why do I need to write anything down? I remember that moment and I remember like literally a month later being like, Oh man, I need to write everything down. Like I'm starting to forget things. They're all falling outta the back of my head. And that, that was the moment where I really started to focus on like, trying to organize myself, trying to organize my thoughts and have frankly, filtered through a lot of tools in the meantime.

And I think. The note taking thing and writing down notes and taking notes is a virtuous thing. It's very good. You want to do it because it, it's less burden for your, your mind, but also it helps other people, right? So like, Drew, if you and I have a conversation, I'm teaching you something one on one, that's awesome. You might learn something from me. But if I also write it down and one other person reads it, I've doubled the efficacy of that conversation. And that's why note taking is good.

It's also helpful. If I forget it in the future, I can come back to it. What, what I also really like about it too is that. Note taking is different for everyone and you kind of have to find what works for you. And I feel like people may feel like the market is kind of floated, flooded with note taking tools.

But I think that's because people's style of thought and their style of organization is very, very different from one another and like, Some people are good with just a notepad, you know, txt file and, and the chaos that that may bring on. Some people might like the iOS, you know, note app for their own thing. But truly finding something that is like broadly applicable and easy to use and easy to understand is a challenging problem space.

So the more you take in, eventually some of that stuff's gonna start falling off. And then there's like the stress of, you know, some of that data may be important and then you may not have it. So I've definitely adapted a practice and you're absolutely right, there's a lot of options out there and. Varying degrees of Complexity, which is the interesting part to me.

But I think what is so interesting is just the fact that there are so many, like different note taking applications speaks to a larger problem, right? No one has kind of sorted this stuff out. Usually, particularly in the dev the development world, engineering world dev tools tend to be winner take all, I mean, vs. Code by far and away owns the market and in ide, maybe with JetBrains or something coming in right behind them. You've got. Basically issue tracking tools and all these other things.

There's usually like a winner take all sort of situation and in so sort of personal notes that sort of space that really isn't something that is landed on. People are kind of all over the board from, you know, untitled text files, just flooding their desktop to any combination of different apps, big ones, no notion Evernote obsidian, all of those things and.

Where we like to think that we can fit in and, and, and why we're building this thing in the first place is to kind of have this defacto, we'll do whatever you want it to do. Lightweight and very speedy. I've used some of the other big name apps out there particularly. Like Apple notes and things like that. And there always seems to be a little bit of friction between, I just got told some information that I need to remember in four hours from now, or two days from now, or two months from now.

Where do I put that? How do I organize that in my. Hierarchy or whatever and how am I gonna find that later? And that has always been my challenge. I've bounced around from, from app to app long before I even knew that stash pad was a thing. And so that's the problem we aim to resolve. And the reality is if we can bring a little bit of joy to something that is often like a mundane sort of experience yeah, I mean, all the better. That's. The goal

Like in three years when I wanna look up what you and I talked about today I certainly won't remember. Right in my brain, but I will remember that we had this talk and I can jump back into my notes and chase it down.

It's really interesting to think about and like you must be building a very kind of generic tool set to do that, right.

And so sort of the next big thing for us is further removing we'll call 'em barriers to capture cuz we believe that that's the most important thing. And so as we continue to expand, Develop the product. One of our, our major items on our roadmap is like integrations and our api. So the whole idea of being able to. Send content from somewhere into stash pad or even have that content automatically be imported into Stash Padd as a note in the right place when you need it is really exciting for me.

I don't know what it was like, you know, at any of your, your previous employers. But like one of the biggest things moving to the tech world that kind of knocked me off my socks is the tech stack. I was not prepared for that whatsoever. Like even coming from like my own business where I was using quite a few different tools for different purposes and managing those things. Like my bookmark folder for like just dash padd tools is, is, is pretty big.

Like we, we've got at least 12 separate tools that we use for different purposes. And while that's great and all of them work really well, sometimes it's hard. Particularly in my position, it's difficult. Hey, remember where that comment that someone made that you need to reference came from? Or like, was it in Slack? Was it in, was it a conversation, Was it a thread in Slack, like going back and doing all of that stuff?

Or was it a slab or any, any number of, of different locations it could have come from. And so the ability to have this sort of automated notes dashboard which is, you know, the ultimate goal here.

Really, really appealing to me to be able to create some smart stacks that give you the information you need from the resources that you use, the tools that you use and combine that with capturing your own notes from one-on-ones meetings, code reviews, all of that stuff is really just feels like I would like to have that today.

Often, like, we'll go into like a spec review or something like that and this person will say, You know, I use this this way, that makes perfect sense to me. And then like I'm looking at 'em like, I don't use it that way at all. Like I, my mindset, my brain map is, is different. My mental model is different. And so what's fascinating is we've, we've kind of engineered the flexibility to match different mental models into the app which has.

I don't know, kind of just eye opening for me, but I use it all the time. Primarily with code reviews, design reviews, that sort of thing. Spec reviews. I have several, one-on-ones every week. I like to use it for them so I can both remember what we talked about, but also kind of measure my own progress and be able to go back and look at some of the things that we talked about. I also do it. Basically things that I want to bring up. I also use it as a drafting tool, believe it or not.

Cuz it does support markdown and so I can do some longer form notes if I need to. So I do like it as a drafting tool. They render really, really nicely. And then I also use it as like a lockbox for data. I know I'm gonna need in perpetuity. I can keep a place for quick, quick info that I just need to access all the time. And I can know that everything in there is always gonna be there forever in the shape that it needs. So and that's how I use it. I also use it as a task manager.

We've got a great sort of to-dos system and hierarchical todos, which is super awesome. So like you can create a stack of todos. Which is within another stack of, to-dos, that stack itself can be a to-do so on and so forth. So Yeah. it works really well for keeping me organized.

We do have a date for release, but just in case things get pushed, you know plus a couple of days, minus a couple of days, whatever the case is, we are rolling out sync in the very near future which will give users an opportunity to not only have data on multiple computers, but also we'll be rolling out our mobile app about the same time. So yeah, we'll have access to. Again, the whole idea is further reducing that, that, that friction capture.

So yeah, we'll, we'll have cloud sync available for a pretty small monthly fee. I don't know exactly what it is off the top of my head. But it's very reasonable. And I think there will be a, a certain number of. Um, like free sync sort of things. And then the community version, which is non sync will be free forever in perpetuity.

That being said, we actually do, we used to have a a web app version, which was like version negative 0.1 or whatever you wanna call it. That does have a collab feature that we still to this day use for retro. And it is easily the greatest platform for something like that that we have experimented with. We've tried basically everything else. We always end up coming back to the old web app. So, yeah, there may be plans for, for adopting some of that functionality in the future as well.

So and, and by that I mean like things that they've probably already paid for within the enterprise. So that may be Google Talks or Jira or GitHub or like the things that are sort of built into that process. But what I also like about this is that by keeping it local and for yourself, like it, it, it's a way for you to keep your information, to grow your own sort of stack of knowledge and, and to build upon your own set of notes in a way. That is you flavored. I think that's really interesting.

And obviously you can still collaborate with your team right there. There are you know, ways to get information out of this thing. It's not a one way valve. Yeah, yeah,

But yeah, I mean our whole thing is that the easier you can make capture, the more likely people are gonna take notes and the better they're gonna retain information and then ultimately the better they're gonna be able to work. So yeah, the, that, that'll be the, the primary function there. We're still kind of working through the details on this. This is on our current roadmap. And I know it's coming probably way quicker. We're gonna be . It feels like we're doing a lot of things right now.

But they're all very good things and we're executing at a pretty high level. And so we're trying to maintain that, that momentum. So I, I'd be surprised if this wasn't out early first quarter next year. Yeah.

And so even with some of the, the push and pull I think it's still a good option, particularly for desktop. And it allows us to ship to Linux and Windows and Mac kind of all in one go.

We've got some, some really good things coming out and I think they're happy with React native today. The engineers are don't, I haven't heard much in the way of complaints, so that's always a good sign.

But I've actually just, I mean, within the last six months have like fully transitioned into stash pad as a whole, primarily because of the speed of the thing. It's just uncanny, like I think all of our. Basic actions are sub hundred milliseconds or something like that. Like even like loading a massive list of notes is just ridiculously fast.

And the other real concept behind it, like particularly if, if you're like a developer and you know, the importance of keeping your hands on the keyboard, like the thing is, is well set up you can navigate everything create, delete, you know, whatever you want to do without ever leaving the keyboard. And like, Super familiar, sort of key bindings that make a lot of sense. And so that's like another huge thing for, for me in particular. We also have like a shortcut, like a global OS shortcut.

So you can open it up while you're, so you're working in BS code or your ide and you gotta take a quick note. You can just open it up without ever touching the mouse and bounce over to it, dump your note, go back to work, and just basically eliminate that context switching sort of moment right there. Yeah, I think if anybody hasn't tried it that's listening. It's certainly worth it. It's free, so no harm, no foul. You can download it, our website wws-padd.com. And yeah, give it a try.

Let us know. And we're super active on our Discord server. We love getting feedback from, from users even when they hate it. Like we got railed the other day by some guy. He just didn't like the interface like whatsoever. And. He was, he must have sent like 10 emails yesterday, I think. But that's good stuff for us. Like, it's, it's good feedback. Like we don't mind it at all.

So yeah, I, I definitely think everybody, if you're using Evernote or Notion or Apple Notes or Ulysses or any of the other ones it's worth giving a try. It's a different experience for sure. You may like it, you may not, but we hope that you.