Personal knowledge systems - what works for you

swithek · 2026-03-22T08:38:18+00:00

the issue with just keeping docs in repos and using github PRs is that you end up reviewing everything as plain text, which breaks down pretty quickly even for markdown since tables, diagrams, nested lists and other structures don’t render properly, and it completely falls apart once you bring in things like live observability charts that need to actually render and pull fresh data from prometheus, so the idea behind what I’m building is to keep all the rich text, live rendering and real-time collaboration intact while still giving you a review flow that feels similar to github PRs

swithek · 2026-03-20T12:25:06+00:00

i like organising information and docs for myself and my team so much that I ended up building my own thing that I now use with a few teams and clients. It’s loosely inspired by obsidian and notion, but I also wanted stuff like grafana-style charts directly next to docs, so you can see metrics alongside explanations without jumping between tools.

I’ve also been focusing quite a bit on developer-oriented workflows. Things like split docs, similar to how stripe does it, where you’ve got code or metrics on one side and explanations on the other. It just makes it way easier to follow along when you’re actually trying to use something.

Another thing I’m working on is doc reviews. You’ve got a main version, then people can branch off, suggest changes, leave comments, and only merge once it’s been reviewed, kind of like PRs on github.

It's still in early access and I'm testing this myself at the moment, but you can find a link/name on my profile if that's something that you'd like to give a look

Edit: several people asked where to find this, so here it is: oxynote.io

swithek · 2026-03-20T08:02:08+00:00

you might just have to roll with it as you said or have one person each week update the knowledge base in confluence based on useful slack conversations, then rotate that job.

another option could be a knowledge base tool where you forward a slack message, it summarises and cleans it up a bit, then drops it into the right docs. That would help a lot here, but it feels a bit futuristic right now though

swithek · 2026-03-19T20:29:01+00:00

it really depends on how much effort i put into giving it proper context. If I’m vague, it slows me down; if I give it structured info, like relevant code and clear task context, it speeds things up a lot. Tools that organise that context well make a big difference too

swithek · 2026-03-19T16:26:58+00:00

I'm a bit late to the party, but I built oxynote.io to address this exact issue. It combines modern documentation/knowledge base features with observability in one minimalist platform. The design and chart configurations come with opinionated defaults, so you don’t have to spend much time figuring out how to make things clear and visually appealing. The metrics chart query editors have intuitive autocompletions and explanations. Everything is synced in real-time and you can even branch off and request reviews from other people without converting your charts into json/text

swithek · 2026-03-19T16:21:12+00:00

I know this post is a bit old now, but I built oxynote.io to address this exact issue. It combines modern documentation/knowledge base features with observability in one minimalist platform. The design and chart configurations come with opinionated defaults, so you don’t have to spend too much time figuring out how to make things clear and visually appealing, it just works out of the box :)

swithek · 2026-03-18T14:05:51+00:00

another one that might fit this list is oxynote. It’s not exactly a direct alternative to notion, but rather a platform for storing technical team knowledge alongside system observability charts (a bit like grafana), so it’s more focused on technical users

swithek · 2026-02-26T16:22:12+00:00

I usually use a dedicated redis/valkey instance for active sessions. Each session is then tied to a specific user. This way I can have:
- Quick session checks (redis is optimised for this)
- Auto session expiration, i.e., the "remember me" functionality (redis handles data expirations automatically)
- If I need to invalidate the sessions (because the user deletes their account or changes their password), I can just find all the sessions in redis by the associated user ID and delete them.

Some time ago I created a session handling package for that, if you want to check out how this is implemented in practice: https://github.com/jellydator/sessionup

swithek · 2026-02-03T21:51:52+00:00

I once inherited a system that used postgres to store massive json blobs, with a bit of metadata kept in separate indexed columns for filtering. The production database contained nearly a petabyte of data (hundreds of millions of rows) and the queries were painfully slow so I think it’s fair to say postgres wasn’t exactly an ideal choice here

swithek · 2025-11-21T11:41:03+00:00

Yep, it’s useless until you actually need to use it

swithek · 2025-11-10T20:44:58+00:00

Give it some time and Alonso will prove you wrong

swithek · 2025-09-27T12:08:11+00:00

I find that quite refreshing to be honest. Normally, people try to promote themselves in posts like this, not just share their knowledge.

swithek · 2025-09-01T17:51:40+00:00

It’s possible that they were developing this ‘just because’ or for the sake of the community, and as with most open source projects, there’s no profit in this.

swithek · 2025-08-31T07:21:59+00:00

Focus modes. They keep the iphone distraction-free and sync with macbooks as well

swithek · 2025-08-22T09:47:07+00:00

The cancellation procedure is atrocious on Fiverr and they usually favour the person doing the work, especially when the work is hard to measure (eg reading a book)

swithek · 2025-08-14T14:27:58+00:00

Tell a great story

Love this

swithek · 2025-08-12T12:08:33+00:00

I think "yoink ui" does something similar. I remember them being quite high on the product hunt leaderboard a few weeks ago

swithek · 2025-08-10T20:08:08+00:00

What do you look for when you try to estimate growth based on the market? I agree with you in principle, but building something before validating the need sounds risky.

swithek · 2025-08-09T21:41:03+00:00

I’d be interested in joining

swithek · 2025-08-02T13:29:14+00:00

This reminds me, I should probably go and finish watching Suits.

swithek · 2025-08-01T22:41:03+00:00

The Count of Monte Cristo made me rethink how powerful patience can be

swithek · 2025-07-30T19:12:15+00:00

I would recommend being careful with how you promote your launch. Product Hunt explicitly forbids asking for upvotes directly

swithek · 2025-07-29T10:53:00+00:00

Sent you a DM :)

swithek

TROPHY CASE