Build · Personal
I wanted my notes — linked, searchable, mine — without renting someone else's app. So one weekend I rebuilt Obsidian from the ground up. It works. It also taught me something I didn't want to learn.
This one’s a failure, and it’s on the site on purpose.
I set out to own my notes end to end: wiki-links, backlinks, daily notes, the graph view, the whole kit, rebuilt from scratch so nobody could deprecate it out from under me. And I got there. Tourmaline works. The links resolve, the graph draws, the search is fast.
Here’s the part I didn’t want to learn: building the thing and living in the thing are different jobs, and finishing the first doesn’t earn you the second. The week I shipped it, I opened my old notes app out of muscle memory and didn’t notice for three days. The switching cost I’d cheerfully ignored was the actual product, and I’d spent the weekend on everything except it.
So Tourmaline’s shelved. Not because the code’s bad — because the bet was wrong, and it’s more useful to me as a reminder than as a daily driver. The lesson generalizes: when you rebuild something that already exists, the engineering is the easy half. The hard half is the habit you’re asking a person to break, and that’s the half I skipped.