I spent 5 months building a note app nobody asked me to build

Last November, I got fed up.

Every note-taking app I tried either locked my data in their cloud,
charged a subscription, or both. So I did what developers do —
I built my own.

Five months later, PenPage (penpage.com) is live: a privacy-first
WYSIWYG note app that stores everything in your browser's IndexedDB
and optionally syncs to your own Google Drive.

## The hardest part: Google Drive sync

I thought sync would take a weekend. It took three weeks.

The core problem: Google Drive has no real-time conflict detection.
When you edit on two devices, you get two versions with no merge
strategy. I ended up building a sync engine around modifiedTime
comparison + a single sync.json as the source of truth.

Edge cases I didn't expect:

• Race conditions when auto-sync fires during manual sync
• Google Drive returning 404 for files that technically still exist
• Folder parentId returning 'root' vs the actual root folder ID (they mean different things)

## Lessons learned

1. Local-first is harder than it sounds — not the storage, but the sync
2. IndexedDB is powerful but needs a proper abstraction layer
3. PWA Service Workers will surprise you in production every time

If you're building anything with Google Drive API or IndexedDB,
happy to share more details in the comments.

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PenPage: https://penpage.com

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