On taking notes
I have been fascinated with personal development for a while. This fascination has led to many exciting adventures with ups-and-downs, and I have learned several invaluable lessons. One of which is the act of taking notes. I take notes when reading books, I take notes to record trivial facts for work that I don't have to use regularly but may have to look up later. Aside from taking notes, task management is also essential so that my life isn't disorganized and time for personal development isn't taken away unnecessarily.
But back to taking notes, the act of taking note overtime amounts to the act of building a knowledge base. The knowledge base I have obtained basically spans across my entire life and it has helped me live a better life, all originates from taking notes. However, it is not always perceived as valuable by many people, due to many reasons, one of which is that they haven't found the need to form such habits yet.
On what I did with this obsession
To facilitate this habit of taking notes within the context of Katalon Studio, I decided to implement a simple note-taking plug-in called Katalon Notes. The link to the plug-in is at the end of this post. I personally use Trillium Notes which is a Electron-based note taking application, as a central tool to take notes. The obsessive usage of this tool inspired me heavily in designing and implementing Katalon Notes.
The altruistic motivation is that it would, first and foremost, provide heavy Katalon users who also happen to share my interest a way to incorporate their productive habits into Katalon Studio (thus using Katalon Studio more LOL). Second, not that anybody asked for it, but my thought is it would be a great idea for people on your team to take notes collectively. To facilitate this, Katalon Notes saves notes into a local database in project folder so that when you commit your code, you can also commit the database file and the notes will be shared.
It is important for a note-taking application to save changes automatically and Katalon Notes provides this feature. You maybe wondering why such a specific feature is desirable ? Because the act of taking notes, when it's most meaningful, consists of going over your old notes on a particular topic, retrieve knowledge and build new synthesized knowledge on top of that. To be able to do that without being instilled the fear of losing what's half-written is such a blessing that should may as well be a common sense.
Currently, Katalon Notes supports Markdown syntax so that your notes can have a styling structure. A limitation is that no image can be displayed yet, but I plan to implement it.
Selfishly,
Designing and implementing Katalon Notes has been a fun technical challenge for me, and it will continually be that way due to many possibilities for features. I found myself pondering over design decisions, code refactoring decision and decisions that I regularly have to make in my work, accompanied with a sense of full ownership that comes with a personal project. I'd probably blog my thoughts somewhere as writing is another one of my habits.
Where you can try it out
So, enough with the talking, even I got sick of myself, here's the link:
https://store.katalon.com/product/105/Katalon-Notes
This project is open-sourced here:
https://github.com/minhthanh3145/katalon-notes
What is Katalon Studio
Katalon is an automated software testing company/product that I currently work at/on.
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