Tinder for knowledge.

I started building a second brain (digital garden / PKM) in Notion two years ago. I collected notes, quotes, wins, and failures about being a designer. My dream was to construct a fountain of knowledge that continually nourished my intellect. But there was a problem.

I rarely opened my notes.

There were some notes that I hadn’t opened since I first created them. I needed a better way to reuse this knowledge. So I created a habit around revisiting my notes.

Each morning, I’d stroll through my digital garden, plucking out luminous bits of insights (i.e. randomly clicking on notes). But this process got tedious. I wanted something that would bring a curated set of insights to me in a delightful manner.

So I built “Catnip for Builders,” where swiping makes you smarter. Let me know what you think: Catnip for Builders.

—

A fun bonus while building this was learning new tools. Here’s my tech stack for this project:

• Design: Penpot. It’s a tiny bit clunky, especially around styles and element selection, but it’s a decent alternative to Figma.
• Backlog: VS Code 😬
• Frontend: Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. Even ChatGPT gave up on my CSS.
• Backend: Firebase. NoSQL is brand new to me, the last time I worked with a backend was PHP / MySQL.