A bit of context on how I got here. More of the story in the post Goodbye social networks, hello Markdown.
I worked as an Engineering Manager at a startup full of Linux folks and they created a home-grown recruitment system using flat files for interview notes and folders containing resumes. This stuck in my head for a long time, such a simple solution with permissions controlled by Linux file system and Web auth.
I came up with the idea to visualize and manage our social networks like we do with computer networks. This lead me to find and learn about social network science.
With some friends we started a company to build out my vision. We failed to get funding and it fizzled away.
After our failed social networking software startup, I began developing a tool for my own use based on the same concept and nicknamed it HAL. I built it with PHP, MySQL, and Javascript and I continued tweaking it over the years while sipping in my network data. It was slow but I lived with it. This was the top page, originally to mimic the Google homepage which is ironic as years later I tried to go Google-free!
This was the profile page for a person.
I started a new hobby looking for the best Android note-taking app. I tested apps and posted one review a week. As of Dec 2023 I've posted 108 app reviews. Early on one of my key requirements was the ability to use Markdown support for input and output. At this point I use Drafting for quick capture and Obsidian for pretty much everything.
After two decades of building and using HAL, I got the idea to start using Markdown and Obsidian to manage my social network and wrote a post Keeping track of people and connections in Obsidian describing the idea.
I spent a lot of time writing an exporter for my large ego network of 3,640 people from my custom MySQL DB to Markdown. I stopped using HAL as my main tool and now only use Obsidian. It's slow to load on Android (about 30 seconds) but fast once loaded. On Windows, loads in about 9 seconds. 37,638 files. Now I can do things I dreamed of 20 years prior like this...
