Launch HN: Dendron (YC W21) – Structured note-taking for developers and teams
My background is in software engineering. Before Dendron, I worked at AWS for 5 years on systems that had grown more complicated than what any one person (or team) could hope to understand. As someone who doesn't have a great memory, I was always overwhelmed with technology and the constant flux in programming languages, frameworks, and techniques. I realized early on that I wouldn't be able to keep everything in my head and so I wanted a better way of externalizing this information in a way that could help me find it again when needed.
The problem with externalizing information is that it becomes hard to find again later unless you're diligent about maintaining a consistent structure. Search is a possible solution, but doesn't work at the scale of personal data (too big to keep in one's head but too small and too unstructured to effectively index). I tried all the note-taking tools and found that they too, to varying degrees, made it easy to get notes in, but hard to get specific information back out again—especially once the quantity of information grew beyond a certain threshold (eg. 1k notes).
Over a decade of experimenting, I found that the only times when I've been able to find information both consistently and quickly is when that information was well organized and well structured. Whether it's a certain naming convention or a precise hierarchy, once information was indexed in a way that made sense in my head, I could find it again. This led me to the structural approach that is now embedded in Dendron. I've been using it successfully myself to manage a personal corpus of over 30K notes.
Organizing notes doesn’t happen effortlessly or become unnecessary with note-taking tools. What’s different about Dendron is that we accept that organization is necessary and requires work — we give you the structure and the tooling to do it consistently.
Dendron is the combination of two things: (1) a structured superset of Markdown with a type system to map and enforce the consistency of your notes, and (2) tooling built on top of that structure - this is a growing set of commands and utilities that let users refactor, lookup, and share their knowledge. We borrow heavily from prior work in programming languages and developer tooling which help developers organize and reference millions of lines of code.
The main way that users interact with Dendron is as a VSCode plugin. When you start the plugin, Dendron starts a local server that indexes and processes commands from the plugin in a separate process. We have interactive graph views and a note preview which is powered by React and NextJS. These are the same components that go into our NextJS template which users can export to publish their notes.
Most of our users are developers. Their use cases include daily journals, keeping track of tasks, and implementing personal knowledge management systems. Many also take advantage of our publishing feature to share their notes on Github Pages and other platforms. Because notes are local, most of our users use Dendron for both personal notes and work. They keep their personal notes on a shared drive like Dropbox and work notes on their work computer. We also have enterprise customers that use Dendron to publish their content. For example, AWS uses Dendron to host a YC specific manual to new YC batches.
Currently, we have a Patreon-like model where supporters can contribute to get access to priority support, early builds and contributor-only chat. Next year, we are launching a teams offering, to give technical teams a better alternative to existing tools like Confluence and Notion.
Dendron is open source and self-hostable. The code is freely available in Github and can be installed on all VSCode compatible...
88 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadWhat are some reasons Obsidian users would want to switch?
More details here: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/a84ff014-e871-445d-9366-d97f1a...
also decent weight still goes to URL keywords in SERPs
(and yes, many to many links to leaves attached more than one place seems a problem, but that's what canonical URLs are for)
e.g.
- https://www.amazon.com/Moleskine-Classic-Cover-Notebook-Rule...
- https://www.amazon.com/dp/8883701127
we're planning on implementing a similar featureset
My wife is writing a book and a weekly newsletter, and I know she spent a lot of time to organize how she collects/documents what she reads, so that she can minimize the time to producing new content. In that vein, this makes total sense.
What do you think are some other areas outside of software that can benefit from this kind of note taking? Are there any active users now that you can share about?
an analogy I use here is excel - no one was born knowing how to use a spreadsheet but the structure and functionality it provides make it a pre-requisite for anyone working with numbers today. dendron's end goal is to be like excel, but for general knowledge
in terms of current non-software use cases, we actually have as many non-technical users using dendron as technical. some popular examples include authors (dendron is popular for world building), gamers (we have a professional street fighter user who uses dendron to keep track of different character movesets), and students (they use dendron for our ability to support math notation and diagrams)
Not at all like previous YC-backed note taking app https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26565629
Or any note taking app ever.. Seriously, is that the biggest thing bothering developers? Is this what you got into computing for? The best use for your AWS experience?
The digital equivalent of making an ashtray in pottery class.
But if you want to expand further (eg. you now have a few hundred or few thousand notes), Dendron adds additional syntax and structure to make that manageable.
I don't know what is to notes as compilers are to code, but certainly note taking could stand to use more tooling.
In terms of the compiler analogy to notes, in Dendron, this is the schema (aka type) system we use to help users define the structure of their notes: https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/c5e5adde-5459-409b-b34d-a0d75c...
I think the reason you're seeing all the development here is because how *humans* manage *knowledge at scale* is fundamentally an unsolved problem (this is why people keep building new tools).
My friends give me grief about doing cloud computing for over half a decade to work on a local-first note-taking app. There is some overlap though - it is impossible to keep even a small subset of AWS (which now has over 200+ services) in one's head. The only way to use it effectively is externalizing the relevant details in a way that I, as a human, can retrieve. In many ways, trying to externalize my mental model of AWS was a great proving ground for many of the fundamental ideas around structure used in Dendron
But the one you are making a comparison with is not really relevant: that's Apple-only it seems, and that, in itself, is enough incentive to look out for more.
Ultimately, market can decide which are needed and which aren't. As for investors like YC, they usually bet into multiple products — while YC might have a better hit rate than some other investors, there are likely still more failed investments than successful ones (by count). The important bit for YC is what the monetary equation is at the end.
As for YC, I remember seeing at least two other note taking companies within our winter batch. At AWS, the mentality for new services is to "let 1000 flowers bloom" (and see which one's make it). Something similar is happening in the note taking space right now
You're posting on HN. I'm willing to bet you wouldn't be as interested in posting comments on r/housekeeping. Superficially, HN and r/housekeeping are the same thing since they both have a form to input comments. Obviously, there's more to it, and good reasons for both to exist.
I disagree with your casually dismissive "digital equivalent of making an ashtray in pottery class". Dendron supports a specific workflow, something that takes a lot of effort to get right. And if they're going to get into syncing and collaboration, that's a challenge. As someone that has been watching this space for a long time, there's plenty of room for new entrants.
Potentially of interest: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
tldr: no one knows how to do knowledge management at scale. Dendron has a viable solution and we're building a team to become the knowledge base for every technical team in the world
for the personal hosted offering - its still available though we don't advertise it as we're focused on polishing the local version this year
I applied but submitted my code challenge, I must say being already familiar with TypeScript/React code bases and being a heavy user of VSCode, I don't know why, but after a few months passed I found again the code challenge in my mail and just did it in an hour or so, it was really easy to set up, iterate with, and develop what was asked for.
I think it's a big enough market to have several winners, would hope so at least! should look into how to share files in between them all
I noticed on your site that the title is somehow getting pulled up into the nav area after initial load (it looks normal for a millisecond then shoots up there):
https://i.ibb.co/VTSkNRH/Capturedendron.png
I'm in Microsoft Edge on Windows 10, 100% zoom on a 1920x1080p laptop :)
https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/7c00d606-7b75-4d28-b563-d75f33...
Show HN: Dendron – fast open-source note-taking in VSCode - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26491764 - March 2021 (84 comments)
Show HN: Dendron – A Hierarchical Tool for Thought - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24898373 - Oct 2020 (168 comments)
Show HN: Dendron – open-source, local first, anti-roam note-taking tool - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24517701 - Sept 2020 (9 comments)
Show HN: Dendron – a roam like open source markdown note taking app - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23890035 - July 2020 (39 comments)
Show HN: Dendron – a local-first, markdown based, hierarchical note taking tool - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23824988 - July 2020 (2 comments)
In terms of what's changed since the last post - we have done a soft product pivot from note-taking for everyone to knowledge management for developers. This is because we found that non-developers struggled with a lot of development basics unrelated to Dendron (eg. navigating vscode, git, etc) which made us realize we still had more work to do to make Dendron intuitive for everyone.
On a product side, we have also released a brand new publishing platform based on ReactJs and NextJS that developers can use to generate their static sites based on their Dendron notes.
More details in our public handbook -> https://handbook.dendron.so/notes/f6d9bc09-04b7-4a02-a6aa-a2...
We actually have quite a number of D&D players using Dendron. was thinking of organizing something for world builders inside our discord. Let me know if you would be interested :)
Quick remark about the site, I expected the site's tool presentation to be an actual video, with sound about the app and most importantly fullscreen capabilities. I can barely see the video's text on mobile (bigger font also needed). But no auto play if there's sound please. Congrats
It terms of the presentation - thanks for the tip. We have a backlog item to swap it out with a higher res video
i find embedding media especially screenshots to be getting more and more of an important aspect of note-taking.
for other assets, we current recommend that you drop into the assets folder and link to them. vscode provides a bunch of extensions that let you preview different assets (eg. mp4, pdf, etc)
dendron creates a `dendron.yml` file and a `dendron.code-workspace` file when you initialize a dendron workspace. if you're in a different vscode workspace, as long as one of the folders has a `dendron.yml` file, then dendron will treat that subdirectory as your dendron workspace.
moving forward, we're looking to support the concept of a `global workspace` that you can access anywhere
Something I've been exploring is using Dendron on my desktop at work (with dual monitors) and Obsidian on my Chromebook. I convert the notes from both into a TiddlyWiki site and view/query them at the same time.
Apologies for interrupting the casual dismissals.
No apologies necessary :)
The key points were that Wikipedia style wikis force you into a page-at-a-time model. And TiddlyWiki uses more like a post-it-note sized amount of information. Wikipedia has a few links, TiddlyWiki items would have dense links to other notes. Then the experience of reading something would be like a 'choose your own adventure' book - click on a link and you don't get whisked away to a new page with all the context lost, you get the next note appearing below. It's building on the work of Ted Nelson and the early HyperText dreams from before the Web.
As you click and explore, you build up a longer page of just the ideas and content you want, and don't have to write huge topic-wide essays and browse huge topic-wide pages all in one go. He called it "the correct level of granularity, deeply intertwingled".
There were probably other important points I've forgotten.
Relevantly for Dendron, the slide I've clicked onto in the YouTube has a quote: "Hierarchical and sequential structures are usually forced and artificial. People keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't" - Ted Nelson, 1974.
If you're trying to create a model of the real world, you probably want to use a graph primitive to capture the nuances. But that flexibility is what makes things hard for humans - since a note can exist in N places, how do you find it? How do you even know you've tagged/linked it correctly?
Dendron's constraint of hierarchy is one of those "its not a bug but a feature" things - the constraint of hierarchy makes it easy for humans to reason about. What we add on top of that is the ability to refactor that hierarchy when necessary
You're targeting devs, we hate this stuff :). What I like is markdown based, VSCode based, open source, alternative to Confluence for tech teams. Make that clear.
I've been using Foam [1] for the last year, which is an open-source vscode-powered aternative to obsidian. There seems to be a large overlap in features. What benefits does Dendron have over Foam that would convince me to switch?
[1] https://github.com/foambubble/foam/
For a more detailed breakdown, you can see the foam vs dendron page here -> https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/p5fMTi-6zOyX1TwhL6dM0.html
[0]:https://code.visualstudio.com/api/extension-guides/web-exten...
More details in our public handbook -> https://handbook.dendron.so/notes/f6d9bc09-04b7-4a02-a6aa-a2...
We were on the same YC cohort and I have to say, dendron didn't 'speak to me' during the batch. But looking at how you describe yourself now, I think 'yeah, I need that'. Booting up VS-Code and Dendron now.
Can you decouple it from VSCode so that we can use it with other editors like Vi or Emacs?
I struggle with PKM. Stuff is distributed on Google Drive, Github wiki and a few tools like Obsidian.