Winston

App main screen
Debug console

Inspiration

I didn't like Notion due to its constantly online nature, and the editing was very cumbersome. I was always on the search for better tools. Obsidian came very close, but it also felt rather slow and clunky (Electron app), and making a knowledge map was a very manual, painstaking process. I thought of a personal knowledge management tool that can automatically analyze the connection between notes and suggest a novel idea to synthesize from a pre-existing structure.

What it does

In short, Winston is a personal knowledge management tool that automatically analyzes your new notes against your previous stash of notes, and updates the map of your second brain.

How we built it

Frontend: Svelte Backend: Go, Wails 3rd Party: UM-GPT

Challenges we ran into

I made this a challenge to myself and made sure to pick a completely new tech stack, aside from Go. It was my first time trying to develop a desktop app, and there were a lot of framework and tool-specific bugs that I ran into that I spent way too much time trying to debug.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am amazed that I was able to pick up this new tech stack. I have a basic frontend and a backend that works (Wow!) and calls UM-GPT successfully. Some prompt engineering allowed a very detailed analysis of notes.

What we learned

I learned a lot about Svelte, Wails, and how to call the UM-GPT API. I also learned that I am able to focus very intently on projects like these. I have been diagnosed with ADHD and focusing on tasks has always been a great challenge for me. So being able to focus hard for such a long time was a learning experience.