taxonomy VS excalidraw

I am building this app with inspiration from Taxonomy and Acme corp so a lot of the design comes from there.

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Now, I must confess that I'm primarily a back-end engineer, and crafting a beautiful front-end was, well, a bit of an adventure. To keep things straightforward, I opted for simplicity. I figured I could enhance it as my customer base grew, as the real value, of course, lies in the robustness of the API and its backend. Looking back, I might consider using a template like https://tx.shadcn.com/ if I were to start all over again. It appears to be a great starting point for any SaaS, but the setup might pose some challenges.

Check out these two GitHub repositories: https://github.com/sadmann7/skateshop/ and https://github.com/shadcn/taxonomy/. They both use Next.js 13 and have well-structured folders and well-written code. Next.js provides performance optimization. To improve it further, avoid loading unnecessary items and use a CDN for fast content delivery. Both not loading unnecessary content & lazy loading) and CDN is 2 individual topics to dive into.

I've also been inspired by this repo, but the Vercel template seems more achievable for me at this point.

In addition to the repository I mentioned in my original post, I've also been inspired by another repository (Taxonomy Repo) which has implemented a similar Stripe integration. However, this one is a bit more complex and I'm finding the Vercel template to be more achievable for my current skill level.

I'm currently working on a Next.js project where I'm trying to integrate Stripe for payments and webhooks. I've been following the Taxonomy GitHub repo for guidance, particularly for setting up the app router and the lib files.

ExcaliDraw - https://excalidraw.com/

ExcaliDraw

However, Notion and Obsidian can only help you write documentation. Well, how about some visuals? Let's talk about Excalidraw.

Fun fact: I used GA in Excalidraw, and it's still powering some of the interactions! https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw/blob/master/package...

I was happy to find out recently that there is a way to make Mermaid diagrams WYSIWYG / drag and drop editable that the open source https://excalidraw.com has and did I mention it's open source!? With a LLM, you can go full loop back to Mermaid again after a few rounds of manual editing. "What a time to be alive!"

I'm working on a personal project and found myself looking for an alternative to Postman/Insomnia this morning. This made me realize i've been using the same tools for so long for work (mobile development, finance) that this project may be a good time to try out some new things.

Here are a few tools that i've been using lately that I really enjoy:

https://pocketbase.io/ - A dead-simple self-hosted firebase/supabase-like "backend in a box" using golang and sqlite. So far i've been really impressed. I've gone the route of extending the base offering with more go code and am really enjoying the experience.

https://excalidraw.com/ - An open source whiteboarding tool. Slick to use and after learning some keybinds I've gotten pretty fast at throwing together diagrams to explain things to people on my team. The killer piece though is that the filetype is just json, so I can source control my diagrams. Even better, their "export to png" function has a box to embed the json data _into_ the png, allowing me to slap the diagram in places that only accept images (think confluence) and still be able to change the diagram later if needed. 10/10.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ - Gitlab's CI/CD toolset is really impressive, and I've gotten really intimate with it's deeper features over the past year. I'd be curious though to hear from someone who's familiar with it vs it's competitors.