Hybrid

Result

This is a responsive Symfony site that allows you to take notes, tasks and organize them into projects.

Note-taking is fast and simple thanks to tags. These are like shortcuts and allow you to give details about the nature of the current note (a note or a task? Parent note/task? Deadline? And so on). The beauty of tags is that they are taken during note-taking. This way, the user doesn’t have to interrupt their writing flow to look for buttons or other elements.

The application is available here.

Context

I had the idea to develop Hybrid when I realized that at work, I had gotten into the habit of taking my notes on a notepad (yes…). What I liked about the notepad was that it was quite simple and modular, but above all it allowed me to take both notes (ideas, suggestions, remarks, or other) and also tasks, and organize all of that.

On the other hand, I realized that there were still things that I didn’t like. For example: to put tasks rather than notes I always had to add a few characters and the hierarchy of my notes and tasks was not easy to notice. Everything was therefore quite messy. On the contrary, in a notebook, it’s quite simple to note things as you go without letting yourself be interrupted and you feel this sensation of flexibility better; but on paper you can lose notes more easily from one project to another.

So I thought it could be interesting to have a tool that allows me to take notes for my projects in a simple, fast, well organized and easily readable way.

I preferred to develop a tool rather than looking for existing applications (like Evernote, Notion or even Todoist) because I thought it was a good opportunity to get back into Symfony and discover new things.

Development

I started by establishing a list of elements that I wanted to see in the application. I also tried to think as much as possible about how I was going to organize my data and the relationships between my different entities.

Then, I started development! I would say that I lost time during this period because I didn’t ask myself enough about the application’s style beforehand. It blocked me a bit at one point and it was when I found a lead that I felt more inspired to continue. It was at that moment that the idea of tags appeared to me as well.

Development seemed more like a race to production from there. I was eager to finish a minimal version and offer it to my friends. On the day of production, I had some errors but everything went well in the end.

What I learned

Deploying to production can be very stressful!

Apart from that, I learned a lot about Symfony.

If I had to redo a project like this, I would pay more attention to design from the start. The result I got suits me but it could probably have been better visually if I had focused more on design.

Thank you for reading! You can visit Hybrid here to see :D.