Show HN: Cardi – store your notes for free in AWS DynamoDB | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Cardi – store your notes for free in AWS DynamoDB

github.com

9 pointspickledish4 comments

Thumbs up for the stack and overall look&feel! Is DynamoDB a hard dependency or it could be swapped for Firebase Firestore?

Hey thanks! I wouldn't say it's a hard dependency, in fact it can work with other things that are API-compatible with DynamoDB, like Scylla for example if you wanted to self-host everything:

http://scylla.docs.scylladb.com/master/alternator/alternator

And in terms of using something like Firestore, the storage needs of this are very simple so it wouldn't be very hard to add that in. I tried to keep all the persistence-related functionality separated off, so it is swappable:

https://github.com/pickledish/cardi/tree/master/src/dynamodb

Thanks for the shout-out!

While you can run Scylla Open Source self-hosted for free, we also have a fully-managed version of our enterprise software on Scylla Cloud.

https://www.scylladb.com/product/scylla-cloud/

Hello HN!

Cardi Notes is a side project of mine that I've been working on (and actively using) for nearly two years now. The TL;DR is that I created Cardi because I wanted something which was:

- Self managed, so I'll never lose all of my notes if some company closes its doors or decides to retire a product

- Easy to set up and use, so I don't have to manage a whole server just for keeping some notes

- Accessible anywhere, so I can make a note on my computer and find it on my phone later

As you might imagine, this ended up being pretty restrictive in terms of what options I was left with:

(1) rules out any third-party service, like Google Keep

(2) rules out a self-hosted note solution, like Joplin

(3) rules out local storage, like a set of markdown files

Thus, I was motivated to create Cardi, which solved my problem (and perhaps yours too!) by simply storing notes in a DynamoDB table in my personal AWS account, then creating a simple static frontend that uses the AWS JS SDK to directly query this table and format the results in an attractive and usable way. Though "attractive" is maybe a stretch, I'm no UI/UX developer and have been learning JS exclusively through working on this... so it is rough around the edges.

The stack is very simple -- Svelte and Tailwind for the frontend, DynamoDB for the note storage, GH Actions for CI + CD, and Netlify for hosting the static site. Each of these tools has been a real pleasure to use, and I'd choose them again in a heartbeat.

Anyway, feel free to ask any questions or suggest any feature! This project is pretty close to my heart by now so I'm open to any feedback to keep improving it :)

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