Subtitle: Musings on Innovation, Tools For Thought, Open Source, Venture Capital, Communities, Software Sustainability, and the Future of Foam.
It’s been a month since I released a very early prototype of Foam on Twitter:
I’ve built something I’ve thought of for a long time, and it’s finally ready for preview! 🚀 Foam is a personal knowledge management and sharing system built on VS Code and GitHub 🧠 Try it out and let me know what you think! 👀 — @jevakallio, 25 June 2020
Foam is my humble contribution to the burgeoning ecosystem of Tools for Thought: A developer-friendly approach to note-taking, personal knowledge management and digital gardening, built on top of Visual Studio Code and GitHub.
I shared it on the internet hoping to get some feedback on my ideas, but instead I accidentally ended up creating a community of people excited to discover better ways to work, together.
In one month, Foam has been installed 8000 times, despite its awkward, multi-step Getting Started experience. It has collected 5800 stars on GitHub, the same amount as my previously most starred repository did in 3 years. Our Discord community has been joined by 550 people, and our first weekend we hit #1 on Hacker News, Product Hunt and GitHub Trending.
In short, it’s been a whirlwind of a month. In this post, I want to pause for a moment, recount the brief history of Foam, and give you a peek at what the future of the project might look like.
A week before I launched Foam, a friend and I decided to start a book club. The first book we selected was Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson, where the author explores patterns of innovation in nature and in human creativity.
In retrospect, this book explains how Foam came to be, but in a weird twist of fate, caused Foam to exist even before I read the first page.
I’ve recently become a sucker for personal productivity books, and none has gripped me more than How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. In it, Ahrens describes a note-taking methodology that can significantly improve your learning and information retention over time. So before starting Where Good Ideas Come From, I knew I wanted to take notes on it, but I had an inconvenient problem:
There was a hole where my note-taking tool used to be.
Earlier this year, I was introduced to Roam Research, the most hyped and, arguably, the genre-defining Tool for Thought. Part note-taking app, part graph database, Roam aims to organise information in a way that matches how our brains work: associatively instead of hierarchically. Our brains aren’t indexed by categories: You can’t simply access all of your thoughts related to “soup”; instead, you can think of gazpacho, and then follow the string of thoughts, facts and memories that unravels as you tug on the ball of yarn. Roam works similarly, by allowing you to create bi-directional links between ideas: not only documents, but individual thoughts within a document, and visualise and traverse them as a graph.
The power of this idea is hard to explain, and it took me a month of use to realise the benefit of this mode of note-taking, but once I figured out that Roam happens to be the perfect companion to the methodology described in How to Take Smart Notes, I knew there was no going back to traditional note-taking.
Now, Roam is a good idea, but like most early-stage startup software, also an infuriatingly imperfect implementation: slow to start, clunky to write in, occasionally losing information when editing offline, and not available on mobile. I was fine with this, until they moved from their private beta to a paid subscription model, priced very… confidently at $15/month.