PERSONAL[BRAIN]2023–2024
Second Brain
Personal knowledge management app for saving, organizing, and sharing technical links, notes, and research papers.
< 80ms
Search Latency
Fast indexing and retrieval
Tags & Collections
Categorization
Hierarchical topic categorization
Engineered With
ReactNode.jsExpressMongoDBTailwind CSSTypeScript
The Problem & Context
Modern developers read hundreds of articles, repositories, and docs a month. Browser bookmarks are a graveyard where links go to be forgotten without metadata, context, or searchable tag associations.
The Messy Part (Behind the Build)
Scraping Open Graph tags and page titles from arbitrary URLs that employ aggressive bot detection or client-side SPA rendering.
Architecture & Design Decisions
React frontend communicating with an Express / Node.js API with MongoDB document storage. Metadata scraper extracts OG tags in the background on link insertion.
A Digital Knowledge Repository
Second Brain was built to solve personal bookmark rot. It allows developers to quickly capture URLs, auto-extract previews, associate hierarchical tags, and search notes with sub-100ms latency.
What I'd Do Differently Today
Migrate MongoDB to PostgreSQL with pgvector for semantic search and vector embeddings.
Related Work & Systems
PERSONAL
BusinessOS
Commercial-grade financial operating system for SMEs with ledger-first accounting, immutable transaction journals, integer minor-unit money calculations, and multi-tenant audit logs.
PROFESSIONAL
Microsoft Teams & Calendar Engine
Hiding deep Microsoft Graph API complexity behind an automated calendar & meeting sync engine for 20K+ EdTech users.