Week 51: Tools, Rabbit Holes, and Why I Stopped Using Notion
Weekly learnings from the build. This week—SQLite on the server, Obsidian for notes, and a mass unsubscribe.
End of year. Time for reflection, cleanup, and changing tools I've used for three years.
SQLite in Production
Deployed a service this week with SQLite as the primary database.
Not a typo. Not prototyping. Production.
The service handles ~500 requests/minute. Single server. Read-heavy workload (95/5 read/write split). SQLite with WAL mode handles it without breaking a sweat.
# WAL mode + synchronous normal
PRAGMA journal_mode=WAL;
PRAGMA synchronous=NORMAL;
Latency: 0.3ms average for reads. PostgreSQL on the same hardware: 2.1ms (network round-trip).
When your data fits on one machine and your write load is modest, SQLite is underrated.
When is SQLite a viable production database?
Single server, read-heavy workloads where your data fits on one machine
Click to reveal answer
Notion → Obsidian
Three years of Notion. 400+ pages. Deleted the app this week.
The breaking point: 4 seconds to open a page. On a MacBook Pro. For text.
Obsidian loads instantly because it's local Markdown files. No sync latency. No loading spinners. Cmd+O, type, enter, I'm there.
Trade-offs:
- Lost: Databases, web sharing, collaboration
- Gained: Speed, offline, plain text forever
For a solo knowledge base, speed wins. Every time.
Email Bankruptcy
Unsubscribed from 47 newsletters this week.
Kept 6:
- One for Clojure news
- One for database internals
- Two individuals whose thinking I trust
- Two industry roundups (weekly, not daily)
The test: "Did I read the last 3 issues?" If no, unsubscribe.
Email went from 40/day to 8/day. Most of those 8 are actually from humans.
Interesting Finds
Zed editor - Finally fast enough to replace VS Code for quick edits. The GPU rendering actually matters.
Tailscale - Set up a mesh network for home lab + cloud servers in 10 minutes. VPNs shouldn't be this easy.
DuckDB - SQLite for analytics. Ran a 2GB CSV query in 3 seconds that pandas choked on for 2 minutes.
What I'm Thinking About
The tools that survive aren't the most powerful. They're the ones that stay out of the way.
Notion is powerful. It's also slow. The power doesn't matter when I avoid using it.
SQLite is limited. It's also fast and simple. The limitations don't matter when they don't apply to my use case.
Picking tools is about knowing your constraints, not maximizing capabilities.
What matters more than a tool's power when choosing it?
Whether it stays out of the way — a fast limited tool beats a powerful slow one
Click to reveal answer
Next Week
- Finish auth system migration (see: why I rebuilt auth three times)
- Experiment with Fly.io for edge deployment
- Actually take a break for the holidays (probably won't)
Week 51. Tools changed. Inboxes cleaned. Ready for next year.
The best productivity system is the one you actually use.