Goals, motivation, design ideas

Goals

• Manage my todo list and schedule with little effort.
• Be in full control of my data.
• Work offline.
• Use something powerful and hackable to be able to experiment.

Motivation

• Taskwarrior not fully satisfying.
  • Frustrating sync issues.
  • Lacking, or immature, UI and important integrations.
• Paid and/or non-FOSS solutions not deemed acceptable.
  • Scheduled todo list with attached notes is not what I think is complicated enough to give up software freedom I had with taskwarrior, at least it's not something I'd take lightly.
  • Most prominent runner-up, todoist, requires paid account to be marginally useful (to have, for example, text annotations).

Design ideas

• Be extremely low maintenance, and short roadmap project (the only way a parent of a toddler can afford).
• Be paranoid about data integrity and history.
  • Data integrity issues is why i migrate away from Taskwarrior, but I don't assume I can write perfect code.
  • So let's backup all data after every change!
  • Even better - let's annotate the changes with what was the change operation!
• Don't roll my own implementations of complex things.
  • Database.
    • Taskwarrior rolls their own RDBMS.
      • With a backend of text file of custom format, which is a JSON object per line.
      • Implements all various functions to access, process and present that data.
    • taskdb employs robust and feature-rich PostgreSQL as both backend and API (and even frontend).
  • Sync, replication.
    • Taskwarrior implements replay based replication with star topology, which is architecturally sound, but is buggy and caused me grief.
    • taskdb does not have master DB replication solution yet, but it will be a reuse of backend technology (PostgreSQL) specific solution, not taskdb-specific.
    • Most important taskdb feature for me currently is bidirectional sync with CalDAV. To have it, and not implement it, taskdb shells out to vdirsyncer.
• Enable usage of available commoditized tools, don't require building specialized toolkit, or huge monolith, from scratch. The Unix way.
  • SQL UI.
    • Variety of readily available SQL UI products is a great bonus, but not a coincidence. I use:
      • OmniDB - great WYSIWYG interface to view and edit SQL databases
      • Grafana - gives dashboards with various views of information, e.g. plots, charts, tables. Define your metrics and watch how you perform towards them over time!
  • Calendar UI.
    • I haven't planned to lean heavily on it at initial design phase, but it quickly proved to be the biggest game changer.
    • Visualisation of time as space, Drag & Drop are amazing things! I would never implement that as well as some established solutions do.