Categories
Database

Designing the Datastore for Notic

One of the early decisions in making Notic Meet was choosing how data would be stored. Traditionally I have opted for MySQL as I have used this for many years, but in the last couple of years I have worked with NoSQL databases, particularly document based storage.

I have grown to really like this approach and because of this, I decided to use it for Notic Meet.

The database of choice is MongoDb. I don’t have experience using it, but do have experience with Cosmos which has some similarities with it.

After deciding the basic feature set for MVP, and after choosing MongoDb, I met with my team member at Notic and we designed what we could of the storage. In short, some of the items we need to store include meetings, users, notes, threads, plus a few more things. I’ll share a more technical post showing the design at a later date.

Our design considers a number of factors which include user stories and how a user will interact with the data, such as what does a user need, what is the best way to get that data, and so on.

As mentioned, we will be using document storage for this project. We will be duplicating some data across documents to speed up access. This will be meta data rather than the full data, meaning that we could potentially get all of the users meetings by just looking at the user model, but as a meeting is opened, it can then grab the contents of the meeting, if needed.

Partitioning will also be used for some types of data to help speed up retrieval.

We both feel that the design is good to go, although we may make minor alterations as needed throughout building the MVP.

We will post regular updates here. Please feel free to comment, ask questions, make suggestions, and sign up for our emailing list if you prefer to receive updates that way.

Categories
Updates

Welcome to Notic

Welcome to Notic. We are a small team of two working on solving a problem of meeting notes.

After taking notes in meetings for over two decades, I have found what works well and what doesn’t. When done correctly, meeting notes can be a valuable resource, but when not handled correctly, they can end up stored in some folder or software, never to be looked at again.

We are designing Notic to tackle the challenge of taking notes in meetings. Whether you are taking notes in meetings or making formal minutes, Notic will simplify the process of taking notes and make them usable after they are taken—more details to follow on this. I think you’ll like what we have planned.

The Notic Meet product is still in early development stages. We are building in public and aim to regularly share progress. When the product has enough features, it will be launched in beta.

The aim is first to get the web app up and running. After the basic features have been developed, the emphasis will switch to mobile. At first, we will likely use .Net MAUI to build the app on both iOS and Android devices, but at some point, there will be both an iPad and iPhone app that is native. Android may follow, although this might need to be outsourced at some point as our skills mostly fall to Swift/SwiftUI and C#.

Please follow along this journey as we build Notic Meet.