I take a lot of notes. Whether it's meetings, planning out a project, outlining an agreement, whatever - it almost always starts in a text file.
For a long time, even after years in the tech industry, I continued to rely on physical paper with notebooks and sticky notes (let's face it - I still use the sticky notes). Paper gave me the freedom that notetaking apps didn't - I could move horizontally to make a new little section of words, I could put boxes and circles around things to group them, I could draw arrows to tie two pieces together, even though they came up 45 minutes a part during conversation.
Can notetaking apps do this? Sure, mostly. I eventually moved to using them. But as I progressed past being just a dev, I had to start sharing the concepts that I'd catalogued during meetings to others: clients, bosses, team members - no one could just read the raw brain vomit that I'd tapped out during live conversations. I'd wind up writing summaries, creating charts, and all that before sharing. It was generally tedious, but it seemed to work well.
Skip forward a few years, and now I take a lot of notes with business partners and the heads of other companies. These people throw out ideas and concepts constantly - they live in worlds where other people handle the details that bring their visions to life. So during nearly every meeting, I'm taking all kinds of notes, some topics seem entirely unrelated to others, but some train of thought got us there. It's also not uncommon for there to be multiple conversations or thought processes going at once. My notes from these meetings can wind up getting wild. And then, the next day, we're rehashing things and I'm pointing back at my notes like "we said this", but no one cares - their minds had moved on, and reading my jumble of words is not their priority. So I started taking notes on white boards, and that started to work, but it took me out of the conversation because I was scrambling to make visual representations out of everything being said.
Finally, I decided to try and find software that could just take nested lists (which is 90% of my notes) and turn them into charts or diagrams. After trying various products, I realized nothing would just do that one thing. Some had great UIs and tons of great features, but they were just as tedious (if not more so) than what I used to do. Then, I realized - I'm literally a programmer. Why not just write a script to do what I want? So using some Javascript, I started what turned into Ziqurat.
I started using Ziqurat in meetings - I just took my notes in the textarea of the webpage and let it build whatever diagrams it wanted, then came back afterward to do minor tweaks. I could just turn my screen around and reference the visuals with others in the room. It made it so much simpler to pinpoint topics and categorize topics. I could assign ownership of tasks, sum up costs, and outline flows right there (and I'm sure there are still more features to come as I run into needs for them). It got to a point that people requested my diagrams after the meetings (and the export features were born).
Eventually, I figured "maybe there are other people in a similar position that might use this thing." I'm sure there are plenty of improvements and new features to come, but it felt like it was stable enough to put it out in the world... so here it is! Hopefully it makes someone else's life easier. If you have a use case where it's been beneficial, let me know! I'd love to hear your feedback and ideas.
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