> real offline alternatives

How about https://tiddlywiki.com/ ?

I thought the parent comment was referring to real offline journals made of treeware.

Exactly. It's not that I don't see value in online alternatives, but in this case, if the main point is to access it offline, I don't see how different it is from a physical journal.

Why use digital formats offline:

  - editing and reordering text
  - attachments
  - aesthetics
  - accessibility 
  - hassle/weight optimisation

Aesthetics includes theming, and also not everyone has good handwriting.

Accessibility, because not everyone is able to hand-write in the first place.

Weight optimisation, because if a laptop is non-negotiable, going digital means one less thing to remember about and carry with you.

I have multiple physical notebooks/calendars and a digital commonplace book, they all have their place.

For slow writers but quick typists, an app is always going to win out over a physical journal. Also interested in an event call export + parse.

I understand the appeal and you're not the only person to want it: I've seen people and companies implement db schema to graphql, db schema to models, and models to db schema.

Based on personal experience, this is a bad idea though. You do not want a 1:1 correspondence between your database schema, your backend models, and your graphql schema, because the way you organise information in each layer should be different.

Database schema needs to be performant for expected queries. That means de/normalisation decisions; sometimes the same data will be stored in multiple locations.

Backend models need to express the domain, because this is where your business logic is. (There's a reason people bitch about ORMs: when you get to complex enough usecases they're not flexible enough in either direction and you need extra models wrapping THAT.)

Graphql schema is a view of your backend; sometimes several fields will be fulfilled using the same model, sometimes your model should not have a reflection in graphql schema (because you do not want to expose this data to frontend/the world), and sometimes your graphql schema will be full of deprecated fields because client apps have not been updated (see Facebook policy of never removing anything.)

Everything you say is so true. In a similar vein, all those ready-made REST libraries that help you shoehorn your business models into 1-to-1 mappings between them and your REST resources/endpoints, have no reason to exist. And yet you still see people battling with them.

REST is still HTTP + more exotic verbs + headers + more serializing/encoding options. You can build a small library, specific for you project's needs in a matter of 3-5 days. And on top of that, you don't forfeit any possible future optimizations, which you most certainly will by choosing any ready made library.

36, recently moved to London and struggling to find friends, especially other techies.

I know people often recommend meetups, and I have attended a variety of those over the last year. The pattern I've noticed, especially on tech meetups, is that people show up in small groups with their existing friends or colleagues. If you come up and start a conversation, they mostly don't engage (bring up new topics, respond at length) - they just respond in a passive way to keep the minimum level of politeness, and wait until you realise they want to go back to talking with their friends. Starting a conversation with a stranger seems to be a rude thing to do, since you're making them uncomfortable.

The ones that do engage turn out to be non-tech (recruiters, marketers, people who want to start a tech career but don't know how), or people desperately looking for a job and thus checking if you can get them into anything.

What success I've had was:

- making friends at work (but for some reason it's always non-tech people - probably for the competition reason mentioned in the article - and it falls apart because they already have better friends they prioritise)

- starting a gaming group (but that had no followup - if I don't run a game, people don't invite me to their other things)

- making friends with a neighbour (an old lady open to friendship with anyone, that seems to have held up since she's retired and has lots of time)

At this point, I'm lost for ideas.

Google "London friends" or something, and you'll find people talking about how they're lonely and they'd like more friends. Seriously, where do those mythical lonely people exist?