Who I am and what is this project

JournalOS is a side project that I've started in Decembre 2024. I worked a lot on another very successful side project called Monica, which I believe was the first personal CRM. After 8 years on this project, I wanted to change and do something different.

My passion, when I get back from my real work (the one that pays the bills), is to code and learn new things every day. This is how I relieve my stress from a challenging day job (which is not about code at all). So even though I stopped working on Monica, I still wanted to code every day.

I believed my work on Monica was incomplete. I still think we haven't figured out how to effectively document personal lives and share what we know about people we like. So, I started this project as an experiment to solve this puzzle. It's also a way for me to learn new technologies and, more importantly, to explore how far we can push simple technologies to achieve significant results without relying on complex, hard-to-maintain JavaScript frameworks, which I personally don't like at all.

JournalOS is a side project. I work a lot on it, but I work on it at night and on the weekend. I try to fix bugs as soon as I see them. I will not implement all the features people want. Do not expect a professionnal, 24/7 support - I don't have the time for this. I try to limitate as much as possible how people can contact me, since it takes so much time otherwise, and I want to decidate my time to working on the product as much as possible.

I believe in open source. Most of the time, I work on Linux. I use many OSS tools every day. I need to make money to run this project, and also to help justify the (significant) personal time I put into this project, but it's not the driving force behind the project. I like closed source projects too. I'm not a purist. But I use so many open source project that I need to give back somehow. Also, would you trust a closed source project to store this kind of data? Lol.

I have launched this project for the journey, not the destination. I'm not sure where it will go. I'm not sure if it will be a success. But I'm sure it will be a fun ride.