What I accomplished in 2021 & my challenge for 2022

My daughter, the native Markdown editor, and my YouTube channel

Takuya Matsuyama

21 Dec 2021 — 5 min read

Hi, it’s Takuya. 2021 was a year of leap forward for me. How was it for you? I’d like to wrap up what I’ve accomplished this year in this article. I’m the author of a Markdown note-taking app called Inkdrop, and I’ve been doing everything alone for it, from marketing, planning, designing, user support, and of course, development. I didn’t do any freelance work since Inkdrop earns enough money to live off. It keeps growing thankfully. I love my current lifestyle. I’ll keep working on it at a healthy pace next year as well.

TL;DR

My daughter was born and she is now 7 months old
The roadmap 40% finished — made good progress of the native Markdown editor for mobile
My YouTube channel got over 56k subscribers
I’ll take the end of year holidays from Dec 22 to Jan 6

My daughter was born

The biggest life event of this year was my daughter. She is now 7 months old! When she was born, I took a 3-week paternity leave and that was the right choice. I was able to help my wife as it’s hard for her to do anything after she gave birth to our daughter. I’ve learned a lot about how to take care of the baby.

I was so worried that I can’t work as I’ve been used to — but it turns out that I’ve done a lot of work this year thanks to my wife and our families’ support. Can’t wait to go out with our daughter!

The roadmap(vol.5) 40% finished

I’d keep Inkdrop to just work without frictions, rather than adding shiny new features and making it more complicated. I’ve done a lot of improvements this year. The key changes are:

Significant loading performance improvement by leveraging the native implementation (Mobile v4.1.0)
Added UI for easily resolving note conflicts (Desktop v5.3.0, Mobile v4.2.0)
Apple Silicon support (v5.3.1)
Got rid of the default white title bar on Windows and Linux (v5.4.0)
Vibrant dark UI support on Windows (v5.4.0)

Made good progress on building a native Markdown editor for iOS and Android

Along with those improvements, I’ve been trying to build a native Markdown editor for iOS and Android. It’s currently web-based, which has a lot of editing experience issues that can’t be solved with the current implementation. Instead of relying on such awkward behaviors, I decided to use CodeMirror v6 as its backend in React Native and to implement the editor UI component in native on iOS and Android. The idea is simple:

Instead of rendering the view with DOMs in webview, it directly uses native components like UITextView on iOS and EditText on Android. This is a big challenge because I have to deeply understand the CodeMirror internals, and iOS and Android APIs, then write code in both native and JavaScript. But I’m happy to report that I’ve made some good progress on it:

It works comfortably with a physical keyboard:

The next step is to extend the editor to support some app-specific features. Please check out the user forum to learn more about the tasks and latest progress (paid users only):

Progress report on building native Markdown editors for iOS and Android — Inkdrop Forum

I’ll be working hard to release it next year!

My YouTube channel got over 56k subscribers

Since I started publishing videos on YouTube as part of marketing for Inkdrop, my channel has been growing quite slowly. I’ve been struggling to make my video unique and attractive, and finally found my style called ‘wabi-sabi style’:

The biggest hit in 2021 was this video, which got 400k views so far:

As you can see, I stopped talking, and focused on its aesthetics with ASMR-style while keeping them informative yet enjoyable without needing to understand what I’m doing. I guess that was the key for YouTube to decide to recommend my videos to people. Because of the quality, it’s so hard to make those videos. I spend a week preparing and another week shooting and editing. It’s like launching a product. This style has a lot of possibilities. For example, I can show you around Japan while giving a tutorial like this:

It’d be a great marriage of coding and travel. I love art. I love playing music and drawing illustrations. I’m so happy to get those experiences connected in my video production! Besides, it’s so fun to give back to the OSS community by making tutorials.

People who make the libraries are happy to know they are featured in my video, and that also makes me happy. That’s a win-win-win (me, viewers, and OSS creators). The next goal is to hit 100k subs and get a silver play button.

I’ll take the end of year holidays from Dec 22 to Jan 6

That’s the wrap-up of my 2021. As always, thank you for all your support! I’m going to take the end-of-year holidays. I’d like to spend time with my family, learn new things, and plan the upcoming year. Happy and prosperous 2022 to you! Cheers.