Texas A&M computer engineering student building Aside, a lightweight, local Windows note-taking app that stays out of your way until summoned

Cool. So Andres, good to meet you. I just kind of told you a little bit about what we're doing with HIRE here with kind of talking about, talking with different creators, different people that are interested in networking kind of within the tech space. And you were just introducing yourself. You're a student right now at Texas A&M University, and you recently built a side. Is that right? Yeah. Yes, that is right. And so pretty much what a side is, is it's very, it's a lightweight, a local, and an out of the way Windows note-taking app. And one thing that sets it aside from all these other note-taking applications or softwares is that a side wants to be away from you. And so when you're, you know, doing your own thing in your computer, you're, you're in flow state and you're having multiple tabs open and windows open, you'd want something that can come up when you need it and leave when you want it to. And uh with a side, I, there's this uh implementation uh called a global summon hotkey, which is Alt-A, which opens up the window for you. And there are nine different configurable windows that you can bind via a keybind uh to your desktop. And pretty much what this enables you to do is um, it allows for you to continue working on the things that you do. And at the same time, having a place where you can add in temporary notes or little bits of information that you'd otherwise lose in many different little platforms, whether it is on your phone using Apple notes or calendar, or even if you're in lecture as a student and you listen to the professor tell you a very important piece of information at the end of class and the only thing that's open is your computer, you know? And so a side is a really good way to capture that. That's awesome. And right now it's hosted just on, it's a note, it's a Windows app. And uh what's the URL to find it? Yeah, so uh the website is uh setaside.dev and there you can find the uh public beta, uh, which redirects you to a releases page on GitHub. There you can find the source code. Again, everything is locally stored. Um, we use uh SQLite for the databasing, so it just gets stored into a local, local root file or sorry, folder into your computer. And um yeah, pretty much uh I, I created this sort of as a, as a way to unify all the little things that I have lost over the years and make it into part of something that I use on a daily basis. Um it supports, you know, sort of markdown formatting. Um if you want to create more of like a, a checklist or a review for something a little bit more comprehensive, it can do that. I also integrated a lot of uh student-based features like Pomodoro timers, where you can pretty much use your summon hotkey, uh, type in a command using natural language, and a timer starts. And I, I made it especially uh easy to use because I feel like with uh apps such as Obsidian and Notion, you sort of get stuck in this paralysis of all the great features that you see um on YouTube and you really want to optimize your workspace and make it look beautiful and have, you know, the best uh the best um sort of plugins. And I realized after using those apps a lot, um, you sort of get away from its main use, which is a note-taking app. You're, you're meant to jot down your information and store it in a place that you know, secure and safe. Um and uh I mean a side has great customization features. Um you can change different colors with your notes and there's a light and dark theme for people who love that. Um but it's meant to be simple and it's meant to become integrated with your way of doing things on your computer. Yeah, I totally relate to that with uh I'm a big Obsidian notion fan and uh yeah, Notion is like, it's amazing, but there's just so much going on. It's really hard to, to use it. Exactly. And I mean, for the, for the technical person, right, that can, you know, become a developer and contribute to the themes and, you know, uh edit the source code and um putting different texts and fonts and, you know, customize the user interface, you know, that, that sort of stuff is cool, but my product is more geared towards um any college student, uh, whether they're pursuing, you know, uh liberal arts education and they have tons of, you know, sort of topics that they have to go over or things to memorize, you know, uh checklists and um you know, bullet points are also uh like natively supported in the app, so it's really easy for you to, you know, go ahead and open up a window, put anything you want down and close it and always know that, you know, it's going to be there if you need it. Yeah. Yeah, and Windows is like really kind of lacking, lacking uh that I think in its note taker. Mac doesn't have something quite that smooth either. I think you could probably do something with key binding, but you know, you can with, with the notes app, you can uh they have like a hot panel on the, in the bottom right, so at least you have some type of quick access panel, but Windows doesn't have anything like that. Exactly. Yeah, and um Aside also has a really good focus return feature. So when you go ahead and open up an app, uh a note window and you're, before that you were typing something in a Word document or highlighting something else, as soon as you close it, your cursor automatically goes back to where it was. And so it's a, it's a, it's a small feature at first, but when you realize that those small things start to add up, um, it becomes a really, really cool thing to have. Yeah. Yeah, pretty much, uh, go ahead. I, I just, I love my, my like hotkeys, my shortcuts on my keyboard. So like having, being able to like remove that extra step of just moving my hand from the keyboard over to, over to the mouse and like eliminate that small movement 10, 20 times a day is huge. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But um, yeah, I'm, I'm excited to announce the, the public beta. I, I, I wish people to, you know, try it out, see um what, what they like, what they don't like, what they want to see implemented. Um, and it's, it's, it's an awesome thing because it's such a small um file size. It's 80 megabytes. Um, and you know, features are rolled out, I'd say every week or two. Um, I notice something that I want to be seen implemented and it's very easy to do so. That's awesome. So this is your first, this is your first public release of a, of an app? Yes. This is, this is my very first ever. And um a little bit more background about myself. I'm a computer engineering student and uh I am more geared towards the hardware engineering side of things. And so software really isn't my strongest suit, but I realized that um with all the AI craze that's going on right now, um, I wanted to become literate in a specific tool and I chose cloud code to do that. Um And I I've been always wanting to figure out a way to learn while using these tools, because if taken the wrong way, I feel like they can be very detrimental. They can think for you and implement things that you don't want to be implemented if you're not specific enough with your prompt. And so um I'd say the majority, maybe 80 to 85% of the um integration and the, the stack that I use, uh, which was Electron, um, Astro, SQL, uh uh SQLite, um, all those frameworks that I haven't previously been exposed to at all suddenly became, you know, something that I can work with. And so um I started out with this project um about half a year ago with Google's anti-gravity IDE, which was a pretty, you know, um frontier uh development environment at that time. But it had tons of little quirks, tons of small things that it kept, you know, messing up and, you know, being a student, I can't really afford um the token usage or like the pro models and stuff. And so um I was, you know, struggling. I was wrestling with the um with the interface and how it implemented things and the implementation plan. And, you know, along the way, I think I've broken more than I've implemented, but at the same time, I've learned how I can prompt and debug with Claude to, you know, push out a new feature or isolate a core issue or even, you know.

I'll maybe pull up VS Code and figure out exactly what is going on in main.js, what listeners are, you know, messing up and what functions aren't being called. And so really, I'm proud that I was able to do this in such a short amount of time. But I'm also, you know, excited that, you know, the Claude CLI is two clicks away from, from my keyboard and I can open it up and in natural language and a little bit of prompt exposure, I can tell it what I want and I can do it. Yeah. So it's a big part of your, of your development kind of work flow, your routine, right? Yes, for sure. For sure. Yeah. And you like using it in terminal or do you use like. Yeah, I use it. I use a CLI. I use the command line interface, and so I just navigate to the project root and I open up Claude and sometimes I use the dangerously skip, dangerously skip features option where it just runs on auto mode. But most of the times you want a little bit of safeguards, especially if you're working in directories that are, you know, sort of containing more private information. And so, I mean, it's it's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I use it that way too sometimes. Yeah, it's especially if you have the GitHub connection on there, it can kind of just get a little bit crazy. Get a little crazy. Yeah, the source control can get a little, little messed up, especially if you don't know what it is you're merging or if you haven't merged yet or pulled, you know, it creates lots of conflicts. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you guys ain't got to watch it. That's awesome, man. So your first project, how many years are you in uni from finishing your degree? I am a rising junior, so I have two full years before I finish my degree. Cool. And so, I mean, it's It's been, it's been crazy because the whole AI craze has sort of added like a like a like a dark cloud over what it is I am capable of because you can see these tools one-shotting side projects that are on resumes and stuff and it sort of takes away the pleasure of, you know, committing to a personal project and doing these things. But at the same time, I feel like if you can work with it and you can and you're able to learn from these tools and ultimately learn what it is they're building, so you kind of like reverse engineer your way back from the end to the beginning. You can really, you know, figure out a way of pumping these projects out and learning lots of information or relevant information for like the industry that you want to go into. And for me, I mean, becoming a little bit, just a little bit more exposed to building web apps using Chromium and dealing with all those functions inside of JavaScript was kind of painful, but at the same time, you know, it taught me a lot. And I wouldn't have been exposed to all these languages and all these features and implementation, you know, techniques if it wasn't for Claude. I would have probably spent a year or two learning the ins and outs of JavaScript because, you know, it's a never-ending language. Yeah. Yeah, it kind of comes with like those big leaps forward, but then kind of like a couple steps back. It's not really like a net positive or a net negative. Definitely not a net negative, but not totally. It's not a magic bullet, you know. Exactly. Yeah. And then you, kind of to your point too, you, I mean, you're kind of missing a little bit of the, maybe that foundational, you know, you're getting to skip ahead a couple steps, but then you're not really that kind of elbow grease that you put in on those slower projects that kind of, I don't know, you cut your teeth on. That's kind of gone now, right? You don't, that doesn't happen as much anymore. Exactly. And I mean, it's not to say that I use this tool as a way of getting ahead and maybe skipping like important information. It's more so, you know, I wanted to solve a problem I had in my life with my work and my workflow for studying and getting some things done. And I mean, all you had to do was open up Claude code and begin iterating with an idea that you had and with enough patience, I feel like you can make something really good. Yeah. Yeah, and I think with detail, I think you're in, you know, the perfect space right now because you're still probably compliments whatever you're studying and doing pretty well. So you're getting to build, see the end result and also see kind of the less exciting parts of good system design and, you know, building something that's anti-fragile, you know. Exactly. Cool. Well, awesome, Andres. Well, thanks for taking a little bit of time to talk about the project. If you build any more projects in the future that you wanna share and talk about and maybe network, connect with people about, happy to have another take another time to feature you on the website. We'll take this, this interview, we'll put it on your hiree.ai profile. And then if there's anybody that joins our network that's interested in kind of a note-taking app or anything else that kind of suits your profile, the system will kind of like offer to make a connection with them. Like, you know, maybe there's somebody that's working on Notion board, custom Notion board theme or something like that. The system might think that, okay, you guys might have a good conversation. That's kind of like the vision of what we're building. So I'll And then also, when you do launch, please let us know. You can shoot me a message. Are you on X or LinkedIn? I am on LinkedIn. I'm not on X. Okay, you wanna just shoot me over your LinkedIn profile and then I'll post it on, I'll post this interview probably on LinkedIn too. And then if you wanna repost it to your own, I'll make a little cut of it, so it won't be raw. But if you wanna post it, I'll tag you on LinkedIn then and we can get some more eyes on this for your launch. Do you have a date for the launch or not? No, not really, honestly. I mean, this is my first time ever doing something like this, so it's been a journey. It's been awesome. Cool, man. I love that. Yeah. Well, let me know. Yeah, I'll connect to the old LinkedIn. And then when you do finally do that official launch, let me know and then we'll kind of just keep coordinating. Perfect. Awesome. Thank you for your time. Really appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you for yours, man. Happy to see what you build next, man. That's awesome. Yeah. Thank you, thank you. Looking forward to seeing your product. Yeah, yeah. Check it out. Let me know when you check it out and shoot me a connection request on there. All right. It's really easy. You can even just text it from your iPhone or yeah, I think we support Android too, but if you got an iPhone, you can just shoot a quick message. Hey, I'd like to create a profile there and connect with Mark. You can say Mark in Arizona. That'll just go ahead and connect you with me. All right. Thank you. Yeah, no problem, man. All right, you have a wonderful day now. All right, you as well. Thank you. All right. No problem. Take care now. Bye.

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