This is the set of projects I am most proud of. When I began using Obsidian to take notes and build a second brain, I wanted a way to save tweets and tweet threads into my Markdown notes so that I could go back and reference them later. Out of that desire was this project born.
It began with the Tweet to Markdown CLI, a small command line utility to save tweets as Markdown files. Then, I built the Tweet to Markdown Obsidian plugin to integrate directly into Obsidian and make saving the tweets a lot easier and more user friendly.
One of the biggest pain points of using the tools, though, was that each user needed a bearer token from Twitter. To receive one, you have to apply to Twitter’s developer platform and await approval, and it’s not even guaranteed that they’ll approve your request. To alleviate this, I set up a Tweet to Markdown SaaS, which allows anyone to sign up and immediately get an API key which they can then use to download tweets.
What I learned
These projects contained a lot of firsts for me. This was my first time writing a CLI using Node.js, building a plugin for another platform, opening a service where public users could sign up, and setting up Stripe to collect payments. I’ve really come to embrace the value of unit testing and end-to-end testing with these projects. I’ve also learned to better orchestrate changes across different tools that rely on each other.