Live on Nicole van der Hoeven

Monitor behind a Firewall With Private Data Source Connect (Grafana Office Hours #04)

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 21:59:57 +0100

How do you monitor behind a firewall? With Grafana Cloud Private Data Connect, you can create a secure tunnel to query data sources, even including those in VPCs on public cloud vendors. Senior Software Engineers Stephanie Hingtgen and Georges Chaudy talk to me about how it works.

Recording a Performance Test With Grafana Cloud k6 (k6 Office Hours #93)

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 23:33:12 +0100

Senior Frontend Engineer Edvinas Daugirdas demonstrates recording a performance test with Grafana Cloud k6 and some other new features that have recently come to Grafana Cloud. He is joined by Developer Advocates Marie Drake and Nicole van der Hoeven to talk about getting started with k6 for free.

Changes to Grafana Plugins in Grafana 10 (Grafana Office Hours #03)

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 23:29:35 +0100

Grafana 10 is fresh off the presses, and it includes some important changes to Grafana plugins that any plugin developer or user will want to know. Senior Product Manager David Harris chats to me about all the new features available to plugins (including the new Scenes framework) and some breaking changes to legacy plugins.

From Load Testing to Reliability Testing Tool (k6 Office Hours #92)

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 23:43:31 +0100

In this k6 Office Hours, Developer Advocates Nicole van der Hoeven and Marie Cruz talk about the evolution of k6 from a load testing tool to a reliability testing tool. They also demonstrate how to combine various modules and extensions with k6.

Testing Kubernetes Networking With k6 (k6 Office Hours #91)

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 13:00:50 +0200

How would you go about testing Kubernetes networking? For his initial project with k6, our new Senior Software Engineer, Roberto Santalla, talks to us about how he used k6 to improve end-to-end network throughput and some insights he learned about Kubernetes networking along the way. I also invited my colleague, Leandro Melendez, to help me interview Roberto.

What's New in Grafana 10? (Grafana Office Hours #01)

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 12:00:25 +0200

What’s new in Grafana 10? I interview Grafana Labs Product Director Mitch Seaman about all the new features in Grafana 10, including Scenes, correlations, some important plugin development changes, and improved security.

Lazy GM Note Taking With Notion and Obsidian

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 12:36:50 +0200

How does Mike Shea (Sly Flourish) do lazy GM note taking with Notion? Mike shows me how he uses Notion to prep and run games, and I’m taking the opportunity to show him some of how I do the same in Obsidian. Mike is the author of several RPG-related books, including the Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and his latest, The Lazy DM’s Companion. Mike has been playing RPGs for almost 40 years and is a forever DM. He also has a YouTube channel where he releases two videos weekly: one about news in the RPG community and one where he preps live for one of his games.

About Sly Flourish

Taking Notes for RPGs in Obsidian with Andy Polaine

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 14:30:21 +0100

My friend, Andy Polaine, joins me to discuss taking notes for RPGs in Obsidian. Andy is the Dungeon Master for one of my weekly games of D&D, and in this livestream, we’re comparing our notes (his as a DM, mine as a player) for the same campaign, a homebrew one in the world of Exandria (from Critical Role). We’re showing the differences between our styles of note-taking and playing games.

Key takeaways

Andy’s DM style is improv-heavy and inspired by the Lazy GM, Sly Flourish. His notes reflect that philosophy.
Andy primarily uses folders for organization due to concerns regarding futureproofness, whereas I use links and Dataview and have no sub-folders.
Andy has Dice Roller tables for random generation, but he also embeds existing websites as iframes within Obsidian.
When a situation calls for many moving parts, monsters, or factions that the party might encounter, Andy uses an Adversary Roster to keep track of where everyone is.
Andy uses Canvas to display multiple statblocks at a time and be able to zoom in individually when necessary. He said he initially had performance issues with this approach, but those seem to be resolved now.

Resources mentioned

DM Heroes
RPG Tinker
TetraCube Statblock generator
Sly Flourish Lazy GM method for session prep
Knife Theory

Below is a transcript of the video.

How we met

NICOLE: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the channel. I’m Nicole van der Hoeven. You probably already know me, but today, I’m also Scura, the level eight Pallid Elf Twilight Cleric/Stars Druid. And with me today is a someone who should be a familiar face now. I think this is your third time back. Andy Polaine.

ANDY: Not sure. Second time on the stream, I think maybe, I’m not sure.

NICOLE: Okay, okay. But we already did a TTRPG thing together.

ANDY: That’s right. So it is the third time in the Obsidian DM world.

NICOLE: So Andy happens to be my DM, my Dungeon Master for my D&D 5e game. And that actually happened because of that presentation we did on Obsidian, right?

ANDY: It is, yes. We’re chatting on the Obsidian channel, the TTRPG channel. And at some point, I kinda said, oh yeah, well actually I need another person. But you probably, ‘cause you had said something like, I play 50 games a week or whatever. And I said, “You probably don’t need another game.”

NICOLE: It was like four.

ANDY: And you went, “Well actually.” So yeah.

NICOLE: Yeah. So you slid into my DMs and you’re like, “Well, just in case you need a fifth.” And I’m like, “Actually, I don’t have a weekday one yet. So maybe, yeah.” So let’s talk about that, because you definitely knew when you asked me to join your game that I took notes. What was going on inside your head? Were you like, “Yeah, I want someone to take notes.” Or did you not really know how much I would take notice of everything that happens?

ANDY: No, I mean, I wanted another player and I wanted someone who was into the same stuff and I thought you would be interested and a great player and you have been. It’s great to have you in the game. I mean, leading up to that, actually, I guess, I had played D&D when I was a kid, teenager, and then I stopped and then COVID happened and like a lot of people, I sort of thought, “Oh yeah, D&D that’s a thing.” And it was actually to talk to my daughter about it and try and persuade her to play. And then the internet happened between when I stopped playing D&D and when I wanted to start again. And so I was looking for ways to note take and have everything. And I’ve tried a few different things, including Notion and I didn’t really like Notion’s… The main thing was no offline mode, which was a real big thing for me. But I’m also like many people who use Obsidian, I’ve been keeping my notes for my work stuff in as plain text markdown for years. And so I thought, “Ah, I’m gonna, I’m gonna switch to that.” So very quickly, I did one game in Notion and I started actually the campaign that you’re currently play in Notion. I think the first few, maybe five or six sessions, and then I switched to Obsidian.

NICOLE: Oh, I didn’t know that.

ANDY: With all the pain that exporting out of Notion with like these horrid, long hex or these database codes attached to all the files. I’ve still got some of that junk occasionally appears in my auto completes.

NICOLE: Yeah, I can imagine. I think by that point, I’d been using Obsidian for a while, but I had just started to use it a lot for TTRPGs ‘cause you know, I was gonna use it for like serious stuff like work. and that changed very quickly. I know. Hey, do you have dice with you?

ANDY: I do have dice I do have dice.

NICOLE: Let’s do rollies again.

ANDY: Okay, alright.

NICOLE: I got my-

ANDY: You better explain what rollies is for people who may not-

NICOLE: It’s just rolling a d20, seeing which one’s higher ‘cause I have a question from Patreon. And the person who gets higher is going to decide whether they answer first or the other person answers first.

ANDY: All right, okay. All right, you ready?

NICOLE: Okay, yeah.

ANDY: 16.

NICOLE: Oh no. Natural one. Okay, you decide.

ANDY: Okay, okay. I decide whether, well, I don’t know what the question is. So that would-

NICOLE: No, you gotta decide if you wanna go first or me.

ANDY: Well ladies first.

NICOLE: Oh, great. Okay, so the question is for me, what GM are you? And for you, what player am I? Andy is a very empathetic GM. He listens and he listens to not just the stuff from the character but also your stuff. And maybe this is something where we should talk about knife theory ‘cause Andy’s particularly good at remembering things that draw you into the story, your character and you. And I think he’s mentioned quite a few times that he likes slightly messing with us all, so.

ANDY: Yeah. So, okay, so what player are you? Well, you’re great. You are actually very empathetic player and you play a cleric, right?

NICOLE: That was my thing.

ANDY: Yeah, yeah. And so, no, what I used to say is that basically, Scura runs around healing everyone way too much from my liking as the DM. But Scura does a lot of, if you like a hit point machine, just of vending machine, like here you go, you have hit points and you have some hit points. And so you’re very engaged on that front. You’re very engaged in the role play. And thanks to Obsidian, Scura has got like a sort of photographic memory. So you have… And you, Nicole, use it I think to kind of mess with me as well sometimes too, which is, usually through sending-

NICOLE: No, I would never.

How I use Sending to mess with Andy

ANDY: Should we talk about sendings here?

NICOLE: Yeah, I could.

ANDY: I’m assuming here that everyone knows about how D&D works and stuff. So I don’t know if this is true, but you might all be Obsidian people just interested in this. For those of you don’t know, there’s a spell in D&D. It’s called sending where you can send 25 words to someone sort of telepathically over distances. So tell me what you do with that.

NICOLE: Well, I actually have something to show on that front.

ANDY: Okay. All right.

(recorded video plays)

NICOLE: I’m gonna play a little clip that I got permission to show. I’m going to send to, I’m not sure what her name is. Sabilis, Sybilis.

ANDY: I don’t who.

NICOLE: The drow priestess that wanted Wally to come with her to Xhorhas.

ANDY: Oh my God. Let me just check who that might be.

TYLER: Great pull. Great pull.

ANDY: That is like, I gotta choose this, this really random that you haven’t thought about for ages.

(back to livestream)

NICOLE: So that was a clip from our actual game where I pulled out a particularly unexpected sending. I don’t know why it was unexpected really, because my character had been try trying to chase down this thread for the other character. So I don’t know why I was unexpected, Andy.

ANDY: Well…. There’s so much that’s unexpected. So I would say there was a couple things actually about that group. So I mean, it may be interesting on the note front for people. So if there’s an important NPC, and I’ll show some stuff in a second, if there’s an important NPC, I will usually make a note for them. But sometimes as in this case, there’s like a group of NPCs. In this case there was a group of drow, they’re called the Kryn in Exandria. We play in the critical role Exandria Wildemount world. There was one of those times where I didn’t have much prep time and I thought, “Oh, I just need to come up with some names and stuff. And so I think I probably just pulled some stat blocks form somewhere just in case you had a fight with them. But actually, the names, I just had them in a little list and there’s a block and like a one line description. I think you might see some in a minute too. And so they didn’t have any notes made for them. And so when you said that, and I’m looking through my dashboard and stuff and I think I can’t think who that is at all. And the name didn’t stick with me at all, so yeah.

NICOLE: Yeah, you know what’s weird is I actually wasn’t there. I wasn’t there when they met her. I was going off of the recording, this is when I think I briefly came in, I dialed in from the airport. So I had very limited video to go on because not everything was recorded. And so I wasn’t actually sure, that’s why I didn’t know the name. But I can show you how I look at how I decide who to send to. So I’m using the new bookmarks feature. I actually have one for sending, in particular. These are all the sendings. There’s a tag now that I do. So like for example, I didn’t change any of my notes so I hope nothing comes up. But this is how I do it. So I have the sending tag, I have the name of the person and then what I actually sent. And that’s easy because then I can highlight it and I can see, “Hey look, it’s 25 words, which is the limit of the spell.” And then when I go into a particular NPC, I also later put down all of the sendings I’ve ever sent to them and their response back. So this particular NPC, I have apparently reluctantly sent him messages a few times. But I also have an agenda page. So I have some sendings planned already and I go down the list. And I also have, this is a Dataview query that it’s a Dataview JS query. And it’s all like random NPC. So there is an element of randomness ‘cause sometimes, these are the ones that I know I want to send to, but these are the ones that I’m like, “Huh, I wonder who Rolf is and what they’re doing today.”

ANDY: It’s annoying.

NICOLE: I have-

ANDY: It’s in a good way, it’s very funny.

NICOLE: Annoying in a good way. That’s me. I have a follow up list. These are the people that I like to talk to often that I’ve sent more than one sending to. They’re like important to my character or to the group or to the story. And I’m also using Supercharged Links by the way. That’s why all of these icons are there. So the rainbow is like a PC and the other one, which is like a vampire actually. It’s like an NPC. So that’s basically it. I have ideas of whom to send to. And they’re also based on the quests and questions that we’ve got. ‘Cause these are like, some of them are just for me, for my character and some of them are for the group. I don’t know. I find sometimes that I’m the one that’s like, other people in the group are like, “Hey, what are we doing here again?” I’m like, “Okay, this is what we’re doing.”

ANDY: Scura would definitely have glasses or something and be the one that goes, the one who’s the character who is most likely the brainy, one of the group who actually knows everything’s going on and pulls everyone else into line on that front.

NICOLE: Yeah, I actually rolled a journal for her in her starting items.

ANDY: That’s perfect. So that’s handy, A magical journal where you can interlink different pages.

NICOLE: I know. I actually purposely never play a character with low intelligence because of it. Because I don’t think it’s realistic. We have a question. Oh, by the way, there’s someone, Mariana Bergo, who said:

What a lovely collision of worlds. I follow Andy’s work on service design but had no idea he’s a D&D guy as well. That’s awesome.

ANDY: I have in mind to do some crossover stuff actually about this, about some of stuff I’ve learned from RPGs too and managing teams and design leadership and stuff and vice versa. So we’ll see if that emerges. So what’s the question?

NICOLE: Courtney Robertson says:

Does your group share notes? Curious if the group might use GitHub or some other means to sync?

Okay, so no. Well, I publish my notes and sometimes, I’ll post my notes especially if somebody was away that week or something. I’ll publish my notes. There’s another person who we got into Obsidian and he doesn’t publish it though. He will just often like export to PDF from Obsidian. And Andy of course, can’t share his notes with us.

Andy’s DM style

ANDY: Yeah, I think a couple of them actually, a couple of others too. So I think three out of the other four use Obsidian and what state their notes are in. So I have to say it’s incredibly handy for me. So as the DM, I really do make up quite a lot. I mean, I think people forget… It maybe just my style. So one of the things you would ask me, what am I like as a DM? I follow the Sly Flourish’s Lazy GM format. So I prep kind of… I think about it a lot. I caught myself this week actually thinking about some stuff like all week. And in fact, the session that we just had on Tuesday, there was a little bit of trolling I did to Nicole’s character that I-

NICOLE: A little.

ANDY: Had been thinking about the joke basically, and the setup of it and just crafting it all week. But then generally, I spend maybe an hour, two hours maybe. And in fact the one we’re about to have a look at, the session we’ll look at in a second, I spent probably a lot of time. Over a couple of weeks, I probably spent about four hours maybe prepping this, plus the map. But usually, I spend less than that. But then, I did that classic thing where I sometimes I prep very little and I’m terribly worried. And literally, so this group is an interesting group in that they’re violent pacifists. They’ll sort of avoid combat and then chop people in half. Once they get triggered, it goes violent. And they’re quite a suspicious group, so quite a suspicious party. So we’ve had sessions where it’s literally taken like half an hour in real time to decide to go through a doorway or something. And I think this isn’t unusual actually in other parties. So sometimes that happens and I think I prep all of this stuff and I think, “Oh God, I’m not prepped at all.” And literally we get through about 20% of it. And sometimes, we blast through it or they desire to do something else. And there of course, I have to improvise an awful lot. Should we have a look at some notes?

NICOLE: I take pleasure at that happening. I wanna ask you first, how many notes, yeah, how many notes do you think I have for this campaign?

ANDY: Oh, I don’t know. It’s gonna be 1,000. No, I don’t know, 800. I don’t know how many, like including other stuff or just the campaign itself?

NICOLE: Just the campaign. Not including pictures.

ANDY: 700.

NICOLE: Less actually.

ANDY: Oh, okay.

NICOLE: It is 486 notes.

ANDY: It’s still quite a lot.

NICOLE: It is but it’s 133,784 words.

ANDY: Wow. It’s telling me I’ve got, well, 1,915 files. But actually, the DM notes come up to 321. And here’s where all the Obsidian people fall off the 102 folders. So I might want to explain-

NICOLE: Oh God.

ANDY: -why that is. Oh God, you use folders? You heathen.

NICOLE: Heathen!

ANDY: So do you wanna have a look?

NICOLE: Do you know bookmarks can- Yeah, yeah. Do you wanna add it or do you want me to do that?

ANDY: No, I’ll do it. I’ll do the same. Bookmarks can what?

NICOLE: Bookmarks can actually on my version, bookmarks can bookmark a folder.

A tour of Andy’s DM vault

ANDY: I can do that too. I can do that too. Yeah, it does work.

I’m gonna show people around my vault a little bit. Not too much. And you’ll see I’ve got the episode title here and it says sanitized ‘cause there there was like two secrets that you’re not allowed to see.

DM reference resources

So I have a bunch of DM resources here. I have the raw reference here, the SRD plus other stuff I’ve added. I have this thing which I don’t really use anymore, which is called default tabs. So I used to use it quite a lot where I’d pull up some generators and cheat sheet and stuff. I don’t really use it anymore. And in fact, I think I’ve lost my DM screen, but I’ll put it back up there. I have a DM screen, which is set up as a list. I used to have it as a Kanban, but I prefer it in a list ‘cause I can just sneak it in in that left-hand column. So I have two keyboard hotkeys set up, which is to hide the two sides and I use them all the time both in work and also DMing. So this is quite handy.

And the other thing plugin I use a lot is the hover one. So I’m really quite often doing this thing where I’m just checking something here. And so, that’s how I’m doing that. So back to this.

Random tables

So I have a bunch of random raw tables. I don’t use these so much. The one I use a lot is the NPC. So I have a big random roller, which is like, pulls from a lot of stuff. It’s got a button at the top and it’s pulling from a bunch of lists. I think some of these will break, but it’s also got things like sort of encounter some of these encounter roll tables and stuff that I’ve got around in my vault. So if I just go, I’m going to… So I re-roll that. And I can quickly find an NPC and a name. Something’s a bit weird I think with the name there actually now it’s pulling, it should be first name, second name. And they’ve got some stuff here and I sometimes re-roll that bit. Always drinking over by under. Sometimes, that’s handy. And occasionally, if you’re wandering around, you will meet some of this stuff. Probably less so. I sometimes might use it when I’m writing bits of an encounter or I might trust, okay, travelers on the road do they meet someone or a roadside encounter. But I actually don’t use this as much as I thought I would.

What I probably use most are things like these things which are iframes. So there’s a website called RPG Heroes. I use this all the time. So when you go, “So do I see anyone to ask directions?” And I’m like, “Oh yeah.” And then I go, “Yes, there’s a guy with a long beard and a cloak and stuff.” ‘Cause I like the visual. And I quite often ignore the rest of it, but sometimes, it’s quite useful. This one is useful for stat blocks. It generates stat blocks as well. So RPG Tinker is good and there’s a bestiary version of it too. And sometimes, use Tetra Cube one, but I mostly use those or I have quick name lists as well.

So in game, that’s what I’m doing. All the other stuff is mostly for adventure writing if I’m doing stuff. And there’s more of that in there. Now I’m seeing amount of PDFs and stuff in here.

I have some charts and tables like price list I use quite often. We’ve just had a couple of shopping episodes. I have a price list encyclopedia here and when someone goes, “Oh, I wanna go and buy a crossbow.” And I’m like, “Crossbow. Oh yeah, yeah, well that’s gonna cost you.” Let’s just go through hand crossbow, that’s 75 gold. So I’m not spending ages searching around in stuff for this.

So that’s most of the stuff I’m using in game. And there’s obviously sort of monsters and stuff like that. I have them in folders partly because this existed before Obsidian and I like to have my stuff in folders on the desktop. So when I don’t have Obsidian handy or maybe one day might use something else whatever, the stuff is organized. I don’t want to become so dependent on say on Dataview that I can’t use all the stuff in my folders or tags for that matter. I do actually just started tagging stuff on macOS in Finder.

DM notes

My actual DM notes are in Wildemounts - Tuesday Wildemount DM notes. I didn’t change that ‘cause this is like ripple across so many links. So I’ve got a previous sessions note and I have a current one, and I make a folder. And the reason why I have it in folder instead of just a note is ‘cause sometimes, I have sub bits of a plot arc. And particularly, if I’m borrowing bits from an existing adventure like a published adventure, I’ll have them in here and the bits of that are actually in that session’s folder.

And I do it as separate notes because then, what I can do is if we don’t get through it all, I can just move the bits that we haven’t got through into the next problem. So that’s why I do that. So that’s my current session always.

I do have a previous session lister. So this is a Dataview query that is doing that. And I can go through an hour, in fact hour, and sometimes I have a few other bits and pieces. I have some scratch stuff so you’re not seeing this but these are sort of things I’m thinking of that might come up. They end up sort of in there. So I have adventures, I’ve got some different quests. I’ve got some extra lore stuff in here. I’ve got some specific images to this world and items and stuff. And then I have locations.

Location dashboard

In every location, so we are gonna have a look at a place named Shadycreek Run. Every location has its folder, there’s some hooks, plot hooks in there, there are locations in there, there are maps and there are NPCs. And that’s how I structure it. And then I usually have a dashboard. So this one here is the Shadycreek dashboard I’ve actually gotta open up here.

And that is a bunch of… That’s a map using the leaflet plugin. I have a bunch of Dataview things that are pulling stuff out that’s tagged as locations, NPCs and so forth. And back to my point that I don’t wanna become so dependent on Dataview that I can’t live without it, that’s what the folders are for, right?

Stuff in here is tagged. And so if I didn’t have Obsidian, if I didn’t have Dataview, I can still go and find all those NPCs and stuff ‘cause they’re in that folder and I’m not having to hunt around amongst locations and other stuff as well. So that’s why I do it. But the dashboard is super handy. It’s particularly handy for when they go, “I wanna go and go to the blacksmith.” And I’m like, “Hang on a second, I have that table.”

NICOLE: We haven’t gone to most of these!

ANDY: Yeah, yeah, we have. So then I’m like, “Oh yeah, blacksmith. Oh I want to go to a shop.” And I think with this one here, so I’ll often just gonna pull up there. I don’t know why that’s looping. It’s into like some ridiculous nested thing there.

So the Jezean Emporium for example, they went there. I pretty much, that’s very weird. That’s doing that. What have I got down going on there that is making that nest? I think that’s a weird artifact. I don’t know why, maybe it’s this. What this is here, this blank thing, I still haven’t come up with an image for the NPC who’s here. I’m pretty sure I decided that he was a taxidermist like, on the spot. So you went-

NICOLE: Really?

ANDY: Yeah, yeah. And then I decided he was this known taxidermist and I thought it was funny to have this taxidermist that was this little gnome. And he was in the middle of pretty disgustingly actually stuffing a worg and preserving a worg, which was this big creature. So I had this idea, it was like sort of getting inside. And he was-

NICOLE: I thought that was intentional.

ANDY: No, no. And then as I was doing it I was thinking, “Oh, this is quite good because one of the characters, this guy, Ionos Jagentoth, I had him collecting these sort of exotic monsters and stuff and keeping them in a dungeon menagerie. So he’s got this dungeon or he had this dungeon, we’ll come to that in a minute. That was full of these different creatures.

‘Cause I was looking through Kobold Press’s Tome of Beasts and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be really great to have just a whole load of monsters of different kinds in one place in a dungeon or in an area, they’re in cages and there’s a bunch of switches on the walls and the players don’t really know what the switches do.” And so I had a random roll table for the switches and I was rolling to see what they did. I can’t remember if I got you to roll. I think I’ve got you to roll. Which what the switch did. So sometimes, it like it opened one cage but there was a couple of switches that opened everything and it would’ve probably been-

NICOLE: Oh God we would’ve died.

ANDY: All the creatures come out. And I thought it was really nice and funny. I thought it was funny most of the time, I’m trying to think of stuff that was funny idea to have all these different creatures.

And they might start fighting each other and stuff as well ‘cause they were creatures that definitely probably would just like feed off of each other and things in the midst of this sort of chaos. Plus you had a fairly major boss character turn up at the same time. So that was the idea behind this. And anyway, so Kimbal Jezean who was the… And I am pretty sure the source for this by the way, was the very good Exandria Discord. It’s a very good community online.

NICOLE: Wait a minute, his potion prices are plus 10%, what?!

ANDY: Yeah, his prices, well because you are in– so Shadycreek Run, for those of you who don’t know, is like the Mos Eisley of Wildemount. It is a dodgy sort of outpost outside of the main empire. And so yeah, so there is a premium on the prices. right?

So I had some potions for sale here, which you may or may not have got. Burned down, thanks to Halkin. So one of our players, his character got petrified, he’s a wizard and so he rolled another character, which is a barbarian dragonborn. And who followed these sort earth goddess called Melora. Anyway, seeing these stuffed animals, he was incensed and basically paid someone to burn it down. There was a lot of that going on in this particular thing.

So anyway, the main thing that I wanna say about him is that a lot of the stuff about him being a taxidermist and well I just sort of thought, “Oh, that’d be funny.” And then I thought, “Oh maybe he’s delivering creatures, either live creatures or stuffed versions of it as trophies to the Jagentoths.” And I thought that might be a good connection.

And then I just came up with his character and his voice, which I’m not gonna do right now immediately.

NICOLE: But that was the best part about him.

ANDY: Let’s go like this. Oh hang, on a minute. I’ve just gotta go and get this slime off of my hands.

NICOLE: Oh it was perfect. Did you do that just on the spot?

ANDY: I did do that on the spot, yeah. And I regretted it ‘cause I-

NICOLE: Oh wow.

ANDY: After about five minutes of talking I was like. So that was it. So that’s how I then reuse something like that dashboard and the NPCs that are in it ‘cause when Nicole as Scura goes, “Oh I’m just gonna send sending to this person.” I’m like, “Yeah, who’s that again?”

Nicole’s note on Shadycreek Run

NICOLE: I wonder if I should show my Shadycreek dashboard.

ANDY: Well do you wanna show, yeah, maybe let’s switch ‘cause there’s more I can show you. ‘Cause I’d like to show you the Jagentoth compound.

NICOLE: Ooh, we’re switching.

ANDY: But you go to yours first and see where you got to.

NICOLE: Okay, so this is my note on Shadycreek Run. I also have the Leaflet thing. I think you gave us this. And then the places that we have been to are already marked on there. So when I click on them, it goes to the note. I do also have Dataview queries. These are the locations that aren’t shops. I have factions because a big part of Shadycreek Run is that it’s ruled by these families. And so I have notes on each of them like, here’s the Jagentoth family. People that they’ve killed, businesses. I even have like a little diagram of their family tree.

ANDY: It’s more than I have, I can tell you.

NICOLE: I think I asked you and you’re like, “Uh, yeah, Reese. Reese is his name.”

ANDY: Yeah, I don’t know what I thought. No, I think some of them are in the book.

NICOLE: Oh, okay. And then also I have Dataview query that lists everybody that’s on there. So every NPC I put their family if it’s relevant as a faction as well. And then some of these have skulls, that’s ‘cause we killed them.

ANDY: Yeah, quite a lot of them.

NICOLE: Yeah, so here are all my NPCs from Shadycreek Run. Some of them are dead. And I have a little description of them. I mean, sometimes it’s really like, Sybastien: doesn’t like Wally. Sometimes, it’s very vague. And then here are the shops in Shadycreek, ‘cause that’s like a separate thing. Kimbal said I might get calming tea here which I did actually. And then I have sessions. So I think there was one point when we were like, “Oh, when was that? What session was it that we were last here?” I’m like, “Oh it was on 37 or whatever.” But my numbering is different from Andy’s by the way, just because I came in like after 17 sessions. So I’m 17 sessions behind. So that’s my Shadycreek Run one.

ANDY: Next week with session 83. So it’s been going for two years. Actually just around this time, I think April, it was the session zero.

NICOLE: Yeah. So should we go into a particular session that you-

ANDY: Let’s do that. Yeah, let’s do that.

NICOLE: Okay, well… Let me ask first though.

Background for the session Andy chose to show

NICOLE: Why did you really choose this session and why was it to troll me?

ANDY: Okay. So I did not deliberately troll you. So there was a significant event with an NPC from Scura’s backstory in this episode. And I actually thought it had happened in the previous episode, session.

NICOLE: Still not convinced.

ANDY: And I chose this one because it was one that I had prepped sort of quite a lot for it. It’s got some, I think some maybe some interesting prep stuff in it in terms of the way I went about structuring it. And it was interesting on because there was some extra bits that I did, which I then have probably then carried on and we’ll probably continue in the future because it was quite complex. There were a lot of NPCs. So the session is, they go to this place they’re called Jagentoths, they go to their compound, it’s this house set in the forest surrounded by the perimeter fence. And there’s an NPC called, sorry, there’s an NPC called Floyd. And I’ll explain why I’m laughing in a second. His name’s Floyd Hemsworth.

And one of the other characters-

NICOLE: Crownsguard Douche.

ANDY: -Milla, had a dalliance with him. Crownsguard Douche, as you’ve christened him.

And there was reverse damseling. So basically they had to go and rescue him. He had been captured by this boss guy.

And so you’ve got the NPCs, a lot of NPCs cause there’s guards and there’s all the other characters that have been, they’re also in it. And this is a thing we talked about in session zero. There are some slaves in this that these are nasty people. So I really wanted to go, this is one of those things where I’m not going to have slavery, like the characters have the main party, have slaves, for fun and stuff. But these are bad people.

So bad that in fact the party decided to burn their whole place down and kill them all and rescue the slaves. So you’ve got the slaves, you’ve got the family, you’ve got all the guards, plus you’ve got this basement, this dungeon menagerie in the basement with all these different creatures.

So there’s quite a lot going on and it could have gone in a lot of different directions for me as a DM. So that’s one of the reasons why I prepped it. Fairly often, I don’t do that much prep.

Fairly often, I’ve got maybe three or four scenes, very bare bones sketched out what’s gonna happen. If there’s any encounter stuff, I’ll have a sort of encounter set up and that’s about it. And then kind of, I don’t know, I think I’m fairly good at winging it. I think quite often, I said I feel so unprepared and you guys don’t think so.

What was entertaining about this one is I was really prepared and I expected you to do a sort of heist thing and sneak in to the house, rescue, explore the house. I had all these kind of, I’m gonna show you. Let me put up my thing and I’ll show you.

Andy’s session prep

ANDY: So in the house. Here’s the session, So the session starts with, I have just have a reminder calendar links back to the Wildemount, I can never remember the names of the week and stuff. So we do a little bit of a thing. There’s an eclipse coming up. I don’t use this that much, but it just reminds me to, in fact, this is an old Owlbear link. I don’t even use that anymore. I use Owlbear-

NICOLE: Actually Andy.

ANDY: The new one.

NICOLE: I remember in the first session ‘cause I went back to the first session we played, that played with you and you weren’t using calendars, no one had asked about the time.

ANDY: No, that’s right. That’s one of the things that now, we do have a calendar actually. So now we have the Fantasy Calendar plugin. Thank you, Jeremy. And as you can see, our game moves pretty slowly. There’s like five sessions in the space that have happened in the game day.

NICOLE: I think we started in Quen’pillar though, didn’t we?

ANDY: Yeah, I think you did. But I don’t remember. I don’t think I started adding to the calendar until more recently. So in this, I’ve made myself a little note to remind about the X or fast forward cards session zero thing. Because of the slavery thing and because one of the guys is the main guy, the main bad is a torturer. I wanted to just remind people if this is something they don’t want, they can skip. So then there’s a recap and then I have a few DM notes. So these are basically things I mustn’t forget to open or I know that I’m going to wanna go back and have a look at. I usually list all the NPCs out and this is all done manually.

NICOLE: Who is Phespo?

ANDY: Yeah, who’s Phespo? That’s a very good point. Oh, that’s the Medusa. You didn’t know? Did you not know her name? Her name is Phespo.

NICOLE: No.

ANDY: So there was a character, there was a Medusa that they faced a couple of sessions before this. And so that’s why she’s there. Just in case I have to go back and remember some of that. And then the rescue’s on. So there’s the Jagentoth. I called them Jagentoth, it’s probably Jagentoth but I live in Germany and for me the Js– Jagen is to hunt

NICOLE: Yeah, it should be Jagentoth, yeah.

ANDY: And so I’ve got these two people, I’ve got one note here. That’s the scene basically. They’re gonna dine around 8 PM. So that’s what I had in mind. They’re in the dining room at this point in time. You didn’t know this, did you?

NICOLE: No, I very nearly poisoned them. I had the midnight tears, ugh.

ANDY: Yeah, let me go to the compound because in the compound, I think I’ve got a map or have I? Haven’t got a map wherever I put it. I haven’t got a map. Somewhere, I’ve got a map. So what I’ve done here on the left-hand side, you can see I’ve broken out all of the rooms in the compound. So I’m sure I’d got… I thought I’ve got.

NICOLE: Wow, this is a lot.

ANDY: This is a lot, yeah. And so I had built this room, I built this mansion in Dungeon Alchemist.

NICOLE: Dungeon Alchemist.

ANDY: And what’s it called? What’d you say? It’s called Dungeon Alchemist.

NICOLE: Dungeon Alchemist.

ANDY: Yeah, yeah. And I’d furnished it all and all of these rooms have some thought behind it. There’s a little tree and there’s a kitchen here. And here is-

NICOLE: We didn’t see it all.

ANDY: No you didn’t. So here is the bedroom, the bedroom has a door to this study. The study has a secret passage, a secret bookshelf door into this secret study with a safe. And then here at the end of this corridor is a secret passageway down into the dungeon. And over here is the slave hut. This is a secret passageway down into the dungeon too. And this was the guardhouse, which you never got to see inside. Because…

NICOLE: ‘Cause we just burned it.

ANDY: Because you decided to burn the place down. So they-

NICOLE: We used an immovable rod.

ANDY: Yeah, yeah. So they used an invisible rod to block the guardhouse door. They put sort of casks of gunpowder, which they had got illegally elsewhere. You blew up the latrine was the first thing. And then you basically ended up setting fire to the house. So that was quite an interesting thing for me in the sense that, okay, so all that stuff I prepared, they’re not gonna see ‘cause they just burnt it down. And all those secrets and all that loot and things like that, that were quite important.

NICOLE: Oh no. There was loot??

ANDY: They’re gonna see. There’s loads of secrets and stuff in there that I had to relocate.

NICOLE: Oh no.

ANDY: So then what happened was quite an interesting mechanic for me though, ‘cause they had actually started that in the previous session. I then thought, “Okay, what would be going on?”

So all the guards are obviously some people are trying to put out the fires. A lot of people are gonna trying to be rescuing stuff from the house. So what was happening is that all these people are kind of pulling stuff out of the house and they’re putting onto the lawn and things like that. It’s kind like people do when there’s a bushfire or something trying to rescue the stuff.

But meanwhile down in the dungeon menagerie. Let me open that. What you guys ended up doing was I had, so there were these… For reasons I won’t go into, all the slaves were tieflings. And there was one of them.

So I had some stuff in here, which is my sort of read aloud thing. Oh, I think I’ve got a read aloud callout here and I use that so I can just flip that up. And then what I do is I use embed, so transcludes. So I have all the different bits here and then I can transclude them. That’s why I find this quite useful to split them into separate notes. Because then I can adjust the structure and things of what I’m gonna be doing in that session. ‘Cause you spent like two or three sessions around this compound. And so I can adjust it, I can embed a note in the scene like I did here and I go, “Okay, so the slave house so this is gonna be this thing.” And then the dungeon menagerie and then I’ve got some stuff around here.

So I have the dungeon menagerie. I’ve got Ionos and Ilbane, who was the big bad in this. I pulled a stat block from LevelUp, actually, 5e. Because it was more interesting.

NICOLE: Is this just an image?

ANDY: This is just an image. Yeah, I think I’ve just clipped a stat block. Out of LevelUp. And sometimes, you use the statblocks plugin and sometimes, it’s just easier to grab an image.

NICOLE: Yeah, I get that.

ANDY: Yeah. And in this one for the dungeon menagerie, I actually like an idiot.

NICOLE: Ooh, ooh, looking at all the secrets.

ANDY: It wasn’t like an- And there’s a secrets and clues things at the end. And I think you know all of these but you know all of these. So I have secrets and clues. So when they found this stuff I go, “Okay, right. They found that.” These will been reset I think because I can’t remember why. Probably made a new sanitized version of it.

So then I have the encounter. So this is using the encounter plugin. So when this is going on, it fires up the encounter there and I work it that way. But the dungeon menagerie was a real issue ‘cause I thought, “Oh my god. And there’s so many people in this place, how am I gonna manage it?”

So I had for the first time ever did an adversary roster. So if anyone knows the Alexandrian, Justin Alexander, he recommends this. It was quite an old school D&D thing to do. And the adversary roster looks like this. It’s just a little markdown table, it’s got links to some people. And it was just so I can remember, these are all the different people around in the house. And I have an idea of where they are, but they can move around.

NICOLE: Did you plan that one of them had a birthday?

ANDY: So I had this idea. I wanted the guards. I didn’t want the guards to dominate everything that you were gonna be fighting multiple guards for ages. And you’d gone there, you’d scoped it out during the day and then you’d gone there in the evening.

So I thought would it be fun for the guards to be in the guard house getting drunk and being loud. And then, I think in the moment, I thought you hear that one of them’s singing “Happy Birthday.” And it was particularly poetic because that one then came out and got axed, I think by Halkin. It’s like, “You just killed the guy whose birthday it was.”

And I quite like messing with them that way. I remember there was one thug and you found a note. I think, I can’t remember if you were playing for this point.

NICOLE: Many, many ways you like to mess with us.

ANDY: So they killed two random thugs who were guarding a place. And then of course, when they searched the bodies, I had a thing where one of them had a note in their pocket from his estranged wife saying, “Please come home. Your daughter misses you. Please give up this way of life” and stuff. And they’re all like, “Oh no, we just killed this henchman, but they had a life and stuff.” So I apologize.

NICOLE: How cruel is that? What a sadistic, okay, I change my answer. You’re a sadistic DM.

ANDY: My job is to mess with you as well.

So anyway, adversary roster and then I had an encounter table. So using the encounter plugin such as separate, it’s in a separate thing as well, a separate transclude, there’s an encounter table so that depending on where you went, I could fire up a, a different set of encounters. So if you were gonna fight the house guards and the captain, I can fire up that one and so on.

And this was the dungeon menagerie. So I just had this set up like all the creatures are in here and then I would just skip them in the initiative if depending on who was there. You would’ve probably struggled if they’d all escaped in one go.

But as it happened, you set fire to the house and missed out quite a lot of, all that prep, all these bedrooms and everything that I created, you guys just completely missed out ‘cause they turned to ash.

NICOLE: There was an ettercap?

ANDY: Yeah, there was an ettercap in the dungeon menagerie. So we play, we use Owlbear Rodeo. So this was loaded into our Owlbear Rodeo and yeah, there was the one that was the ether cap was, there was one cage you might remember that was full of spiderwebs and cobwebs. That was the…

NICOLE: Cool.

ANDY: And then I guess the last thing you were, Floyd… So the joke was that this Domovoi was Floyd. Ah, so Floyd, he was just a Crownsguard. He was just a guard on a gate. And I thought it would be funny if there was like a really good looking guy and a young doofus who was as a comedic pair.

And then I said, “Oh, this guy’s, his name’s…” I thought of Pink Floyd or something, his name’s Floyd. And when you ask him directions and that’s how it started. And then I said, “He’s really good looking. He looks like Chris Hemsworth.” And so that’s how he became Floyd Hemsworth. And then-

NICOLE: Oh, I didn’t know that.

ANDY: You asked him to come with you. Yeah, the party asked him to come with you. He started flirting with one of the characters who then was flirting, well, she was flirting with him. And then he had all sorts of thoughts about, he became, then I had to build a whole backstory and family and stuff and connections for him. But it was one of the examples of a randomly invented NPC became actually quite important.

So anyway, the way the setup was he was in here and the Domovoi had made him invisible but had made himself look like Floyd and was in here. So the idea was that I was gonna lure a character into the cage, get the cage closed, there was gonna be a little cage fight inside here except what happened?

What happened, Scura? Tell us.

NICOLE: I foiled your plans.

ANDY: Milla. It was Milla that foiled the plans actually. Two of you, both of you, between the two of you.

NICOLE: I cast the see invisibility, yeah.

ANDY: So you cast see invisibility and Milla cast Detect Thoughts. And so basically between the two of them, they could work out who was in which cage. So that didn’t work. Anyway. So that was my setup for all of that. That’s probably as much as I need to carry on going on about, it’s been quite a long time, but it was quite complex. And then got foiled by the players.

Nicole’s session notes

NICOLE: Good. I can show you mine for the same one.

ANDY: Okay. And if anyone has any questions, please fire away.

NICOLE: Okay, so this is the same session. I always like to have like a Midjourney thing that I do just so that in the worldview, in the world note, it’s just nice to have cards and each session has like an image of what it looks like. Sometimes it’s not quite right, but it’s enough to remind me of the session.

And oh, that’s our video of it actually happening. Oh, so we have a player-only chat where we scheme against Andy.

ANDY: I didn’t know about this.

NICOLE: And plan to mess with him almost as much as he plans to mess with us. So there were, at the time, Tyler, who plays Wally, he was away. So sometimes, I put things like instructions for Wally and he had this weapon. He told me when to use it and what the abilities were. And then I like to use these little call outs sometimes to mark what I know and what I don’t know or what other players don’t know.

Sometimes, I put things in comments so that if somebody goes into my Obsidian published notes, one of the other players, they won’t immediately see some things there. So it’s the same thing, right?

So here I cast see invisibility as we were going down into the dungeon. And then I also use Initiative Tracker.

I mean, I’m a healer. So part of the reason I love being a healer is that I always love keeping track of where everyone is. So this is what it looks like. I happen to have taken a screenshot of the end of this session. So this is what it looks like. I have everyone’s HP, I’m going through this using the initiative tracker and I have these custom statuses. So I track things like, if our barbarian has used reckless this round, then I know that he’s gonna need a little bit more help ‘cause he is probably gonna get hit.

And if I have temporary hit points that I’m giving to people, I would track that here as well. Even things like if people have reacted or not, ‘cause that affects whether my party can leave the threat range. And what I noticed though, you use the initiative tracker, but you don’t use the log, do you?

ANDY: Yes, sometimes. I do turn it on and off. I do use the log but once I, something crashed or something and I couldn’t remember everyone’s, the initiative order. What I don’t do is I don’t really log everyone’s hit points. I let you guys decide. I let you keep track of your character. Obviously, I’m keeping track of your opponents, but I’m not keeping track of your hit points. Obviously, I’m seeing it.

NICOLE: That’s fair enough.

ANDY: We still have our character sheets on D&D Beyond, so I’m usually checking where you’re at on D&D Beyond in the phone app.

NICOLE: Yeah, so I do that mainly in Obsidian because I need to know who needs healing and I always turn the log on, and this log is like an optional thing for Initiative Tracker, which is the same one that Andy uses. So I have a bunch of them here. There’s a separate Folder for log and those are the combats. And then I embed that combat into the session note so that way, it gets updated here. And then while I’m going through the rounds, I also just type in some explanation because otherwise, it’s just things like, “Grom took three damage.” And it doesn’t say, Oh that was because of Divine Smite. So I also track it along the way. And it’s just also handy I think if Andy, your initiative tracker stuffs up or something or you lose it, I can say like, “No, we’re in round three” or whatever.

ANDY: Yeah, it is super handy. I think one of this is one of the differences between being the DM and being a player also is that as a DM, I’m just flat out like in a combat thing, but there’s like lots of creatures and people going on. I’m flat out concentrating on like everything. Whereas there’s a player, you’ve got the space between your turn and the next time it comes round to-

NICOLE: We’re much more immersed.

ANDY: Yeah, yeah. Well, you are much more immersed, but also you have time. You have time to write notes.

NICOLE: Yeah, true.

ANDY: I barely write any notes when I’m DMing by the way. I probably should. I know loads of people who also don’t, I occasionally will write some at the end of the session if like, “Oh, I must remember that that’s happened.” I like Scura gave her two daggers to one of the NPCs, so I wrote that down.

NICOLE: Everything. I gave everything.

ANDY: I forget everything. I’m very reliant on note-taking players.

NICOLE: Yeah, so mine was basically the combat after that. And here, I’m tracking whether somebody has used my Guiding Bolt advantage on attacks and things like that.

And at the time, I was also playing two players because one of the other, two characters, because one of the other players was gone. So this is like where I put the next moves for both of them. And then at the end, I had a little note to tell him because I don’t have access to his character sheet.

But I was thinking that maybe I could also show how I create a new session because this is the world page and I have this nice little add new session button and when I click it, look, everything’s filled in for me.

I guess I haven’t processed the last one yet, The Leaky Cucumber. But it creates- It creates the session already. So yeah, I use funny titles as well. So this is where it is at the end of the session, I would put like a summary here so that when I generate the next one that’s pulled in, so this is the recap.

So often, I do the recap. Sometimes I try to get one of the other players to do it, to encourage them as well. But it’s just nice to have everything filled in. And this is also pulling in the date. I set today’s date on Fantasy Calendar so that it always chooses today’s date. My character is a Twilight Cleric and a Stars Druid, so moons matter. So I do have that as well. Let’s just show, oh, by the way, our party’s name is Temporary White Circle, and now you didn’t notice, Andy. Do you see there?

ANDY: Oh yeah, I see the logo. Yeah, yeah, that’s what we’ve got on here, TWC.

NICOLE: Yeah. So there, you can also see the moons, Catha and Ruidus. Isn’t that cool?

ANDY: So you are way more organized in terms of the automation than I am. I generally start by duplicating the previous session’s note and because of the stuff in there, there’s some secrets and clues still that they haven’t discovered and I sort of delete stuff out and then go back in. So my metadata is all manually done. I should probably try and automate some of that.

NICOLE: Yeah, I can just give it to you.

ANDY: Yeah, but then all the rest of the stuff doesn’t work and I just don’t have the inclination to go back through every session note though and add it all back in, so.

NICOLE: Octavian Datcu says:

“Nicole, how do you color tags without any tags surrounding it?”

I’m not sure what you mean exactly. Let me share my screen.

ANDY: It could be the theme. Is it the?

NICOLE: You mean, does Octavian mean like the italics and stuff? Because yeah, this is the Anuppuccin theme where you can have the text decorations a different color. So that’s handy. For example, if I just put something here, it’s automatically green because it’s italic. And then this one would be automatically red ‘cause it’s bold. I love Anuppuccin.

How has me taking notes changed the way Andy GMs?

NICOLE: Andy. Do you think that it’s changed anything about the way that you GM that we take notes, and I take notes, so much?

ANDY: I don’t know because this was the first big campaign. I’d played some small stuff with my family. But it’s the first big campaign that I’ve done since I was a kid. And so, I guess you came in, I mean, couple of the other players did take notes, but probably, you take obviously more extreme notes.

What has it changed? I don’t think it changes much. I mean, it’s just really useful for me. ‘Cause I know that I’ve like, “Oh God, I didn’t make a note of what happened here or who’s got what,” and things like that especially when you’re dividing up loot and things like that. And I know that one of you has made a note, so I’ll often ask for your notes or go and have a look at them and that’s pretty useful.

It’s probably, I think, we’ve joking about the sending stuff before. I don’t know what it’s like for you as a player. I mean, I get the feeling that it sort of makes the world a bit more alive because NPCs, they’re not just like, “Oh yeah, we spoke to that person and we recorded that one and then we moved on and we’ve forgotten all about them.” It means that they sort of come back into the world a bit and I think that maybe makes the world feel more alive maybe to you as players.

NICOLE: Yeah, I mean part of it is me just wanting to mess with you, but also some of these things are actually for a greater purpose. Most of them are not completely random. I am actually trying to do a background check or whatever.

And yeah, I am very engaged in the world. And there have been a few times where I would’ve gone further if I didn’t think I was taking up too much time already. I would’ve, like, engaged with an NPC a bit more.

Taking notes on other PCs

NICOLE: I don’t know, maybe I’ll also show my notes on the PCs. So this is one of them. Yeah, I’m hoping that they won’t watch till this part.

So this is the one for Milla, there’s a picture of her, there’s a backstory that I’ve pieced together from things that she’s told me in the game. I do something called an OGAS framework. Occupation, goal, attitudes, stake. So I’m just… I’m thinking of what her goals are because I think my character is very supportive and she wants her fellow party to achieve their goals. So I have to know them first. So I take notes on everybody. So I also have ideals, bonds, and flaws, not the actual ones that she has. So I don’t see that, but just, I’m guessing. I’m guessing based on what she said. And then I also have a section for knives.

Andy, can you explain knife theory?

ANDY: Oh, we didn’t talk about that, yeah.

So knife theory is the thing, and there’s a Reddit post. So if you Google like Reddit knife theory D&D or something, you’ll find it.

So knife theory is this idea that what you do when you create a player, when you create a character as a player, you give a bunch of knives in there that the DM can use basically to stab you with later.

Which is, there are some things like, I did this thing and I’m trying to escape from it or so I have this adversary or I have this ally, or I have this particular weakness, or I have this thing in my past.

And the more knives there are, the more useful it is for me. The more I can as a DM and the more I can integrate you into the world or integrate the story with their backstories.

And a lot of stuff comes up fairly randomly as I talked about Floyd Hemsworth. And he is, like I said, he’s just a random NPC. And then it forced me, if I go here.

ANDY: Actually, for this session, the dungeon menagerie one, I put all the stat blocks on a canvas. And it was really crawling on the day of the session, so I stopped using it, but it would now actually be quite useful. So I could just quickly grab the stat block.

So here’s Floyd. I found a picture of Chris Hemsworth, I don’t know what you know, what this is from here. He is dressed up and he looked a bit like.

NICOLE: Well, so he really is just a basic guard.

ANDY: Yeah, well he’s a captain now. Well, he’s more than the captain now anyway. And super handsome Crownsguard.

NICOLE: Super handsome!

ANDY: And then there’s a backstory for him. I came up with a kind of, his father’s a general and all this stuff. And they ended up being quite a scene with me talking to myself, like him talking to his father, NPC to NPC about it. And so it was quite of, I was able to connect him to a couple of the other characters’ backstories in interesting ways.

So one of the characters, Wally, I thought, well, like I said, Wally’s character is actually, his father’s also in the military. So I thought, “Oh, this would be interesting that they know each other and stuff.” You have to be a little bit careful because you can also end up with a thing like of too many coincidences. But it helps and I’d really like the knife thing. And then, occasionally, there are actual player things that I know like things that I then just use to mess with them.

NICOLE: Yeah, I like that stuff. But I also keep notes on knives for the other players and that’s what I like– my character likes to do Zone of Truth, which is basically just us telling– me, me asking questions to the group-

ANDY: It’s spin the bottle.

NICOLE: -to the characters. Pretty much, yeah. And those questions come from some knives that I’ve identified, like things that they react to in a positive or negative way.

And I also actually have a section where. So here, the knives are things that the tiefling likes and doesn’t like. And then I always have a section of how I can help them for every PC. What are the things that my character, Scura, could do. And then I have this section, which is all of the questions that I ask in Zone of Truth. I also have stuff for playing the tiefling in case she’s away.

ANDY: The tiefling.

NICOLE: Yeah, I have them. Yeah, I guess she’s not THE tiefling anymore, but yeah. They’re my notes.

ANDY: I sometimes– I have a cheat sheet. I found a cheat sheet for Scura actually from a session ‘cause I think that was the one where you were away, you were like getting on a plane or something, so I had a little cheat sheet.

NICOLE: Yeah. Well we should probably end this ‘cause we’re over time. There’s so much that I would’ve wanted to ask you, but probably for my own edification.

ANDY: You can ask one more.

NICOLE: Maybe I’ll ask you offline. Okay. What should I ask? Oh, no.

ANDY: Roll dice.

Taking notes on the players

NICOLE: Okay, okay, I know. Because the kind of GMing that you do, it is very specific to us as the players. I don’t know, at least that’s what I feel. It’s our characters and it’s what we’ve given you in our backstory as knives. But the more that you know us, the more that you also know our knives as players. So do you take notes on us as well as our characters? Do you just remember that?

ANDY: Only up here. Yeah, I don’t write notes really about you as people. No, no, not as players. Some things come up during the week or something and I’ll think of something I thought that would be funny to mess with the player. I can do this to their character to mess with the player and I do that, but I don’t have notes. I mean, I do have notes from session zero about you and stuff like that. And that’s mostly around so I can remember what you said you did and didn’t want and things like that. But otherwise no. I don’t take notes. Not like you.

NICOLE: Wow. You just have space in your mind for all sorts of devious things then.

ANDY: Well, lots of improv.

NICOLE: Yeah, no, it’s really well done. It means a lot to me to have a safe space to play a game and to like truly try out things that I wouldn’t do in real life.

ANDY: That’s good. I’m glad that it feels that way. That’s the aim.

NICOLE: All right, let’s close this so that I can ask you the real questions afterwards. Thanks for coming on to the channel again for the second time.

ANDY: Thanks for having me.

NICOLE: Maybe we’ll have you on for a third. You’re always welcome.

ANDY: Okay. Take care.

NICOLE: Thank you, everyone for listening and I’ll see you next week. Bye.

ANDY: Bye.

The Future of Obsidian with CEO Stephan Ango and Andy Polaine

Sun, 12 Mar 2023 00:27:40 +0100

What is the future of Obsidian? The new Obsidian CEO, Stephan Ango (@kepano), talks about why he joined the Obsidian team and what he wants to do next. I’m Nicole van der Hoeven, and today I’m joined by my friend, Andy Polaine, to find out what’s on the horizon for our favourite note-taking app.

Key takeaways

10 notable points raised in the video were:

Stephan thinks the proliferation of tools for thought is a positive thing, in that every new tool that uses Markdown makes the standard more futureproof.
Obsidian’s three major pillars are extensibility, privacy, and longevity. Those are things Obsidian excels at.
The things Obsidian is bad at are the consequences of those three major pillars (such as fragmentation, difficulty in sharing, and being restricted to Markdown).
The Obsidian team consists of five full-time people, including founders Licat (Shida, dev) and Silver (Erica, product), Liam (dev of Calendar plugin), and Joethei (plugin reviews and dev ecosystem).
Upcoming features: better metadata format than YAML (think something like Dataview inline fields), better querying of tasks
Stephan wants to keep the Obsidian team small, and grow only when absolutely necessary.
It’s difficult to get exact usage figures for Obsidian, but going by downloads of the app bundle, there are about 1 million users.
The Obsidian team doesn’t want to bring on venture capital investors.
Better sharing in Obsidian is something they’re thinking about, but they need to prioritize use cases.
Artificial intelligence in Obsidian is likely to remain in the realm of community plugins for now.

Below is a transcript of the video.

Introductions: Nicole van der Hoeven, Stephan Ango, Andy Polaine

Nicole: Hello, everyone. I’m Nicole van der Hoeven, and today I’m joined by two special guests. And I’d like to introduce first, I guess, Stephan Ango, or you might know him better as Kepano.

Stephan: Hey, Nicole. Thank you for having me.

Nicole: You’re welcome.

Stephan: Kepano’s great. You can call me Kepano. I’m fine with that.

Nicole: So, Stephan is a designer and an engineer, and most recently, he was announced to be the CEO of Obsidian. So that’s going to be interesting. I actually know you more for the stuff that you’ve made for Obsidian, like Minimal, and also Hider and Web Clipper. But it looks like you’ve been in the industry for a while making, I’d say similar tools.

Stephan: Yeah. Well, I mean, up until now it wasn’t really in the consumer space. I was building startups in more in the B2B area, but I’ve been using a lot of these tools for a long time. So, as a user, I’m older than I look, I guess. I’ve been like, building, I think the first thing that I really got into when I was a teenager was Winamp Skins. And so like, this is like, ’90s, early 2000s, making my first website and things around that time. So that’s how, that was my first, I guess, experience, like, building things in the software world.

Nicole: Awesome. And also here to help me interview you basically, is Andy Polaine, who is a lot of things. Designer, educator, writer, design leadership coach. He’s also co-authored a book called, “Service Design: From Insight to Implementation.” And he has a podcast called, “Power of Ten.” But really, the most important thing is he’s my Dungeon Master. We play D&D every week, and he’s also a good friend. We actually met because of Obsidian. So, welcome to the channel.

Andy: Thanks. Thanks for having me on. I’m excited to be a co-host. Or co-interviewer. Co-interviewer.

Nicole: Yeah, it’s really weird for me to not take cues from you and roll dice when you tell me to, but, you know, we’ll see how that goes.

Andy: I’ve got the dice here just in case we need-

Nicole: Okay, well I’ve got mine too, so. Anytime you need me to roll a save, I’m ready.

Andy: Well, let’s just roll for initiative to see who interviews first, huh?

Nicole: Yeah. Okay, let’s do that. Rollies, what are you going to roll? Okay. Just a d20. I rolled a two, so.

Andy: I got an 11.

Nicole: You go first.

PKM history and getting started with Obsidian

Andy: Okay, all right. I will, so, really, the first question for you is, it’s kind of under a sort of batch of questions really, about why Obsidian, but how did you get started with Obsidian?

Stephan: First, can you give me any like, buffs or stats or anything as my character would?

Andy: Well, I think you get sort of plus one in design and coding, right? So, yeah.

Nicole: What class do you think Stephan would be, Andy?

Andy: Wizard, I reckon. Or an arcanist.

Nicole: Yeah, I was thinking like-

Andy: No, I reckon-

Nicole: Sorcerer?

Andy: Yeah, or a, you know, someone who kind of makes stuff as well.

Nicole: Artificer.

Andy: Artificer, yeah. That’s what I reckon he is.

Stephan: Back in the World of Warcraft days-

Andy: So high end.

Stephan: I played a lot of the paladin class. I like the hybrid class, but I think that I also in like, “Lord of the Rings” really love, you know, Gandalf and those types of guy, Radagast, you know. I’m definitely into those types of characters.

Andy: Someone who can produce something out of nothing. So. So. As you were.

Stephan: I forgot what your question was.

Andy: Yes, so we’re going to lose half the audience straightaway. So, you know, you were a customer, right? You were a user before you became CEO and pretty quickly I seem to remember seeing your, certainly your theme, I think, probably a couple of other things, seeing you in the Obsidian Discord. So, you know, what was your hook into Obsidian in the first place?

Stephan: We’re getting some comments that your mic is very crackly.

Andy: We are hearing it. This is weird, isn’t it?

Stephan: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Andy: I had it before.

Stephan: Some people are hearing it.

Andy: I don’t know what’s going on.

Stephan: But to answer your question, I had been using the, over the past like, 15 or so years, I’ve used a lot of different tools to kind of try to solve what for me was mostly a journaling question. So, I wanted to be able to just write kind of, my own diary notes in a tool that, over time I discovered that the Wiki type of format was what I really loved. I kind of fell in love with the wiki link kind of idea. And that idea’s been around, I’m not sure exactly who invented the notation. I think it was the Wikipedia people in the MediaWiki, the kind of like, double-bracket concept. But once I discovered that, I felt that I only wanted to use like, journaling with that. So the one that I used for a long time was TiddlyWiki, and TiddlyWiki has that same kind of bracket notation, but I found that my personal sensibilities as a user, I really wanted something that felt like, very simple and minimalistic. Like, as you may notice from the kind of like, type of themes and things that I’ve made for Obsidian. And when Obsidian came out, I found out about it almost right away, like, in, I guess April, 2020, you know, as right as the pandemic was kicking off. Like, I think a lot of people, I don’t know, around that time were staying at home, were exploring different things and I found out about it, I had spent probably a year trying to kind of customize TiddlyWiki to be a little bit more user friendly, and Obsidian, even in like, V1 or whatever, not V1, it was like, V0.001, was already better than what TiddlyWiki was doing for me in terms of, it had the quick switcher, it had the prompts, it had the file Nav in the way that I wanted. It didn’t quite look like what I wanted, but it had a lot of the kind of, nice user interface patterns that I was looking for. And so I pretty much started making, I took, I was looking back at my notes, kind of preparing for this conversation, and I pretty much went all in on Obsidian after using it just for a couple days. I imported everything, and started making the minimal theme like, immediately. But I was just making it for myself at first. I wasn’t intending to publish it, I just kind of made it to solve my own UI preferences.

Nicole: So I actually used TiddlyWiki quite a bit. The reason that I used it was a lot of, ‘cause I was a consultant at the time, and a lot of the tools that were out there required, like, they were basically on the cloud so it was a SaaS platform that I’d have to log into and not, and those sites weren’t always allowed by whatever company I happened to be working for, so that’s what I loved about TiddlyWiki, that it could just sit on like, a flash drive and it would work. And that’s part of the reason that I started using Obsidian too, is ‘cause it’s local.

Stephan: Yeah. Yeah, and that was something, you know, being able to use it on your computer when you’re offline, just having that control. I was, you know, using it on flights, and so that local first idea to me is, I don’t know, I just find it much more natural and it allows you to do things so much faster. And because I have experience, you know, I wouldn’t say that like, being an engineer is first and foremost what I do, but I do dabble in a lot of different things on the code side and using, I use Sublime Text as my main code editor, but having, being used to using like, a code editor, you just expect everything to be there for you, right away, super fast. Like, even a small delay feels like it gets in the way of my productivity in some cases. So, being in the cloud, it always feels a little slow. And I’ve used a lot of those tools in my previous, especially for work purposes like Confluence or Google Docs or those things. And the sluggishness I feel like, really gets in the way of being able to make progress on whatever you’re trying to do.

Andy: Yeah. I mean for me, it was the portability thing. I switched to Markdown for everything, I think, for my blog. Like really, really soon after Gruber kind of released it. And I used to use Notational Velocity, which I think it was probably one of the first ones I know of, of a kind of this idea of a database that just sits on top of a bunch of Markdown files. And then Brett Terpstra was putting together NvALT, and nvUltra, which he’s still working on. And you know, I’ve been pretty disloyal. I’ve used lots and lots of like, every and probably most people, every Markdown out there. And a lot of them are starting to do the kind of wiki thing too, but depending-

Stephan: And there’s so many of them and-

Andy: Yeah. Yeah.

Stephan: And I think that is such a great thing that now that the ecosystem of Markdown editing tools is so deep and broad, that I often think that Obsidian, to me what’s exciting about this whole kind of area is like, I’m very curious about how we can make digital information persist over a long period of time. Like, how will the ideas that we have right now continue to persist for hundreds of years in the future? We’ve had books for thousands of years, but we’ve only had digital files for, you know, 70 or 80 years. And I like the idea that something like, plain text could still be around for the next few hundred years. And so using something like Markdown is, like, the file in a way is way more important than the apps. Like, Obsidian will eventually become obsolete because technology changes so much. But hopefully, the plain text will continue to live forever.

Andy: Yeah. I mean a bit like you, I’m gonna ask you about Computer Show actually later, but a bit like you, I’ve been around for quite a long time and I thought, I’ve been in digital stuff for like, 30-something years and I got fed up, but one of the reasons I moved to doing everything, I do all that, still do my invoicing, you know, with Markdown and stuff because I had so many times where like, “Oh the app’s gone out of, you know, out of production,” or “I’ve got so much of my work still on like, CD-ROMs.” I keep an old laptop that’s still got a CD-ROM drive, just in order to be able to view that.

Stephan: Oh, really? You’ve got to transfer those.

Andy: It still runs, kinda like, oh, it’s a, no, but yeah, but some of it’s like, Director MacroMind, actually, Macromedia Director stuff, that that’s the only thing you can play on, so you sort of have to keep the machine for it, too. And I transferred a lot of other stuff, but I had the same thing and I started using Evernote once and then trying getting stuff out. It was horrendous. Had the same thing with Notions, of exporting out of Notion, and it kind of dumps all this other crap in there. And so, you know, yeah, I agree. I think the file format is the kind of winner.

Stephan: Yeah, the file is more important than that.

Dealing with competitors

Andy: I’m interested though more as CEO, that you’ve got, you know, there are a whole lot of, well, I kind of would perhaps a little bit rudely say Obsidian clones kind of popping up. It feels like, in the last, you know, even in the last year there’s been a lot of stuff coming up. So, you know, whether you perceive those, is that a challenge for Obsidian? Is Obsidian kind of, just take its own path that each of them have their kind of own flavors? Now is it a good thing, you see it as a good thing?

Stephan: Well, I see it as a good thing because I am still kind of like, a plain text maximalist. So I think that you have to have a diversity of clients in order for that to kind of last forever. Like, I still think the file is more important than the app. I do think that where it gets dangerous is if there’s too many app-specific syntaxes that start to emerge. I think that is kind of dangerous because it reduces interoperability. Like, I think that, you know, Markdown, for all its flaws, and I think a lot of people have frustrations with Markdown, it has kind of stood the test of time, at least for the past, however many, 12, 15 years it’s been around, I’m not exactly sure, but maybe more at this point, I’m getting old. And so, I think that that is one of the biggest challenges that we have with Obsidian is sometimes we wanna do something new. Like, recently we launched the Canvas feature and there isn’t a, you know, off-the-shelf kind of canvas type of bio format. So we, you know, created a new one that is, you know, open and the type specification for it is out there, but there’s no other client for that file format yet. Hopefully there will be, but I think that that diversity of clients is good because there’s a lot of people who have lots of different ideas about how thinking should work, and Obsidian is not particularly dogmatic, like, a big part of, you know, one of the main values that we always think about is extensibility. So how do we make it easy for individual users to customize Obsidian? And also, how do we enable developers to build on top of it? But there’s a, I think it’s very viable to create a very opinionated Markdown or tool, you know, editing tool that takes a different approach than Obsidian. And I’ve seen many people who enjoy using more than one, different one for different parts of their workflow. So yeah, I think it’s good. I think we’re living through a little bit of like, this Cambrian explosion moment because for some reason right now, in the past couple of years, like, people have realized this a really exciting problem to work on and I think we all learn a lot from each other, so, I see it as a good thing.

Nicole: So one of the things that you said, ‘cause I trolled through your blog while I was thinking of questions for this. You had a post about how great tools choose to be bad at some things. So, what do you think Obsidian has chosen to be bad at?

Stephan: Well, I think that design principles are only real design principles if you can take both sides of it and create something compelling. Like, for example, we talked about extensibility. That’s one of our, I would say there’s like, three major pillars to what Obsidian is trying to be. One of them is around privacy, one of them is around longevity of your notes, and one of them is around extensibility. So those three things are the things that we want to continue being really good at. But you can take the extensibility example as kind of one of our design principles. We wanna make Obsidian super extensible. But you could, I can see why some people would prefer an app that’s not at all extensible, that is, you know, completely designed by one small group of people who are trying to make a very cohesive experience. I think one of the big challenges with Obsidian is we’re always asking ourselves, “What should be a community plugin versus a core plugin?” We’re always asking ourselves, “How can we make community plugins feel more native to the app and more cohesive and intuitive to people? Do they make sense with the rest of the app? Because any developer can basically build anything inside of Obsidian. And so it, I think it is a common point of frustration for some new Obsidian users that they have to download a lot of plugins and some of them feel a little janky. So, you know, Obsidian has chosen to be bad at that, with the trade off that it allows a lot of freedom for people to customize the app. And you can take the same example with, you know, privacy and longevity. Those have their own trade offs as well. Andy, did you wanna say something?

Andy: I was thinking, you know, it reminded me of what you just said. It was just as you talked about the plugin thing. One of the tricks that Apple did with the iPhone, was to make the phone bit an app. And it sounds just like, a really banal thing, but up until then there were phones, smartphones, were kind of phones with sort of app bits in them, and they were really janky. And I think one of the things also, obviously not having a keyboard, having a touch screen, means that that thing where you get whatever app you’re in is completely the app. All right? So, you know, I’m in FaceTime, it’s completely FaceTime, I’m in Obsidian and it’s completely Obsidian, the whole phone turns into whatever app you’re in. And I feel that, you know, in a way that’s what the plugin mechanism can do for Obsidian. At its base it’s, you know, it’s a text editor that’s browsing as a viewer on a set of Markdown files. But you know, as soon as you start putting, particularly some of the more powerful plugins in it, it becomes something completely else. And I think, I find it really kind of powerful that you can switch that stuff on and off. I can see that the, you know, I was sharing my students the other day ‘cause they were talking about design research and how you can use Obsidian, and quite a lot of them use Notion. And I can completely see why they use Notion, right? ‘Cause it’s just, you know, zero learning curve for them. Until such time as they want to take that stuff with them, and then they’ll find out. And I think some of that stuff’s a bit like doing backups. You find out the hard way, right? But I kind of feel like that is a, it’s been a smart trade off to make with Obsidian, with the plugins. And I was just wondering at this point-

Stephan: But it has its downsides. I mean, I think the point, you know, on privacy, the way we think about that is that is having ownership over your files. They’re not in somebody else’s database. They’re on your computer, on your device. You know, if you choose to use the first-party sync, everything’s end-to-end encrypted, and so we have this kind of strong pillar around privacy, but it has the trade off that it makes certain things harder for us. For example, people ask us, would we ever see a web client for Obsidian? A like, online, you know, cloud-based Obsidian? And that’s a lot harder for us to do because we don’t have access to your files. We would have to compromise on that value of encrypting your data and kind of being able to see that information on our side in order to be able to present it back to you. And that makes things really tough. Unless, there’s some, we’ve thought about this question a lot, but it really is a very hard problem to solve. But for someone who, you know, for whatever scenario they might be in, either can’t access a local app because they, you know, there were computer restricts, you know, apps and they can’t download Obsidian or they’re on a school computer and they have to access it from the school computer, it does present a limitation. But I think strong principles force those kinds of trade-offs where you could take either side and make a compelling and legitimate app. We just, you know, have chosen our own particular set of trade off and that’s what that blog post was about. So. So there’s other things that Obsidian is bad at as well, like, relating to longevity and like, the choice of using Markdown, for example. It’s not the most intuitive to some people. I can come up with a long list of things that Obsidian is bad at, in favor of something that it wants to be really good at. And I think that’s a, making trade offs is our job.

Nicole: Well, one of the things that I hear a lot is that Obsidian is too developer focused, or some people think it’s not approachable. And I think it comes back to what we’ve been talking about. You do have to make a decision, you do sacrifice a little bit of usability in exchange for flexibility and modularity. My background is in performance engineering, so I care a lot about performance and I love this idea of making the most streamlined possible app, and then just leaving room for extensions so that other people can make their own decisions. I would rather have that, than have an app that has everything baked in and I have really no choice as to what to turn on or off because my use case is going to be different from everybody else’s.

Andy: That’s Microsoft Word, right?

Stephan: Yeah.

Andy: When you just have the sort of, bloat and they get those screenshots, sometimes, of every palette open and there’s about this much space, they actually edit some text.

Nicole: By the way, do you like my shirt?

Stephan: Oh yes. Classic.

Nicole: Where’s yours?

Andy: Yeah.

Nicole: How disappointing.

Stephan: I know, I haven’t, I’m such a minimalist-

Andy: It’s a print.

Stephan: I haven’t gotten my Obsidian merch yet, but, yeah, you’re looking good over there.

Andy: So, you know, you’ve been contributing to Obsidian, pretty much from the get go, and then you started working with them. What is it with them? It’s the, the Licat and Silver, basically-

Stephan: It’s the smart, yeah, the smart team.

Joining the Obsidian team

Andy: Two-person team. So, you know, how did that, I don’t know how much you can reveal, how did that come about and then, and what was the sort of transition? When was there this kind of moment of like, “Hey, how about becoming CEO?”

Stephan: Yeah, well, it was a very organic process because I, you know, was running a different company at the time when Obsidian first came out. And so, I had, you know, started building minimal theme, a bunch of different small plugins here and there, the Web Clipper. And I was a very vocal in the Discord and forum about some of the things that I thought would be, you know, improvements or bug fixes. And at the time, the Obsidian community was way smaller than it is today. And so, I was often interacting with Licat and Silver, the founders of Obsidian, through the Discord. And just kind of, just talking very organically about here are some things that could be improved, here are some, you know, bugs I found. Can you help me with this feature of Minimal that I am trying to, you know, build into my plugin? Can you give me some feedback on how to do this properly? And so, we started interacting, you know, talking about Obsidian for a couple of years. And, I’m not exactly sure at what point it started, and maybe it was around the time that, I’m trying to like, actually remember, but I think there was like, a Gems of the Year contest where Minimal won like, the Best Theme category, and I think I started DMing more with Silver and Licat around that time, and just kind of getting to know them just over chat in Discord. And they found out that I had been, you know, running some startups and asked me for some advice on a couple small things here and there. And so we just kind of kept that conversation going, and at some point last year, there was this kind of idea that Obsidian wanted to kinda reach the 1.0 release. And the 1.0 release, I mean I think it, you know, it’s funny that it, it was really a milestone moment, because we, that’s when I started becoming involved in the project and they asked me to basically create the new default theme. And so I was working with them part-time, kind of taking a lot of my experience on Minimal and bringing that into the core app. But also, they were asking me about some of the things that I felt were on my like, top priority list of small details that we felt were still kind of embarrassing or like, wanted to really get nailed down before we could really feel like we could call it a 1.0. And, that’s when I started working much more closely with them, as well as Liam, who is now a full-time part of the team. You might know Liam from the calendar plugin. He’s amazing. We have basically five people full-time. Joethei, you might have seen around the community who helps a lot with plugin reviews and the developer ecosystem, and then a few other folks who’ve been helping us part-time, like MG Meyers, who you might know from the Kanban plugin and style settings is working on, has been working on Canvas and kind of like, led the Canvas effort. And so, the more conversations kept going on with this project, I just realized it was so much fun and I love Obsidian so much. Like I just, I really want it to continue to be an important tool in my life, in a very selfish way, but also I think that Shida and Erica, Licat and Silver, are such mature like, entrepreneurs, they’re quite a bit younger than me. They make me feel old all the time. But it’s a great exchange of knowledge and yeah, so we started discussing this idea and they were on board. I think it’s a very, we have very complimentary skills. I’m really excited about, like, Licat’s one of the most incredible engineers that I’ve ever worked with. I’ve worked with a lot of like, amazing engineers throughout my life and I have like, so much respect for him. He’s just super, super impressive and continues to be like, they’re both gonna continue to be involved for the foreseeable future. And Erica has just an incredible mind for, you know, product and how to think about what users really care about. And so, and has been, I think, the person who’s, in a way, influenced why Obsidian has such an amazing community more than anybody else. Just kind of from the beginning, making that an important part of Obsidian, I think is a lot of credit to Erica. So, seeing, like, getting to know them just made me realize like, there’s nothing that I would rather do than help that community continue to grow, help make sure that Obsidian has the, kind of like, structure that it can last for a long time, kind of going back to that principle of longevity that matters at the app level. How do we actually make that viable at the company level so that the kind of, product and the company can be aligned? So yeah, that’s why I kind of believe that-

Nicole: I also just wanted to call out-

Stephan: Very organic.

Nicole There’s some people who are asking-

Stephan: Oh, where do we get the merchandise?

Nicole: Where do we get the merch? By the way, I bought this. And it is here.

Stephan: Yeah.

Nicole: Just so everybody can see, ‘cause there’s some awesome things on there.

Stephan: Yeah, I think it’s-

Nicole: I want I wanted to ask you-

Stephan: Yeah.

Building intentional tools for tool builders

Nicole: Yeah, it is. So I wanted to also ask you, earlier when I was introducing you, I said that you have worked in similar spaces, which I realize now is a bit odd because the companies that you had worked on before aren’t note-taking apps. But what I meant by that, is actually I’m seeing a theme in what you’ve worked on and it’s all about creating things that are minimal, intentional, well-made. And I think like, in your previous company, Lumi, you were talking about packaging, and making that a little bit more transparent and intentional as well. I know you’re also an industrial designer, or you claim not to be one anymore, but that’s also something that permeates your work there as well, doesn’t it?

Stephan: Yeah, I’m a generalist. I like to dabble in a lot of different things. And so, it has taken me in a lot of different directions, but I think the common theme is I’ve always been interested in making tools. So everything basically in my professional career has been a tool of some kind. So in the case of Lumi, it was a tool, it was actually two different tools. One was for factories, to help manufacturers kind of bring their capabilities online, and a tool that helped businesses who need to collaborate with manufacturers, find the right manufacturers and work with them. And so, I like building tools that kind of empower individuals to do something that they couldn’t do before. And so Obsidian definitely fits into that because I feel like, I mean, in my own personal life, it’s been so rewarding and exciting to use Obsidian. Like, I feel like, my thought process is clear and more reliable when I’m using Obsidian. And I feel like, that’s such an exciting superpower that I have that I want to help more people get that feeling, too. So yeah, like, throughout my life basically like, that theme just keeps coming back of like, making tools that help other people do whatever they’re trying to do.

Nicole: And it’s also helping other people make other things, right? ‘Cause like, you know, you’ve also worked on things like, that kind of pare down what is out there, because there’s an information overload that’s out there and I know you’ve made like, Tidy, which kind of streamlines what we even see on the page. What do you think, is there anything in Obsidian, ‘cause we’ve talked about things that it’s bad at. Are there any big features that you’d like to introduce to it, that don’t detract from, that don’t make it like this bloated bit of software but still are along the same lines of being intentional and helping people?

Stephan: Definitely. I think that the area we want to keep working on is the primitives. Like, what are the basic things that you can use that you can build on top of? So, we have a public roadmap that’s not always the most up to date, but one of the big things we’re working on right now is around metadata. So, a lot of, I’m a huge fan in my personal use, of DataView is one of my favorite plugins for Obsidian, and I use it for everything. And kind of asking ourselves like, “What can we do that would enable the user and developer ecosystem of Obsidian to leverage metadata even more?” So, you know, you can, there’s a couple different ways that you can add metadata to your notes with Obsidian. One of them is through YAML in the frontmatter, and one of them is through DataView has these like, custom fields. So that’s an area that, we want to, like, the author of DataView had to create this new notation with the double colon. You know, you put a key in a value and separate them with a double colon, and that notation was essentially invented by the author of DataView because it’s so painful to write YAML. And so, what can we do to clean that up a little bit and make metadata feel more like a first-class citizen from the user’s perspective, but also enable more developers to build on top of that. Yeah, API docs and developer portal. I’m looking, I can’t even remember what we have on here. Tasks. There’s a few other things that we have up our sleeve at the moment, that I’ll be excited to share in a little bit. Talking about the roadmap-

Nicole: A few questions, Stephan-

Stephan: Yeah, go ahead.

Nicole: You mentioned DataView. I know that he’s working on DataCore, right? Is that going to be something that’s going to be built into Obsidian or is it still going to be a community plugin? Honestly, I would never use Obsidian without DataView.

Stephan: You know, I haven’t really, I’m not exactly sure what the goals of DataCore are. I’m not super informed about what he’s trying to do with that. I think that our job is always to find the right balance between what feels like a core plugin, what feels like it should be part of the community. And so, I think that long term we do wanna have good ways for people to add metadata to their notes and perhaps view kind of an output of that in some way. I think that’s kind of a long-term project, but in the short term, the metadata improvements is really about making it a lot easier to add metadata to your notes and then hopefully that makes things like DataView easier to use. But maybe long term will consider some more ways that people can like, look and view their data, or the metadata from their notes. I do found that DataView, one challenge with it is it is pretty nerdy. Like, it does require, it has a syntax that’s a little bit, you know, like, SQL and I think that that’s not the most user friendly. So we’ve seen quite a few plugins pop up, like DB Folder is one that’s kind of interesting that makes it a little bit more WYSIWYG. And that’s one of the big benefits that we have as a community is that people can build plugins that optimize for different types of users. People who love writing SQL, they’re gonna love using DataView, but people who prefer something more WYSIWYG are gonna prefer a different type of UI. And we can be patient in our approach to what we actually wanna build into the core because we could just kind of watch what people like, what people make, and decide later down the road what we wanna build ourselves.

Growth of Obsidian as a team and company

Andy: Do you think there are, I mean are there any plans to then grow the team? Or is partly what makes it special, the fact that you are a very small team?

Stephan: I think that for now we wanna stay really small. We wanna be as small as we can be because, you know, one of the other things that’s really important that made me want to join Obsidian, is that from an early stage, Shida and Erica decided that they didn’t wanna bring on investors, like, venture capital investors. And I have, throughout my career, worked and built companies that have used every single funding model under the sun. Like, my first company was one of the very first Kickstarter campaigns ever, back in 2009. I’ve gone down the venture capital route, I’ve done bootstrapping, like, I’ve tried it all. And I think when it comes to the goals of Obsidian that we’ve been talking about, like, longevity in particular comes to mind, but also privacy and extensibility, I find that is not very compatible with the VC route. And, you know, if you just kind of survey the ecosystem, you’ll find that actually, almost all of the kind of big PKM apps, if you wanna call them that, have raised a lot of money, like, millions of dollars from, or hundreds of millions of dollars, even. And the problem with that is that, I think it’s misaligning the incentives in the long term for, you know, the user and how they want to kind of, store their notes. Like, basically it incentivizes certain behaviors that are kind of against our principles. And so for that reason, we’re trying to build very intentionally and also work through the extensibility part of our like, principle to enable the community to customize things more. Like, we don’t feel like it’s necessarily our job to make this like, huge app that has every single feature. We like seeing how the community kind of extends Obsidian in their own ways. So I would say that growing the team, it will be more by necessity than by a desire to like, try to do everything ourselves. We’re getting to a point now where, I would guess, we don’t actually even know how many Obsidian users there are because we’re so focused on privacy, we don’t have analytics, we just like, don’t know. But we can guess based on a few different like, things like, how many people downloaded the app bundle, that there’s probably close to a million users of Obsidian and only basically five core members of the team. And eventually, from a support standpoint are things, things might start to break and we might need to hire people to help on that front. But we’re trying to stay small if we can.

Andy: Yeah. I think you’ve been very diplomatic about the VC thing. I mean, in general it’s, you know, you’ve got, in my coaching practice, and I coach a lot of design leaders who are kind of suffering in startups or scale ups because of this constant pressure to scale, because this constant pressure for just more and you know, I want a 10 X on my, you know, investors want 10 X return on their investment in some stupid amount of time, things like that. And it definitely leads to that, you know, what Cory, Dr. Al calls sort of, an end certification, you know, this thing where then there’s a choke point and we have everyone’s data on our server and they have to use app and then you just start, it becomes a sort of process of trying to extract value. And I-

Stephan: Well, I’ve touched on the thing-

Andy: Oh, go on, go on.

Stephan: To defend VC, I will say there’s some businesses where, it kind of is necessary because especially, we’re in a privileged position, building software, because software has no cost to us. But there’s some companies, you know, that have to produce a physical product in the world-

Andy: Yeah, that’s true.

Stephan:: And they have to buy the materials and put in orders and so they need to raise money somehow, and VC is one of those paths. You can get loans, like, there’s different ways. So I think it, I’m not like, I just have a kind of, like, a more zen point of view on that where like, I understand why a lot of companies go that direction and it makes sense. I think in the case of what we’re trying to build specifically, it’s a bad fit. But it’s not necessarily a bad fit for everything.

Nicole: So-

Andy: You mentioned anything just now which is, oh sorry, Nicole. What were you gonna say?

Nicole: I was gonna say I’d like to go back to, and just quickly, to what Obsidian is bad at. And you know, Stephan, I love Obsidian. It is, I’m all for it. I am possibly the biggest fan. I think one thing that Obsidian is bad at that I really would love to see improved, is sharing. Because I think that is the thing that stops most people from using it, because, you know, using it on your own in an isolated way is one thing. It excels at that. But anytime that you have other people that you wanna do that with, as an example, Andy and I play D&D. Okay, this not a work thing, right? But it is a recreational use, and honestly, it takes up a lot of, my usage of Obsidian is role playing games. And in that group, there are four of us, three and a half, who use Obsidian. We can’t share our notes. We can’t have like, one repository for all of us to collaborate on. So we have like, individual notes, and yes, we could use something like Dropbox to share those notes, but then Andy for example, can’t, or wouldn’t want to share all of his notes with us. Maybe some of them he would. So I would love to see like, a little bit more permissions around sharing.

Stephan: Yeah, I think sharing is a big, like, it’s a challenge because there’s like, three or four different use cases nested under sharing that are quite different from one another. So, we have published, so we’re doing a lot of work right now, actually, on making some publish improvements. There’s a big batch of publish improvements that just went live like, a week or two ago, and that’s more about sharing to the external world, an entire vault, and we wanna keep improving that. Then there is sync, which is like, has this concept called Shared Vaults. I don’t know if you’ve tried that out, but Sync Shared Vaults is actually what we use internally on the Obsidian team. So everyone who’s like, you know, between the five of us, are working on projects, we keep our notes in one shared vault. Then there’s also the idea of, “Hey, I’m writing this note, I just wanna send a link to someone so that they can view it.” They don’t have Obsidian or they don’t know, you know, I don’t wanna like, put them through the process of having to, you know, learn everything about Obsidian just to read this one note. And that note might be, you know, semi-private, like, it’s like, something where it’s not like, a published use case where you want the world to see it, you just want this one person to see it. And then there’s a collaboration use case where like, Google Docs or Notion makes it really easy for a few people to be like, collaboratively editing something, even if they don’t, or have Obsidian, for example. So like, those are all kind of different problems to solve in different ways, and I do think that we want to find ways to solve those problems, figuring out what the right order, that’s another challenge about being a small team is like, what do we work on now versus later? But I think all of them are problems that we would like to solve, you know, over the kind of medium to long term for sure. We’re very aware of that.

Andy: It feels like there’s a bit of a thread here, though, as well, when you’ve talked about, you know, ‘cause obviously the sharing bit brings up the privacy issue that you talked about before.

Stephan: Correct. Yeah.

Andy: And it also links to the, is there a browser-based version of Obsidian? You know, because one of the ways of obviously, easily sharing and collaborating on a document would be to have kind of a browser-based editor, even if it was just for that one document. And it’s almost like, you need a kind of, instead of a separate vault, a sort of enclave in your existing vault that you can say, “Oh this the shareable bit and all the rest of it, you know, remains encrypted,” let’s say, I don’t know if the encryption thing is an issue, but you know, at some point once you share it, you have to not do that, right.

Nicole: So I think-

Andy: And that may be at the beginning of the browser-based version.

Nicole: I think my problem is that I am able to do those use cases, but I use separate tools for each of them. I would really love to streamline in this area. Like you were talking about, being able to share a link. I use Etherpad with that, but it’s not the best. It works, though. And then when you talk about using Sync, I also subscribe to Sync, but that also requires other people to have Sync. So for those people who don’t use Obsidian enough to warrant Sync, I use Dropbox. And then at work, because we have all of our internal docs on GitHub repos, I use GitHub to bring my Obsidian notes and share them. And that brings a lot of things but also brings like, comments and being able to roll back changes, and, you know, handle merge conflicts, and that’s not something that Sync does as well for now.

Stephan: I totally agree. Yeah, I think that those are things that we have to eventually solve. And I do, going back to what feels like it should be a core thing and what feels like it should be a community thing, I think that sharing is something that belongs in core, or at least core needs to have good sharing mechanisms for all of the different use cases. Publishing, collaboration, single note sharing, is just a matter of, how do we do that? In what order do we build those features? And can we build them in a way that is consistent with our principles?

Task management in Obsidian

Nicole: Can we talk about task management? ‘Cause that was something that was on the roadmap. So is there anything you can share with us on that front?

Stephan: Our goal around that one is fairly conservative, I would say. It’s not gonna be a major, you know, complete revamp to everything. It’s more about, how do we make tasks queriable in a better way, like, and also adding better date supports? So we’ve been thinking a lot about how do due dates work with tasks? So right now, there’s ways that you can do that with community plugins, but we wanna figure out, should there be a core way of dealing with due dates? Again, thinking about the API first and how that might, you know, enable developers to come up with some new experiences on top of that. But I would say that that project’s been a little bit on the back burner for us because, we had some other ideas that we wanted to prioritize first, like Canvas, and some of the things that we’re working on right now, like metadata and publish improvements, for example.

Nicole: It does occur to me that a lot of these things, like task management, could be helped if you share a log something like DataCorp or DataView. ‘Cause the functionality is there, you just need to make it look pretty, but you’re good at that.

Stephan: Yeah, I mean the challenge there is just again, like, you know, two, three people building things. We only have so much bandwidth and kind of finding that happy medium between, we wanna make sure that we’re, you know, releasing features at a good pace. But every time we add new capabilities, we also add, you know, add to the surface area of potential bugs of potential issues that might come up or edge cases with certain plugins, we increase the number of feature requests, like, when we add something like Canvas, then we get a whole bunch of new feature requests from people who are like, “Oh, Canvas is great, but it doesn’t do X, Y or Z.” So that, I don’t know that anyone has ever solved that problem. It’s just kind of a problem of building software in the world. But, that is probably the biggest challenge that we deal with as a team is like, how to find the right balance of what to build now, how comprehensive do we want this feature to be versus, you know, starting small and kind of building on top of it. But trail locking a plugin, we tend to, we’ve done it a couple times, and when we do, we tend to rewrite it from scratch pretty much. And so that’s a pretty big effort. Like, rewriting something like DataView or Data, I haven’t looked at the code for DataCore. It’s not a small task. It tends to be a pretty big thing.

Artificial intelligence in Obsidian

Nicole: Another question here by Imaginationscene and another one by another user called Remy, “What about AI? Or integrating something like ChatGPT?” Is that something that’s on your radar?

Stephan: I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I think that right now, so this kind of like, goes back to the benefit of the extensibility of Obsidian. I’m pretty sure that Obsidian was the first app that had ChatGPT or like GPT-3 integrated into it, because someone in the community built a plugin for that called Text Generator. And now I think there’s three or four plug-ins out there that connect to the Open AI API. So, the cool thing for Obsidian is that because it’s so easy to build plug-ins, people tend to go really like, we both have the ability to be very fast and very slow, so, the community can go and build a plugin that solves that use case. And I think that they’re quite good, actually. I’ve used Text Generator a bunch, but we can also be patient about what’s the right way of building it for Obsidian. And I think that there’s a lot of companies right now rushing into adding GPT to everything. My personal preference when it comes to this, is I would like for it to all be local first, completely private. I don’t wanna send, you know, data that I don’t, like, I wanna have complete control over any data that is being sent. You know, there’s this concept of training and inference in, we’re getting like, right into the weeds of how AI works, but I would like, someday, to be able to have maybe a plugin, whether it’s a core plugin or a community plugin, that can do some training on your vault and kind of learn from your vault and be able to do the inference locally on your computer, so that it completely aligns with the principles of privacy and local first that Obsidian is known for. The challenge with that right now is that that’s quite intensive on the graphics card, and it’s quite complicated to set up locally for users, and we’re still kind of waiting to see whether a company like Stability, that they made stable diffusion and is an open-source platform for like, image generation, there’s been talks about them releasing a language model that would be open source. So we’re kind of waiting for all of those things to come together before we make a decision. We would, I think we would prefer to build something that kind of, is aligned with our principles, but in the meantime, there’s a bunch of plug-ins that you can use that solve that use case and I think they do quite a good job with them, actually.

Nicole: Stephan, have you heard of Napkin?

Stephan: No, I don’t know Napkin. Tell me more.

Nicole: It’s, yeah, it’s an awesome service that I recently have been using. And it uses AI in a really interesting way, because I think there’s a lot of focus on using AI for like, generating blocks of text or outlines or images. But what Napkin does is it looks at your vault, well, it’s not a vault because it doesn’t do it for Obsidian, it looks at your Readwise highlights, and it uses AI to tag them intelligently. So, it has this interface where you can determine, you can click on like, a thought or a highlight, and it shows you intelligently linked other highlights that you already have, that you may not have put together. And sometimes they’re like, they’re not even using the same keyword or they’re not tagged the same way, but somehow it still figures it out. That kind of thing would be invaluable for Obsidian because there’s a lot to be said for manually linking things, but getting some help would be nice.

Stephan: I think that sounds awesome. I’m seeing a lot of comments here in the chat of like, people who are suggesting some different ideas and some plugins that I’m not even aware of that are already doing some more local AI stuff. I think that’s a, I think what’s amazing about the Obsidian community is we have people kind of, at every level of the spectrum of nerdiness. Like, we have like, people who are some of the most advanced engineers that I’ve ever talked to are developing their own custom plugins, and then we have people who are complete beginners and novices, not engineers, people who are just learning about note taking. We have a lot of young students in the community. And so, I like that we have the ability to have those people who are like, all the way at the deepest end of like, understanding all of those principles, able to start working on, you know, potential plugins and extensions that could do something like that. And that can be kind of a breeding ground where we can learn, what do people actually want out of that type of tool? But I do think that if we want to continue to stay true to these kind of principles of being local and private, there’s gonna be some constraints that we have to deal with that are actual like, performance constraints and technical constraints, that may mean Obsidian will be a little slower to get to those features than apps that are completely cloud-based where they can upload that to a server and do that, you know, somewhere else.

Andy: Hm. Yeah.

Stephan: So I think it is a very tricky challenge for us to try to solve that right away. I think we’re gonna tend to watch what plugin developers do, and then start to think about that in a year or two. ‘Cause right now there’s, I mean, literally every month there’s something new going on with AI and the open source packages that are going on. So, we’re maybe a little less cutting edge than the plugin ecosystem can be, if that makes sense, on the core side it.

Andy: It feels like you could get dependent on something very quickly there as well, and just kind get really kind of bogged down. And then, you know, a couple of people have said keep that as a plugin, it’s much better that way.

Accessibility in Obsidian

Andy: There was a question, it was from Daniel Gartmann further up yeah, I don’t use a screen reader, but I think, you know, something that would need to be much more sort of, core fundamentals as obviously accessibility. I don’t know, maybe Daniel can say how, I don’t know how accessible Obsidian is to use with screen read, but read is-

Stephan: We’ve done a lot of work in that area with, yeah, I would be curious to hear a little bit more detail from Daniel about what they’re looking for, but yeah, Obsidian is already compatible with screen readers. We have done a lot of work on that side, but if there’s things that are missing in that respect, I would say let us know in the community, on the forum or on Discord. We’re definitely, I agree that building that into core is a must. I think that’s super important. We’ve added a lot of new customization features over the past year, so I’m actually kind of curious to see if there are themes that get developed that are focused on different use cases. It’s much easier today to design themes than it was a year ago in my, one of my, that was one of my biggest contributions over the past year from a code standpoint, was rewriting the way that themes can be built. And so that means that you can very easily now create like, very high-contrast themes. Themes with different font sizes, different fonts that might help people who have, you know, who need help on the vision side. But then there’s other things like, ARIA labels and other kind of web technologies that we’re able to incorporate that make it easier with screen readers for sure.

Tags vs Links

Nicole: Okay, we have a question that is a little bit controversial. It’s from Germ Germain, whom I actually, by chance, met a few weeks ago in person. He says, “What is his opinion (Well, I’m gonna ask both of you) about tags versus links?”.

Stephan: In my personal use? Or, how do you wanna clarify that?

Nicole: Yeah, in your personal use. Which one do you use more?

Stephan: So I tend to use links more than tags, personally. So, I do have quite a few tags, but I tend to use links because I like to see everything in the, all the relationships in my backlinks, I guess, is how I would say it. And I like that links, for example, like, I’ll have a top-level categories for books that I’ve read. And so I just have a category called books. And I link to it. In my template, I still use tags. I don’t actually really know why. I just feel like I should have it there for future need.

Andy: Future proofing.

Stephan: Yeah, for future proofing. Like, if I ever create a note about a book, it has both a tag for book and a link to the category books. So that redundancy helps sometimes if I’m creating like a DataView list or something I have access to both of those different ways of filtering down. But I tend to prefer links. I think links have a lot, are more powerful and cross over more different things. I think tags, where I use them the most, is for kind of very narrow meta segmentation of a very specific thing, where there’s only like, a very narrow subset of notes that needs to be grouped in a way that a link wouldn’t make sense, or I don’t really wanna have a page for that concept. Am I making sense?

Andy: Mm hm. I’m still here.

Stephan: But also, it’s not-

Andy: I’m still a fan of the folders, you know.

Stephan: Oh, I hear you.

Nicole: No. Do you really?

Andy: Oh, half the people have gone, “Oh god!”

Stephan: Yeah. I’m very-

Nicole: What are you even doing here?

Stephan: In my personal organization-

Nicole: No, I’m joking, I’m joking.

Andy: I can explain.

Stephan: This is why I feel like Obsidian being not dogmatic about this is great, because people think in different ways. Like, I love that people can use folders or tags or links or all of them. Do whatever works for you. If it works for you, that’s great.

Andy: I think partly goes back to what you were saying right at the beginning, which is, you know, where the file format is the thing, right? And so I use several other things on that group of files that I have there. And whilst, you know, it’s great if you can search the tags or you can do whatever you want with the tags or links in Obsidian when you are trying to find a file, to kind of pull into something. I use Marked, Brett Terpstra’s Marked quite a lot for Output. It’s a massive pain in the ass. Well, I mean, I use search a lot anyway on the Finder, but, you know, I much prefer to have some organization that works across other things that aren’t gonna handle tags. So that’s why.

Stephan: Well, to be fair, in our team vault, we do use folders for our like, internal grouping. But I think that that use case is very different than my personal notes.

Andy: Yeah, yeah.

Nicole: We have an answer from Daniel, actually. He says he has issues both for Windows and iOS screen reader support.

Stephan: Okay, well let’s-

Nicole: “I love the potential that Obsidian has for me as a blind person who’s already using notes in a text-based format.”

Stephan: Jump into Discord and let’s talk about it.

Andy: I don’t know how accessible Discord is, by the way.

Stephan: That’s a great question.

Andy: Because we might be saying jump into something that’s really terrible for you to use on Discord. So, yeah, on the forum, I’m guessing the forum-

Nicole: The forum.

Andy: It runs on Discourse, doesn’t it, of the forum?

Stephan: Correct, yeah.

Andy: I would imagine it’s kinda more accessible.

Stephan: If you go to obsidian.md/community, you’ll see the links there and send us your feedback. Or if you wanna just email support@obsidian.md we’ll take a look. But the best is definitely through the community and we’ll definitely take a look, yeah.

Andy: Tell us who does that email go to? Of the three of you?

Stephan: Well, right now it’s like, a kind of a shared thing where you kind of look in there, but I think that most people who use the support inbox are for kind of like, our enterprise users. We prefer to use the community as the main place because there’s more transparency around that and like, other people can jump in and add their own kind of experiences with whatever the feature request or bug might be. So in general, that’s why we kind of direct people towards the community if they wanna provide some feature requests or bug fix requests.

Andy: I was kind of hoping it triggered like, a kind of a bat signal that projected us an Obsidian sort of into the sky, the Obsidian crystal into the sky, and you all kinda come running.

Stephan: Yeah, unfortunately, it’s just one of those other things that, as we scale up, we have to find good ways of parsing what the community is looking for and how we can fit it into our roadmap.

Message to the community

Nicole: Well, I don’t, I would love to have you stay, both of you, stay on for longer. You’re both welcome back, but I also wanna be mindful of your time. So thank you for coming on to talk about the future of Obsidian, Stephan, and for helping me interview him, Andy. Stephan, is there anything that you’d like to say to the community before we end?

Stephan: Wow. Thank you. I just, I’m so thankful. I think that the thing that I love about Obsidian is, so many smart people and kind and like, kind people are part of the community. I love, you know, watching your videos, Nicole. You do such a great job of kind of making Obsidian feel more accessible. And I think that, in a way, like, beyond what we’re working on in terms of features and so on, like, the fact that we have such a friendly and collaborative and helpful community, is one of my favorite things. And so, I’m extremely thankful for that. You know, continue to be, continue doing an amazing job, being nice and helpful. Like, I think we’re still at the very beginning of people adopting these tools. Like, anyone who’s watching this is probably in the like, top 0.01% of people who knows anything about these, whatever you wanna call ’em, tools for thought, how you like, some people have been calling it integrated thinking environment. Like, we’re creating a new generation of tools that help people unlock the way that they think. And anyone who’s watching this right now is kind of, pretty much on the cutting edge of that concept. And I’m really curious what happens if that idea becomes more pervasive in society. I’m very hopeful that it can help us solve a lot of big problems. And so, if you’re one of the, you know, nerds, I say that lovingly. Geeks, dorks, that are part of this conversation, I consider myself one of those, introducing people to Obsidian and being part of, you know, helping them learn how to kind of, make their thought process more reliable is just an amazing gift. Like, I just think that’s like, and you’re doing that every day with your videos, Nicole. And so, I wanna thank you for that. So that, it’s not a specific ask, but that’s just kind of the way that I feel and I hope we can continue that for a really long time.

Nicole: Awesome. Thank you. I’ll talk to you both in a second, but we’ll say goodbye to everybody else. Thank you for joining us on this weekend, and see you next week.

Andy: Thanks. Bye.

Nicole: Bye!

Stephan: Thank you.

Notion Database Views in Obsidian (Live)

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 14:06:02 +0100

Have you ever wanted rotating Notion database views in Obsidian? Marcus Olsson’s Obsidian Projects plugin does exactly that, letting you create Table, Board, Calendar, and Gallery views for the same notes in Obsidian, just like in Notion! Join us as Marcus shows us how this awesome new plugin works and how it can be used to display the same data in different ways.

Resources

Distributed Tracing With Grafana k6 (k6 Office Hours #70)

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 14:03:04 +0100

Just announced: distributed tracing with Grafana k6 x Tempo! Daniel González Lopes joins us to talk about what distributed tracing is, and how traces using the Tempo backend could help you troubleshoot your performance issues and improve overall reliability. This new integration was just announced at ObservabilityCon 2022, and Daniel’s here to tell us all about it!

Resources

All About Load Testing Metrics (k6 Office Hours #69)

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 15:00:07 +0200

Leandro Melendez and Nicole van der Hoeven discuss all about load testing metrics. What do they all mean? Which ones do you REALLY need? Understanding metrics and analysing test results is arguably the most important part of a load test– and also the most difficult! We’re answering all the questions you ever had about the many metrics that come with load and performance testing.

Assertions in k6 (k6 Office Hours #68)

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 16:29:35 +0200

How do you do assertions in k6? CTO Pawel Suwala talks about different ways to implement BDD/TDD in k6, including an assertion library called k6chaijs. We also discuss the differences between checks, thresholds, and assertions.

End-to-end browser testing using xk6-browser (k6 Office Hours #51)
Browser-based testing (notes)
Browser testing and API load testing in the same script with k6 (k6 Office Hours #35)
In search of the best Pokémon: Browser automation and load testing in one script with k6 (presentation at Automation Guild 2022)
Real browser testing with xk6-browser

How to Take Notes for D&D in Obsidian, with Leah Ferguson

Sat, 15 Oct 2022 22:38:50 +0200

Obsidian moderator and my friend Leah Ferguson and I talk about how to take notes for D&D in Obsidian, including TTRPG plugins we use to prepare for, play, and process our D&D (and other TTRPG) sessions. We take our play seriously! :)

Load Testing Types and k6 Executors (k6 Office Hours #67)

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 18:36:55 +0200

What are the different load testing types, and how do they relate to the k6 executors? We go through every single k6 executor and how, when, and why you should use each one in this week’s episode of k6 Office Hours.

All About Web Performance (k6 Office Hours #66)

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 17:25:24 +0200

My fellow Developer Advocate and tester Marie Cruz and I talk all about web performance and best practices for making websites faster. What’s the difference between performance testing a website vs. an API? What are some things you should keep in mind when testing a web app?

Performance testing for beginners (k6 Office Hours #65)

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 12:45:08 +0200

My colleague Paul Balogh and I interview the k6 technical writer, Matt Dodson, who asks all the questions about load and performance testing that you were always afraid to ask.

The future of k6 (k6 Office Hours #64)

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 12:18:07 +0200

We’re talking about the future of k6 with CEO Robin Gustafsson and CTO Pawel Suwala. What’s next for k6? What new features are we working on? What’s the plan for further integrations with Grafana? What are the plans for the k6 team as we transition out of the honeymoon period after the Grafana acquisition?

Getting started with xk6-browser (k6 Office Hours #63)

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 12:13:33 +0200

Marie Drake, the newest Developer Advocate to join the k6 team, shares her experience in getting started with xk6-browser: how to install it, issues she encountered, and the state of browser testing with k6 as she sees it.

Load Testing Apache Kafka using k6 (k6 Office Hours #62)

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 12:09:36 +0200

Senior Software Engineer Mostafa Moradian joins us to talk about load testing Apache Kafka using k6 and the extension he created, called xk6-kafka. He describes what Kafka is, the basics of Kafka, and why he thinks load testing it is important. Mostafa works on the backend team at k6/Grafana Labs.

Resilience and Chaos Testing with SteadyBit and k6 (k6 Office Hours #61)

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 16:56:14 +0200

What is the difference between resilience testing and chaos testing? SteadyBit CEO and co-founder Benjamin Wilms talks about how to integrate SteadyBit with k6 for both resilience and chaos, and why he prefers “chaos testing” to “chaos engineering”.

Live - Visual PKM With Zsolt Viczián

Sat, 20 Aug 2022 17:48:41 +0200

What is a visual Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and how can it help you make connections between your notes? Zsolt Vizcain, developer of the Obsidian Excalidraw and Excalibrain plugins, joins me to talk about how to use his plugins to make your PKM system more visual.

Zsolt makes videos too! Check his channel out: https://www.youtube.com/c/VisualPKM

What is browser testing, with Marie Drake (k6 Office Hours #60)

Fri, 19 Aug 2022 17:51:38 +0200

What is browser testing, and do we really need it? What does browser or automation testing have to do with load testing? Our new colleague, Marie Drake, joins us today to talk about why she joined k6 and why she is an advocate for browser testing.

Obsidian Dataview, building a second brain, and more about me // Q&A Livestream

Sat, 19 Mar 2022 17:42:54 +0100

In celebration of reaching 1000 subscribers on my personal channel, I did a live Q&A where I demonstrated how to use Obsidian Dataview, my personal philosophy about building a second brain, and how I stay organized.

Live on Nicole van der Hoeven

Monitor behind a Firewall With Private Data Source Connect (Grafana Office Hours #04)

Recording a Performance Test With Grafana Cloud k6 (k6 Office Hours #93)

Changes to Grafana Plugins in Grafana 10 (Grafana Office Hours #03)

From Load Testing to Reliability Testing Tool (k6 Office Hours #92)

Testing Kubernetes Networking With k6 (k6 Office Hours #91)

What's New in Grafana 10? (Grafana Office Hours #01)

Lazy GM Note Taking With Notion and Obsidian

About Sly Flourish

Taking Notes for RPGs in Obsidian with Andy Polaine

Key takeaways

Resources mentioned

How we met

How I use Sending to mess with Andy

Andy’s DM style

A tour of Andy’s DM vault

DM reference resources

Random tables

DM notes

Location dashboard

Nicole’s note on Shadycreek Run

Background for the session Andy chose to show

Andy’s session prep

Nicole’s session notes

How has me taking notes changed the way Andy GMs?

Taking notes on other PCs

Taking notes on the players

The Future of Obsidian with CEO Stephan Ango and Andy Polaine

Key takeaways

Introductions: Nicole van der Hoeven, Stephan Ango, Andy Polaine

PKM history and getting started with Obsidian

Dealing with competitors

Joining the Obsidian team

Building intentional tools for tool builders

Growth of Obsidian as a team and company

Sharing, Obsidian Sync, Obsidian Publish

Task management in Obsidian

Artificial intelligence in Obsidian

Accessibility in Obsidian

Tags vs Links

Message to the community

Notion Database Views in Obsidian (Live)

Resources

Distributed Tracing With Grafana k6 (k6 Office Hours #70)

Resources

All About Load Testing Metrics (k6 Office Hours #69)

Assertions in k6 (k6 Office Hours #68)

Related articles

How to Take Notes for D&D in Obsidian, with Leah Ferguson

Load Testing Types and k6 Executors (k6 Office Hours #67)

All About Web Performance (k6 Office Hours #66)

Performance testing for beginners (k6 Office Hours #65)

The future of k6 (k6 Office Hours #64)

Getting started with xk6-browser (k6 Office Hours #63)

Load Testing Apache Kafka using k6 (k6 Office Hours #62)

Resilience and Chaos Testing with SteadyBit and k6 (k6 Office Hours #61)

Live - Visual PKM With Zsolt Viczián

What is browser testing, with Marie Drake (k6 Office Hours #60)

Obsidian Dataview, building a second brain, and more about me // Q&A Livestream