Jotter

Jotter is a web application built to make note-taking and idea capture simpler and more structured. It was designed and developed in-house at 18dev as a product project.

Building and running our own product keeps our engineering honest: we live with the consequences of our own technical decisions, in production, every day.

Note-taking tools tend to drift toward complexity. The challenge was to build something fast and dependable enough to trust with everyday thinking: capture that never gets in the way, organisation that stays simple, and data that is never lost.

The product needed to stay deliberately narrow: instant capture, straightforward organisation and dependable saving, with everything that did not serve those jobs left out.

Jotter is built on a modern full-stack architecture with a deliberate focus on speed, simplicity and data reliability.

• React frontend designed for fast, distraction-free capture
• Node.js API with a PostgreSQL database
• User authentication and secure session handling
• Real-time auto-save so work is never lost
• Note organisation and export functionality

As a live product, Jotter carries real operational responsibilities: uptime, performance, secure authentication, backups and data reliability for real users.

Operating Jotter in production feeds directly back into client work. The same standards we hold our own product to are the standards we bring to every website and application we build for clients.