Understanding Evernote's tech & what are they up to? Dissecting Evernote's latest blog post.

Newsletter housekeeping: New Evernote Android & iOS versions (10.53.2) are on their way out. iOS is on the app store and Android will be delivered via the Play Store over a few days. The latest Triple 'T' Productivity Podcast is out and I’m talking procrastination with the author of “How to be a better Procrastinator”, Patrick Sanaghan.

Evernote have just published a new blog post, and it’s a good one.

It kind of explains why they’ve been quiet on the communication front and It talks about what they’re up to right now and what we can look forward to in the future.

The Evernote post is a little technical so I’ve been doing my research so I can dissect the jargon and explain a little more behind what they’re doing and offer some opinion.

The first thing that grabbed my attention in the post was the confirmation that Bending Spoons (Evernote’s owners) are in this for the long run.

There’s been grumbling on social media that Bending Spoons came along and bought Evernote, put the price up and were going to milk this for all its worth and discard it when it wasn’t valuable. This isn’t the case at all.

I’m lucky enough to be one of the Evernote Certified Experts that gets some time each month with Evernote staff including product lead Federico and the CEO Francesco Patarnello. In all the calls I’ve been a part of there has always been total commitment to the product for the long term. They want to make it the best app in its class and I think they’ll get there.

The second bit of the post that grabbed me kind of reinforced this.

The core of Evernote has always been to be able to capture information, in any way you want, then retrieve it when you need it. It’s good that Bending Spoons want to continue this functionality and improve it.

We then come to the technical side of things.

A few months ago, Evernote released a completely new sync system which included Real Time Editing. You can share a note with someone and work on it at the same time. There’s also instant sync. No more having to click a sync button.

It launched really well and for around a week everything was lightning fast but as time went on a few bugs started appearing. The blog post talks about this.

Let’s dig into this. To introduce the new sync and real time editing features Evernote needed to restructure how notes were stored in their database, the backend side, not the side you see.

The meant that notes created before real time editing was introduced needed to be converted to the new format and this is where the slowdown was happening. The conversion only needed to happen once but sometimes it was taking longer than the usual couple of seconds. This proved to be even more of an issue with really long complicated notes, sometimes data was lost.

Personally, I never really noticed too much of an issue, it was sometimes slow converting my notes but I never lost any data.

Fixes for these issues were applied on June 15th, June 27th, and July 20th.

If you still have a problem with slow loading notes contact support as they want to hear from you. For me, right now, everything is fine.

One other nice touch is that the fixes Evernote made were given to the open-source Yjs software library that looks after the real time editing functionality. This means others will benefit from the work Evernote has done.

The next part got a little more technical.

From how I understand it this is not the navigation we think of, like moving to Evernote Home or navigating from one notebook to another.

This is the internal navigation. How the different areas of the software talk to each other. For example, it’s how the Ai Cleanup tool knows which note to clean up when you click the button. It might make sense to you as you’re in the note but to the software it needs to know exactly which note its working on.

It looks like Evernote have completely rewritten the way this happens and we now have a new notebook URL structure on the desktop and web apps.

I can see that having a very specific and consistent way to identify notebooks and notes will help development in the future.

Next up is the really technical bit. Monoliths and Microservices!

So, the way I understand this is that there’s a giant single computer programme that looks after many things within Evernote. Every time you want to update a little bit of the system you have to re-compile the entire computer programme. This would lead to slow development and more chances of bugs being introduced.

Here’s a quote from the Wikipedia page about Monolithic applications:

In software engineering, a monolithic application is a single unified software application which is self-contained and independent from other applications, but typically lacks flexibility.

Moving away from this type of architecture to using more Microservices will help speed up development and hopefully reduce the number of bugs being introduced.

Think of Microservices as lots of little programmes that only do one job. The Yjs real time editing library we spoke about earlier is a microservice. Real time editing is all it needs to do. Nothing else.

Here’s a quote from the Wikipedia page about Microservices:

It is an architectural pattern that arranges an application as a collection of loosely coupled, fine-grained services, communicating through lightweight protocols. One of its goals is that teams can develop and deploy their services independently of others.

One analogy I thought of when on my walk in the woods this morning is, imagine Microsoft Word needs a small update to the way it prints documents and this change is just 10 lines of code. Once the changes have been made the whole Word programme needs to be re-complied and reinstalled just for 10 lines of code.

Now imagine there was a bug in one of those changed lines. You’d need to fix it and then go through the whole process of re-compiling and re-installing.

This is monolithic.

The Microservices way of doing it would be to have a small separate computer programme that just looks after printing. Its light and easy to install. You make the changes to the code, put it live and if there’s a bug you can fix it quickly.

From Evernotes perspective I would imagine this means they can create small teams dedicated to one specific microservice. Maybe a sync team or an Ai team. They can push their updates and changes into the backend without it effecting the things other teams are working on.

In conclusion, I think we can expect Evernote improving, modernising and becoming much quicker over the next few weeks and months.

I love this type of communication from Evernote. It’s much better than the usual marketing fluff that comes out of companies. Even if we can’t understand 100% of the tech side, we can understand the complexities faced with modernising a piece of software that’s, in some part is over 15 years old.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon