Better Journal
Private journaling with search, a calendar and a writing dashboard
A journaling app built around the question "what did I actually write this year?" — a rich-text editor with autosave, full-text search across every entry, a month/week/day calendar of what was written when, and a dashboard that turns a year of writing into streaks, a contribution heatmap and word counts.
- End-to-end typed RPC with oRPC over Prisma 7 and PostgreSQL — the client imports the router type, never the implementation, so a renamed field is a compile error at the call site rather than a runtime surprise.
- Authorization expressed as a query predicate instead of a check on the result: ownership lives in the WHERE clause, so there is one round trip and no window in which a resource can change hands between the check and the write.
- Timezone-correct day bucketing — the reader's zone is an explicit input and every day boundary goes through one helper, so a note written at 02:00 IST files under the right date instead of the previous one.
- A month/week/day calendar backed by a single capped range query, with the selected day and view derived from the URL so back/forward navigates it and a day view is linkable.
- Postgres full-text search via a generated tsvector column and GIN index — stemming, ranking and highlighted snippets with no second datastore to run or sync.
- 226 Vitest tests against a real Postgres rather than a mocked Prisma client, covering cross-tenant access, DST-boundary day windows and search ranking, with lint → typecheck → test → build in CI on every push.
- Next.js 16
- React 19
- TypeScript
- oRPC
- Prisma 7
- PostgreSQL
- Clerk
- TanStack Query
- Plate
- Vitest