Every engineering manager has the same daily friction: team status is in one tool, calendar is in another, notes are somewhere else, and the tickets you need to check on require three clicks into a system that wasn't designed for how you actually work. Most people adapt to the tools. I built a better one.
localhost:5000 · No login · No cloud dependency
Vault size
84 files indexed · growing daily
THE PROBLEM WITH ONENOTE
Microsoft OneNote was the daily operations hub — notes, support tracking, meeting context, team status. It works. It's also a black box: no real search, no integration, no way to surface the right information at the right moment without already knowing where to look. I wanted a single browser tab that told me everything I needed to know to start the day. OneNote couldn't do that. So I built something that could.
WHAT IT IS
A full-stack Blazor Server dashboard running locally at localhost:5000 — serving as a daily operations hub for an engineering manager leading a mission-critical nuclear software team.
Four live panels on the main dashboard: daily notes, active support items with auto-linked ticket numbers, today's Outlook meetings, and per-team-member Azure DevOps work item status. Everything visible at a glance. No login. No cloud dependency. Opens fast, stays out of the way.
THE TECHNICAL CHOICES
Every stack choice is deliberate, not default.
Blazor Server · no JavaScript framework Real-time UI, C# end to end, zero framework overhead. Right tool for a locally-run internal application.
Outlook COM via PowerShell · no OAuth Calendar integration without Azure AD registration, without IT involvement, without a week of configuration.
FileSystemWatcher · SHA-256 change detection The markdown vault is watched in real time. Notes indexed on startup, updated incrementally as files change.
It exists because the right tool didn't, and building it was faster than tolerating the wrong one.
This project isn't on the critical path of anything. Nobody asked for it. There's no stakeholder, no sprint, no deadline.