November 24, 2025
Grammar Police vs Speed Demons
I built an faster Notion in Rust
Rust-built Notion rival promises speed; fans cheer, grammar cops nitpick
TLDR: A former Stripe engineer built a faster, simpler Notion-style knowledge base in Rust. Commenters cheered the speed, debated pretty pages vs. databases, roasted slow big apps, and demanded pricing—making clear that performance and usability, not chatbots, will decide if this challenger sticks.
An ex-Stripe engineer says he built a faster, simpler alternative to Notion using Rust, and the comments immediately split into tribes. Speed evangelists cheered the focus on snappy search and clean pages, while a grammar cop stole the spotlight with “Irrelevant, but ‘a faster’, not ‘an faster’,” triggering a mini spelling bee. Another crowd begged for pretty, live documents over turning notes into databases—one user called Notion’s pivot to an “RDBMS” (basically spreadsheets-in-disguise) a vibe killer. Meanwhile, the builder’s switch from Go to Rust, plus a tiny version of Google’s Zanzibar (who-can-see-what system), fed the inevitable language-war mutters.
Then the latency lament hit hard: “Gmail, Notion, Facebook are painfully slow on my high‑end laptop,” wrote one commenter, roasting Tech’s bloat. Practical folks crashed the party with “What’s your pricing? Is early access free?” while another slid into networking mode—“email me, let’s talk Rust tools”—because launch threads are half pitch deck. The vibe: people are starving for very fast, simple knowledge bases, not chatbots or clunky tables. If this Irish-built tool nails speed, collaboration, and easy permissions, it could grab customers spooked by Atlassian’s Data Center shutdown and Europe’s data rules. The community’s verdict: go fast, look good, then talk money
Key Points
- •An ex-Stripe engineer spent eight months building a faster, simpler knowledge base.
- •Initial prototype in Go led to high boilerplate and code generation; the system was rewritten in Rust using macro crates (e.g., utoipa).
- •Design priorities include speed, simple team-owned spaces, effective search, and automated handling of outdated documents.
- •Authorization is inspired by Google’s Zanzibar; the author built a smaller integrated version to avoid maintaining an additional service.
- •Market timing factors include Atlassian sunsetting Data Center and tightening European data residency regulations, benefiting an Irish company.