Hello everyone!
I'm Aarushi Tandon, and I'm excited to be joining this thread as a GSoC 2026 applicant with Joplin.
I've been using note-taking apps for a while, and what genuinely drew me to Joplin is its offline-first philosophy and the fact that your notes are truly yours. They are stored locally, synced on your terms, and never locked into a proprietary format. The Markdown-based approach and the open plugin ecosystem make it exactly the kind of tool I would love to build on top of.
On the technical side, I come from a Python-heavy background with a focus on ML, NLP, LLMs, and RAG systems. I have worked with sentence-transformers, ChromaDB, LangChain, and FastAPI. I also have experience with React and TypeScript, which aligns well with Joplin's frontend stack. While exploring the codebase, I noticed how cleanly the plugin architecture is structured. I have already submitted a small PR fixing a keyboard accessibility regression where Shift+Tab could not reach the "New notebook" button when the sidebar was scrolled down. The fix was implemented in useOnRenderItem.tsx by expanding the isKeyboardNavigating heuristic to recognize any focused element within the list container, not just treeitem roles.
I'm most interested in Project #4, "Chat with your note collection using AI". It sits right at the intersection of what I enjoy building, including a full RAG pipeline, LLM integration, and a clean conversational UI. The idea of letting users interact with their own curated knowledge base, especially for power users with large note collections, feels genuinely useful and impactful.
Looking forward to contributing and learning from this community!