side quests
the pursuits around the company — minimal, flexoki, inkodye and lumi, dynalist, minecraft plugins, and the ecosystem's own projects.
kepano's quests
- 2020–minimal theme · activethe most-installed obsidian theme (~5.4k stars) — kepano's side project became the ecosystem's default face, then his job. the minimal.guide docs and the settings/hider companions grew around it.
- 2023–flexoki · activean inky oklab color scheme for prose and code, named after flexography — ported across editors, terminals, and sites far beyond obsidian.
- 2025–defuddle · activethe html→markdown cleaning library that powers obsidian web clipper — his show hn for it out-scored most obsidian product posts.
- 2025–obsidian-skills · activeagent skills for obsidian workflows — ~48k stars, the repo that quietly made him one of the most-starred maintainers in the agent-tooling space.
- 2016–40 questions · continuingthe metafilter-inspired annual self-interview — community-translated into roughly 35 languages.
- 2011–2015inkodye · endedhis first company with jesse genet — light-developed fabric dye sold through kickstarter and retail. the met-at-artcenter partnership that became lumi.
- 2015–2021lumi · endedthe packaging company — 'shipping is violence.' raised real venture money (the exception that proves his later anti-vc writing), ran the well made podcast and slash packaging resource, acquired by narvar in 2021.
- 2021–2022narvar · endedthe post-acquisition day job — design leadership inside the company that bought lumi, until the obsidian pitch.
- 2015computer show · endedthe retro-comedy youtube series — an early artifact of the same craft instinct.
- 2023the hario v60 episode · endeda thoroughly considered episode about the hario v60 — a pure side quest with no obsidian angle at all.
- –kepiano, furniture, cookies · continuingcustom split keyboards, furniture, and the deluxe chocolate-chip-cookie recipe — the physical-craft half of the corpus.
- 2002–2010swinamp skins and early design · endedthe earliest dated entries on his projects page — winamp skins and forum-era design work, the apprenticeship before inkodye.
the founders' quests
- 2015–dynalist · continuingthe founders' first product — the web outliner that funded obsidian's runway. still running, still maintained 'as usual' even as obsidian eclipsed it; erica calls it her hobby work.
- 2013–2019minecraft plugins · endedorebfuscator and openinv — server-side minecraft plugins licat maintained for years. the plugin-ecosystem instincts (and the licat handle, from mabinogi) predate obsidian by a decade.
- 2013-09nokia imaging hackathon · endedthe waterloo cs news item — second-years shida li and rudi chen win the nokia imaging hackathon in lund, sweden.
- 2023–silverland · continuingsilverland — her public obsidian publish garden, themed in flexoki: essays on understanding and epistemics, the forces framework, music patterns, and the running count of 172/1000 dishes.
- –quantified chef · continuingthe quantified-chef repo — 'track your cooking!' — plus the 1,000-dishes project she documents on silverland.
the ecosystem's quests
- 2021–obsidian october · continuingobsidian october — the annual community build event for plugins, themes, and vault setups; the judging rosters read like a team pipeline.
- 2020–gems of the year · continuinggems of the year — the annual awards for plugins, themes, and contributors, informally run from 2020 and formally named in 2021.
- 2021–obsidian roundup · continuingeleanor konik's weekly community newsletter — third-party scaffolding the ecosystem built for itself.
- 2020–linking your thinking · activelinking your thinking — nick milo's course and video operation; 'obsidian for beginners' alone carries 2.4m views.
- 2021–style settings · activemgmeyers' style settings — the plugin that made theme customization accessible, ~2k stars, and the reason half the themes on the directory are configurable.
- 2021–dataview · activedataview — michael brenan's query-engine plugin that treated a vault like a database years before bases made it core.
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.