Tech – Tools & Craft – Notion

Thoughts on the future of work,
from the people and teams creating it.

Tech

Tech

— How we’re building Notion, block by block.

how-we-built-offline

How we made Notion available offline

Offline Mode was Notion's most requested feature for years, but building it meant solving tough technical challenges around our unique block architecture. Here's the architecture and data model that made it possible.

Raymond Xu

Software Engineer, Notion

notion-mcp-tech-blog

Notion’s hosted MCP server: an inside look

Earlier this year, we got requests for a Notion MCP server that would let AI agents work directly with Notion workspaces. Here’s how we built it, from our initial open-source experiment to today’s hosted solution with custom tools designed specifically for AI workflows.

Kenneth Sinder

Software Engineer, Notion

Speed, Structure, and Smarts: The Notion AI Way

How we combine AI with structured data to deliver a best-in-class work product.

Sarah Sachs

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How we evolve code: Notion’s “ratcheting” system using custom ESLint rules

Our custom ESLint approach gradually modernizes code without slowing development. By systematically tracking violations and distributing the workload of fixing them, we maintain high code-quality standards while keeping engineers focused on what matters most.

Ankit Sardesai, Jake Teton-Landis

Gretchen - Emojis

How we built custom emoji

Our challenge: load millions of personalized, sometimes animated emojis into a workspace without breaking everything. As we strive to make Notion the happiest workspace on earth, it was a technical puzzle worth solving.

Henry Chiu

Hero for Data Catalog

A brief history of Notion’s data catalog

From chaos to clarity: How Notion transformed its data catalog for better efficiency and insights with TypeScript, JSON Schema, and LLMs.

Wendy Jiao, Parul Baweja, Evelyn Wou

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Observability for Notion’s Redis Queue

Enhancing infrastructure visibility and performance with a queue proxy service

Grace Nguyen, Xiaoya He

Engineering

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How we sped up Notion in the browser with WASM SQLite

You might have noticed that browsing Notion recently got faster. It's 20 percent faster, to be precise. Here's how we did it.

Carlo Francisco

Software engineer

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Building and scaling Notion’s data lake

In the past 3 years Notion's data has expanded 10x. Here's how we built our data lake to manage this growth.

XZ Tie, Nathan Louie, Thomas Chow, Darin Im, Abhishek Modi, Wendy Jiao

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Notion on Android is now more than twice as fast to launch

Here's our approach to optimizing app startup and our ongoing efforts to enhance the mobile experience for all our Android users.

Karn Saheb

Engineering