Fails

Although focusing on successes is great and all, I want to make a little space for some of my failed endeavours. So to some extent, this is like a project graveyard. I will describe what I was trying to build based on notes, code and or other efforts that I documented.

Selfime:

When: 2014-2015

What: A notes app with superpowers.

Points:

• I didn’t like the landscape of notes apps as far as information organisation.
• I wanted to create an app that slowly gets to know me (Self-I-Me…), automatically arganises information based on hashtags or something.
• I wanted to create an app that uses hash tags (or something) trigger events. Say for instance, I’m writing this post and I want to post it to my WordPress blog. What if all I needed to do to accomplish that is just type #wordpress(@'Anphase Blog') and boom! This very text goes to the Anphase Blog.

Come to think of it, Reddit bots kinda do something like that. Typing something like “RemindMe! in 24hrs” triggers a bot that will remind the commenter of the thread. We don’t really see powerful actions in notes apps beyond calendar actions and tagging.

Why did it fail: I never made any progress on it beyond registering the domain SelfIMe.com only to let it expire when I realised it had nothing to do with the ideas I was building around it.

Future: I think there are some interesting ideas I can salvage from this. Maybe I’ll pick it up some day - there’s always room for yet another notes app.

Memory.bike

When: 2017-2018

What: A bicycle for the mind

Points:

• I wanted to organise my book reviews and things I was learning
• To accomplish this I wanted to create a syntax for writing/recording information in such a way that it could be digested intelligently. For instance, in writing my notes I could write notes with questions and answers such as:

  {*html}
  {q}
    What does WAI-ARIA stand for?
  {a}
    Web Accessibility Initiative Accessible Rich Internet Applications
  {/a}
  

  These notes can then be presented as a question and answer in Anki cards or something.

• In my learning go via the cool Gophercises I worked through a quiz CLI that does a bit of this using questions and answers stored in a CSV file. My code is on Github but implementation details are in the Gophercises lesson 1. They are free and pretty fun, you should check them out if you’re interested in learning Go by doing.

(WIP… to be continued…)