Fails

Successes get most of the attention, so this page makes room for failed endeavours: a small project graveyard reconstructed from notes, code, and whatever documentation survived.

Selfime:

When: 2014-2015

What: A notes app with superpowers.

Points:

• I didn’t like how existing notes apps organised information.
• I wanted an app that would slowly get to know me (Self-I-Me), automatically organising information from hashtags or similar cues.
• I wanted hashtags to trigger actions. For example, what if adding #wordpress(@'Anphase Blog') to a note were enough to publish it to my WordPress blog?

Reddit bots do something similar: typing “RemindMe! in 24hrs” triggers a reminder. We still don’t see many powerful actions in notes apps beyond calendar events and tagging.

Why did it fail: I never made progress beyond registering SelfIMe.com, then letting it expire when I realised the domain had little to do with the ideas behind it.

Future: There are still ideas worth salvaging. Maybe I’ll pick it up someday. There’s always room for another notes app.

Updated September 2026: After spending years on this fails page, Selfime is alive. It became a meditation app built around recording in your own voice. A different use for the name, but still self - I - me. I wrote about the journey in The Long Game.

Memory.bike

When: 2017-2018

What: A bicycle for the mind.

Points:

• I wanted to organise my book reviews and the things I was learning.
• I wanted a writing syntax that software could digest intelligently. A note could contain questions and answers such as:

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

  Those notes could then become question-and-answer cards in Anki or a similar tool.

• While learning Go through Gophercises, I built a quiz CLI that does a little of this with questions and answers stored in a CSV file. My code is on GitHub; the implementation follows Gophercises lesson 1. The lessons are free, practical, and fun.

Work in progress.

Updated September 2026: The memory lives on! I’ve just picked up the memory.bike domain again, and the project is starting to come alive.