Three years ago today, I was reading the book Factfulness by Hans Rosling, and I wrote in my journal that I’d like a program that would add Anki-like spaced repetition to the notes I was making about the book. I wrote:
I’m thinking of maintaining a simple text file with Markdown syntax, one bulleted line per “fact” I want to remember from a book. Markdown-underline something like this and it becomes a phrase that gets elided for an Anki card.
That idea turned into Grail Diary, which I still use today to take notes about the books I read. The project has been a huge personal success. I write personal programs as a way to teach myself things, and by working on Grail Diary I cemented knowledge into my brain about piece tables, incremental packrat parsing, spaced repetition, sqlite, and iCloud document storage. I also have 760 prompts about the 66 books I’ve read in the past 3 years, and by regularly reviewing those cards I’ve remembered the material I’ve read these past three years way better than what I’d read for the prior 44. It was also the start of my journey into educational technology, which lead me to leave Facebook and join Duolingo.
Of all of my side projects, Grail Diary feels like it’s got the most potential to be useful for someone other than myself. However, it’s got one huge problem at its core: When I was working on Grail Diary, I was confused on if I was writing a digital Commonplace Book (specifically designed for storing quotes and other things you want to remember about the books you read) or if I was writing a general-purpose notes app with a spaced-repetition feature. As a result, it’s this strange mishmash of features. I doubt anyone else would understand why the software in its current form behaves the way it does.
Who knows… maybe by the time Grail Diary turns 5, I’ll have picked “Commonplace Book” or “General-purpose notes app” as the primary identity for the project and it will have another user. Time will tell!