CardOverflow VS pqm

I tried to build StackOverflow for flashcards (i.e. spaced repetition with collaboration as a first class feature.) After working on it on nights/weekends for ~2 years, I realized my architecture was shit. I started out with Blazor + F# + PostGres, but eventually I realized that syncing offline client DBs to the cloud was a very nontrivial problem. So I moved to event sourcing. Turns out that's not much better - I started to write my own IndexedDB wrapper, then said "you're a moron" and switched to CouchDb/PouchDb/RxDB. I also wanted to support plugins. I thought I figured that out with Blazor, but eventually I realized that more powerful plugins would want to manipulate the DOM directly. Blazor's virtual DOM kills that possibility. So, I'm off the dotnet ecosystem (I can't express how very, very sad I am to leave F#) and onto Typescript + SolidJS. I would've gone ReScript but that's tightly coupled to React which uses the VDom. Perhaps I should be using Svelte - I'm not solid on any of this new architecture yet. So my project has not yet entirely failed... I just realized I spent ~2 years on the wrong architecture.

The carcass of my attempt in dotnet: https://github.com/dharmaturtle/cardoverflow

FWIW I'm building something from the ground up that'll have this sharing/social thang built in. I also (obviously) think that there's a need for collaborative tools for building and sharing cards, along with perhaps ways to publish your progress. For various reasons I'm not building it on Anki though.

I'm building the above thing here: https://github.com/dharmaturtle/cardoverflow

Not only considered - I'm actively using it. You'll find people complaining about IndexedDB's API all over the internet. They're right - it's remarkably terrible. I'm using Dexie.JS as a wrapper over it.

I'm working on an open source edtech website. Prelaunch, but I wouldn't mind talking shop. In the western suburbs.

My dude, speaking as someone who gets really happy when they find a functor in their code, I fully disagree with your last paragraph. You can do FP without knowing anything about the theory. Telling someone that they should read up on a dry, boring academic topic in order to be a better programmer is kinda a nonstarter. When you start throwing around stuff like "You should learn category theory and homotopy theory to really understand FP" only drives people away - it doesn't inspire curiosity (in most people).

I'm working on an edtech thing - think StackOverflow/Wikipedia for flashcards. Basically, there's a way to remember an exponential amount of information - it just isn't popular because the existing software is terrible. Despite the terrible software, it is very popular among med students, since they have to cram so much info into their heads.

> I also hate that the anki shared decks web site does not encourage collaboration...

Dude, I'm building exactly this. I'm not basing it on git for various reasons, but I am using event sourcing, and git is basically event sourcing for code. My system will (eventually) allow pull requests, comments, upvotes/downvotes, and all kinds of community shenanigans on flash cards. It's months away from release... but here's the repo if you wanna have a look: https://github.com/dharmaturtle/cardoverflow

Here's another link that I recently saw about something related which is most likely not interesting for you. Just in case: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/nalar8/open_source_web_port_of_anki/ which is about https://github.com/dharmaturtle/CardOverflow

OK, found https://github.com/dharmaturtle/CardOverflow

I made a spreadsheet add-on similar to the pint library for python (dimensional analysis) based on my own open source JS library (https://github.com/GhostWrench/pqm). Website is still up: https://ghostwrench.net/convertplus.html.

To me it seemed like the perfect way to get a solo app up and running because Google was going to run all the sever stuff and I could just cash in. The app never really got off the ground and by the time I realized that Big G really doesn’t want to make it easy for any schmuck to run a profit generating app using their servers and their technology and it wasn’t worth the maintenance effort to keep up with the constant requests to update the app. I think it is no longer available on the GSuite store as of a few months ago. I think my biggest mistakes were as follows:

1) I needed a business/marketing oriented co-founder. I underestimated how difficult that job is and overestimated my ability to do it.

2) I wanted to charge too much for the app. I didn’t want to undersell myself and get caught in a trap of not making enough to keep up with maintenance. I went too far the other way. I think maybe a $50-$60 on time charge would have been appropriate, instead of requiring a subscription. This is an easy fix, but I would had to re-do my marketing effort and see #1

3) Built before I tested the market. I convinced myself that just asking a few of my engineering friend would use it was enough. Again, this is probably a symptom of #1

4) I was mentally unprepared to deal with failure and I lost motivation to keep working on the project when things didn’t go as I expected.

5) I underestimated how much people actually use spreasheet add-ons. There really isn’t a thriving market and most of the really popular apps are a utility attached to another popular standalone project.

6) Probably should have targeted Excel rather than Sheets, because the market is simply bigger.

I think if the stars align, I would like to give this project another go. I don’t think it has totally failed rather than just gone dormant, but I need a better strategy for round 2!

There are heaps of libraries for all languages because it is a fairly fun and straight forward project. I personally created this one because I was frustrated with how slow and clunky the existing javascript libraries were:

https://github.com/GhostWrench/pqm

Also, I open sourced just the unit database (in JSON format) for anyone interested in making their own version:

https://github.com/GhostWrench/unitdb