It was terrible.
So I made another one.
If Mnemo looks like a study app that appeared a few weeks ago, I have some deeply embarrassing screenshots to show you.
How it started
I wanted to
study medicine.
Somewhere along the way,
I acquired a software project.
I’m nineteen. I’ve wanted to study medicine since I was about ten, and I’ve been messing with programming and electronics since I was twelve.
At school, I became the person quizzing classmates before tests. I liked helping someone get unstuck. I was much worse at being relaxed about my own grades.
I tried more study tools than was reasonable. There was always something I wanted to change, so I started making my own.
This seemed like a reasonably small project at the time.
The first one actually shipped.
I was fourteen. I published a terminal program that turned notes into a quiz.
In this screenshot, it decides the missing word is ‘what’, marks my answer wrong, and ends with ‘maybe study more lol’. The product voice was finished before the product.
Then I discovered sidebars.
The quiz became flashcards. Then I added study goals, notes, and dashboards. I kept adding things I’d wanted in the apps I was using.
The quizzes were still listed as ‘Comming soon’. Somewhere in all of this, it became Mnemo.
I kept restarting.
I’d redesign it, rewrite it, get annoyed with it, and start again. Some versions barely got past the interface. Others got much further before I abandoned them.
This was one of the later notes editors. I was still rebuilding it.
And yeah, there were more.
These are just the ones I could still find. Most of the really old ones are probably lost somewhere.
The version I use now.
I use Mnemo for my own studying now. My chemistry notes used to live in Notion. Now they’re here.
Somewhere along the way, Mnemo also became open source. It’s free, the code is public, and your notes live on your computer.
People I’ve never met now use it, file bugs, suggest features and occasionally send code. That’s still slightly strange considering this started as a terminal quiz I made at fourteen.
Mnemo isn’t finished.
If something annoys you, tell us. If you know how to fix it, even better.
Design, documentation, testing and translations need work too.
