Building a Memex (with Ruby!)
summary
A personal Memex built in Ruby actually stores and queries a timeline of life data: 10M data points, dozens of importers, Postgres as a graph DB. Live demo shows timeline queries, OCR on photos, bash history, GPS trails and restaurant receipts; UI in Electron/Ember with a Rails API. It works and is used daily, but importers are fragile — removed APIs, inconsistent export formats, missing timezones — and ingestion runs at about tens of thousands per day.
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chapters (23)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:32History
- 1:22World War II
- 2:29The Medics
- 4:38The Problem
- 5:07Gathering Data
- 5:53Live Demo
- 11:40Overview
- 12:58ETL
- 13:33Data
- 14:08No API
- 14:28Private API
- 16:44History API
- 19:05Asking myself this all the time
- 19:33Computer size
- 20:16Computer audience
- 20:38Hard problems
- 21:21Machine for the mind
- 21:45Personal devices
- 22:10Demo Notes
- 28:42Machine as Human
- 29:21Show Hands
- 29:50Questions
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