Paying Off My Debt

Anki Suggestions
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Not sure if this type of post is permitted. If not, feel free to delete it.

Introduction

Hi all,

Thanks to Anki and SuperMemo, I have finished Medical School with fantastic grades!

For Anki and AnkiDroid, I owe Dae and David Allison and all those who contributed (many to list!). For SuperMemo 18, I owe Dr. Wozniak. Without those tools, I would not have been able to do it with such extreme ease.

Problem

I have been very frustrated that my programming knowledge was not good enough to help with either Anki or AnkiDroid. Though I tried to contribute through reporting bugs, finance, translating, and promoting AnkiMobile/AnkiDroid… it always felt so little.

I know that there is the Anki development guide, but I was never able to truly make a good start due to time restraints.

But… now that I would start to have an income, I would like to contribute and help ease off the pressure.

Ideas for paying off the debt

I do not know what Anki and AnkiDroid need the most. Is it help, or is it finance? Or maybe something else: happy to be privately contacted by developers (PGP is available)!

My ideas were as follows (best to worst):

  1. Fund a new, more detailed development guide (preferably by a long-term contributor). One for Anki and another for AnkiDroid. +/- detailed addon guide.
  2. Simply keep donating. The problem with this one is: though I have already bought it for my students, I cannot buy it for myself more than once :confused:
  3. Pay someone to teach me a few things to get started, and then publish my notes for people to read and learn from (I think AI would be able to help as soon as I have some basic foundation). The issue with this one is that my time is limited. So, sadly, I am not sure if I can contribute much.

Take your time!

And once again, thank you for your hard work; I have never taken Anki nor AnkiDroid for granted. If I could print your names on my degree, I absolutely would.

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I think the official Anki is not accepting donations(their income is only from AnkiMobile), AnkiDroid is being developed by volunteers so they are accepting donations.

Most Anki developers are volunteers so they are not looking for paid work(as far as I know there are only one or two) so if you want someone to tell you something I think you will get more info if you ask a question in this forum.

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(I was considering replying privately, but we strongly value transparency).

Views here are my own, much more self-serving than usual [which makes me a little uncomfortable].

Firstly, I TRULY appreciate the thought that you’ve put into this post (& congratulations on your success!!)

Short-term: Money/recurring income.

Right now, the donations which AnkiDroid receive aren’t sufficient to pay minimum wage for the contributors who dedicate the most time to the project.

I receive:

  • Open Collective: ~$200-400/mo, which works out to $2-4/hour
    • For reference, we’re often the fastest growing collective on the site. This is a systemic problem within Open Source. We TRULY appreciate the donations
  • GitHub Sponsors: $30/mo [no fees]
  • Patreon: $27/mo [much less due to fees]

I’d like to dedicate significantly more time, but I can’t for financial reasons [the above doesn’t come close to paying rent]. I’ve made significant sacrifices, and I’m happy to continue to make these sacrifices, but truthfully: I’ve reduced time, but the amount of time that I’m currently putting in is still unsustainable.

I believe other established contributors would be willing to increase the amount of time spent if/when we hit financial sustainability, and this would be the most effective use of time/resources.

To answer your question:

(1 & 3): Assume that contributors are working on the aspects of the app which they feel the most passionately about [& these typically align with high impact changes]. Offering money to do things which are much lower down the priority list is definitely a positive, but this may end up taking time away from higher priority items.

  • Short term: Financing
  • Medium term: Guidance on respectfully soliciting donations from people similar to yourself [probably in a similar manner to alumni fundraising]

The above needs to be done with care: at the end of the day, there’s a finite amount of things to do, infinite growth is unsustainable, and we don’t want to (EDIT to complete sentence: grow to the point where excessive admin/significant waste occurs).

In terms of a developer guide. We do Google Summer of Code and Hacktoberfest, which provide an annual opportunity to improve our onboarding process for new developers. Improving onboarding is a gradual process of refinement & clearing roadblocks.

Thank you again for your kind words and this post, and thank you for reading.

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You used both Anki and SuperMemo? What was the reason behind that? If you are a US Medical Student, I assume you used the AnKing decks. Was there anything else you used in addition to it? How much would you say that Anki/SuperMemo made learning easier by?

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I agree with Shige, Anki is a volunteer job, be wary of anyone who asks for money to do something with it

I have already made more than 10 addons for Anki, in addition to several decks for my country (Brazil) for free and since it is a free program, I would never ask for money for it

You can see my work on this page
https://ankiweb.net/shared/by-author/2123127537

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That’s a lot more than the average user! Your contributions are already appreciated, as are your kind words.

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Thank you all for the replies and suggestions.

I hope to set up something in the near future to help with funding Anki. In the meantime, I will continue to do what I can.

Once again, thank you for your hardwork.

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Med school felt like so:

  • You have an assignment to write the alphabet 1000 times
  • The deadline is tomorrow

Is it doable? Maybe.

What if, however, you had a stamp-like device that could write all 26 letters with just one stamp? Well, you would make MUCH less than 1000 moves…

SRS is the stamp-like device.

Yes. (Almost) every single day!

Going back to the alphabet: imagine if you had some kind of a clock that would remind you when to stamp (so that you can spread the work equally over the day without overloading yourself)? SuperMemo (Plan) is that clock.

SuperMemo worked like a toolbox. It has one indispensable tool, and that is called SuperMemo Plan. I have summarised how it works on these slides here (my version is buggy and lacks quite a lot of features, but it would provide you with around 50-60% of the original SuperMemo Plan functionality).

I also used SuperMemo Sleep Chart to monitor my sleep during medical school.

Here is a video example (opens Google Drive)

Another thing was that SuperMemo was great at scheduling topics (through incremental reading). My use-case is a little different to the traditional, but still follows the same concept. See this video (opens Google Drive) for an example.

My biggest problem with SuperMemo was the lack of extensibility and portability. If you use a lot of image occlusions, I think you should stick to Anki since it is much more mature (though, SuperMemo has been extended by the great work of Alexis: GitHub - supermemo/SuperMemoAssistant: A companion app for SuperMemo 17-18 which extends its functionalities through plugins.). If you travel a lot, use Anki (so that you can do your reps on your phone/tablet).

I waffled a lot, but I hope you found this to be of some use. If you have any questions, I am happy to answer them.
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I believe that we can contribute not only by donating money to Anki, but also by reducing their costs.

For instance, the costs for cloud which is used for Anki synchronization. They provide it for free and that’s great!
Cloud bills can easily be thousands of USD per month (as I can see my employers’ AWS bills). If we keep our collections as small as possible, we can consume less cloud resources and slightly reduce Anki cloud bills.

It was my motivation to create the “Note Size” addon. As I know, there are no other tools to monitor your collection size (only “Collection” and “Media” size in Anki web).

I hope this addon will help people to be aware how big their notes are. For example, it’s easy to paste a 4MB image when a 50KB is enough. And you can even don’t notice that you inserted a such big file.

I’m trying to make it as convenient as possible and intend to improve it continuously. However, it’s not much popular among users now. I guess they just don’t know about it and why their collection size can be important.

If you also consider this idea meaningful, you can share it with your students, for instance. Any feedback about using the addon is also can be very useful for development.

image
image931Ă—904 179 KB

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Could you post those video examples to YouTube or post them again? They aren’t working for me.

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Great addon. Thank you for sharing!

We’re not using Ankiweb because we are mindful of the costs. We have agreed that we would only start using it if it were to become a paid service.

Instead, I have set up a local private server for us to upload and sync our collections!

But, nice addon nonetheless!

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Plan: Tour of SM Plan.mp4

Incremental Reading: Using IR.mp4