TL;DR: AMA about the full-text search functionality and general experiences with using the extension.
Hello everybody. I'm Jon - one of the lead technical contributors to the Memex extension. I have been involved in the project for roughly 18 months and watched as it has changed and grown over that time through the hard work of many different individuals.
I would be happy to provide answers to any questions regarding the full-text search and how we enable it for each web page your visit. I have spent a large portion of my time at Memex focused solely on the search and, with the help of some fantastic technologies like Dexie (http://dexie.org) and IndexedDB, we have arrived at what we believe to be one of the fastest in-browser full-text history search engines. However saying that we hope to iterate on and improve important aspects of our search - such as results accuracy - in the near future.
I would also love to hear any feedback you might have from your own experiences with using or having the extension installed in general - we're always aiming to improve that experience.
A lot of software to attempt to make the boring repitition-based stuff more fun, for things like grammatical patterns and vocab. Anki (free) is my all-time favourite. Usually use a popular pre-made deck to learn what's recommended, and then have my own one going which I add a new flash-card to whenever I encounter a new word in my daily life. Review them in the evening. Something new I found out recently is that Anki has plugins [0]. AnkiStrategy [1] is currently making sure I get my daily review in.
Duolingo [2] (free) also helps with getting a grasp on basic grammar and vocab, but doesn't support many Asian languages (Vietnamese just got released and Indonesian is in progress).
Memrise [3] (free) is similar to Anki but has more of a modern, community-based app feel. A lot of great user-generated content.
Skritter [4] (subscription, phone app) helped me a lot when I was learning to write and recognise Chinese characters. They also have Japanese Kanji version.
Software-wise, I am currently learning Vietnamese, and for that using my own Anki deck (30-40 cards a day) and 5 duolingo lessons (adding new vocab to Anki). Feel like I'm making fast enough progress, but I think integrating anymore software to my daily revision routine would be too much.
Then you need a lot of interaction with people, using what you have leant in that language to attempt to communicate. I think this is the most important part and where you'll learn the most. You'll be forced to practise your listening, speaking, drawing on vocab and grammar that you know and have to put mould them into an understandable sentence. You'll make mistakes and look like a fool, but that's just part of the learning process. Try to treat it like a bit of fun, and hopefully the people you're talking to will also.
My most used aliases would probably have to be for the git commands.
Each git command, I have aliased to the name of the command, preceded with the letter 'g'. So:
alias gadd='git add'
and so on.
I find the oh-my-zsh git plugin's default aliases to be unintuitive and hard to remember. Simply not having to type 'git ' before everything is good enough for me.
