Building a Memory Machine for My Mom (and then my whole family)
The Problem
There are things I want to know about my mom that I’ve never asked — not because I don’t care, but because the moment never quite arrives, or I assume there will be more time, or life moves fast enough that I forget until something reminds me again. I suspect most people have a version of this problem. The questions pile up quietly, and the people who could answer them get older, and at some point you realize the window is shorter than you thought.
So I built a small tool to fix it.
What It Does
Reich Memories sends questions to family members on a randomized schedule — a few per week, via email (hopefully Signal eventually as well) — and saves their replies to a private searchable archive.
Questions like “What nickname did you have growing up?” or “What work did you find most meaningful?” go out automatically, and the recipient answers whenever they want, just by replying to the message. No account to create, no app to download, nothing to learn. It’s designed to feel like a normal conversation rather than a form they’re filling out, because I think that’s when people actually tell you things.
Over a few weeks it grew into something more complete: threaded follow-ups so you can dig deeper on an interesting answer, per-user privacy controls for responses that aren’t meant for everyone, comment threads, and an HTML export designed for printing into something book-like.
What I Learned
I’m not a software engineer — I’m a business analyst who’s gotten comfortable building things with Claude as a collaborator. I wrote the requirements, reviewed the code, and made the product decisions; Claude handled most of the implementation. What surprised me wasn’t how well that workflow held up, but what happened when I actually deployed it.
Eventually I thought “why not ask the rest of my family to contribute (including myself)? Having a repository of family memories, accrued over time with feedback and comments and reactions seems like a fun, private place to find things that you have in common, didn’t know about, want to learn more about, and what made them who they are.
What’s next
Quite a bit of tokens and cash expenditures later, I’ve got a stable product that is a fun window into snippets of my family’s life that will be a great way to chronicle our lives and accomplishments and failures.
I’ll keep improving it slowly with quality of life things that get suggested (but maybe after requesting a few bucks for the effort lol)
Screenshots as of v0.8.0
