Giant Shoulders
We didn't build this alone. Here are the vendors, platforms, and open-source projects that MyExternalCortex stands on.
AI
- Anthropic
- Language model — Claude powers the coaching and natural-language understanding in MyExternalCortex.
Infrastructure
- DigitalOcean *
- Virtual machine hosting and container registry.
- Cloudflare
- DNS, CDN, object storage (R2), and email routing. This site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages.
Messaging Platforms
Observability
- Grafana Cloud
- Metrics dashboards and alerting.
- HetrixTools
- Uptime monitoring.
DevOps
Runtime
- Python
- Application language.
- PostgreSQL
- Primary database. Encrypted at rest; off-site backups to R2 via rclone and age.
- FastAPI
- Web framework — dynamic routes and the internal API.
The Humans
The vendors above are easy to list. Harder to list, and more important, are the people whose ideas made all of it possible. We didn't build this alone — and neither did they.
Douglas Engelbart
In 1962 he published Augmenting Human Intellect and posed the question that still defines this work: what if we built computers to make people more capable rather than to replace them? He also invented the mouse, collaborative real-time editing, and hypertext windowing — decades before anyone else thought to. Everything here is downstream of that paper.
Vannevar Bush
In 1945 he imagined the Memex — a hypothetical device where a person's books, records, and communications could be stored and navigated by association rather than index. He called it "an extension of… memory." (As We May Think, The Atlantic, 1945.) MyExternalCortex is a Memex that talks back and sends you reminders.
Ted Nelson
Coined "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in the 1960s and spent decades building Xanadu — a document system where nothing was ever lost and every quote traced back to its source. He never shipped it at scale, but the ideas shipped in everything else.
Tim May
Co-founder of the Cypherpunks mailing list. His 1988 Crypto Anarchist Manifesto described a world where strong cryptography would make censorship and surveillance technically impossible.
John Perry Barlow
EFF co-founder. His 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace — written in anger at the Communications Decency Act — is the emotional constitution of the open internet. Still correct in principle; still worth reading.
Phil Zimmermann
Created PGP in 1991 and made strong encryption available to anyone with a computer. The US government investigated him for it. The encryption we use to protect user data at rest descends directly from the work he refused to stop doing.
Eric Raymond
The Cathedral and the Bazaar articulated why open, distributed development produces better software than closed hierarchies. Every open-source component in this stack carries that argument forward.
Richard Stallman
Founded the GNU Project in 1983 and wrote the GPL. The servers run GNU/Linux; the database is PostgreSQL; the language is Python. Almost none of the open-source software this stack depends on would exist in its current form without the copyleft licensing framework he invented.
For specifics on which services receive your personal data and why, see the MyExternalCortex Privacy Policy.
* The DigitalOcean link is a referral link. If you sign up through it, ARCOIS receives account credit at no cost to you.