Dion Almaer

Software, Development, Products

The holy grail of a Web SDK

As I sit here watching WWDC, I get that same feeling. Everything is vertically integrated. The layering of the SDKs, with much that is shared, and then differences for iOS vs. Mac vs. tv, etc. You can’t hope but look at the Web and think “oh man, the paradox of choice over here… with so much evolving and changing to keep up with!”

The old analogy comparing dictatorships vs. democracies continues to ring somewhat true.

I have made the mistake in the past of wanting to chase the holy grail of a Web SDK that has the benefits of a unified stack that takes care of everything. However, I have learned that this is a holy grail in the sense that it can’t actually exist on the Web in the form that you think of.

The quest is wrong. We shouldn’t try to be like Apple, and compete in the same way with a history and ecosystem that isn’t setup to succeed in that form.

Well, what is the right quest?

  • We should embrace the ecosystem, and the players lower in the stack (e.g. browsers shipping the web platform) should embrace the fact that so much evolution happens on top. Plan for this. Be malleable and modular, and allow for shifts and changes. Most of all, be enablers for the stack on top.
  • The web platform can absolutely do better with undergrounding gains that come from the evolution in user space. The Web is a meta-platform that ships with browsers. Anything in user space is fairly costly, but has the trade-off where it can evolve quickly (downloading libraries / updating libraries).
  • It is a fair criticism that the Web has many primitives baked in for documents, but leaves much of app development to user space. If you build something truly app-y, you can end up somewhat frustrated. It’s improving all the time, and there are things that are amazing about building web apps, but there is a ton to improve here.
  • In general, there is value in seeing what primitives are needed to help the various types of experiences that users choose on the Web. It’s so broad, and the needs for content, commerce, apps, and games are different and yet share a lot.

I am seeing a lot of progress in areas that push us forward:

  • WebAssembly as a lot level runtime for client AND server that can change the game, opening up a TON of room for the ecosystem to innovate.
  • Massive CSS improvements with container queries and new helpful syntax bumps, and losing the need for preprocessors for obvious changes (this is all good undergrounding!!)
  • Apple hiring and catching up with app related APIs (e.g. Web Push, making PWA not be somewhat broken). There is still so much that is needed here, both in WebKit catching up and also the entire Web pushing forward. Dogfooding with Active Recall is very humbling!

Let’s lean in. Platform folks work together and build hooks and capabilities that those on top can innovate with. App devs and framework/library folks, share what you need. Together, push on where we want the Web to go and use the fact that it isn’t run by one company.

The rise of the extensible app platforms

I was excited to see Kenneth and his team ship the public beta of the Stripe App platform:

I was excited to dive into it, as I know that the developer experience would be high quality, and I wasn’t proven wrong. Great CLI experience. Great docs. What you have come accustomed too. As I read through the anatomy of what you are able to do with apps, I could see a lot of similarities with Shopify’s app platform.

The body of a Shopify store

Let’s dive into some anatomy. When chatting with one of my favorite new PMs, Ben Sehl, he shared an analogy of how a store is like a body… a metaphor which I will now abuse to kingdom come:

When you create a Shopify store, you get a simple, yet fully functioning experience… like a human with simple attire, let’s call them Shopi. How do you want to take this base and make it your own?

The first step that products and platforms give you is the ability to tweak the look and feel. This is where you start with theming. You can dress up Shopi in many ways, and make them unique. You can make the clothing yourself, or you can find manufacturers (theme developers!) that have pre-built quality goods that you can then customize from there. As the platform matures, so does the supporting ecosystem.

Now, there is a lot that you can do with the look and feel, but you quickly find that you need richer customizations. This is when the app platform comes in (often called plugins/extensions). The platform controls what can be extended. Can you replace limbs? The heart? The brain? How do you do this in a way that doesn’t destroy the body? A great platform allows for layers of extensibility, which is as much art as science. This is the type of work I love doing, and I am excited to see Shopify continue to refine these layers.

Shopify Flow: Helping you automate workflow

Systems such as nervous, circulatory etc can be the glue that makes everything work well. This is the platform doing its job at regulating everything. Connecting things and making sure any one extension doesn’t blow things up. Acting as an engine for connectors and workflows like Shopify Flow.

If you look deeper at Shopify and the Stripe platform, you see a variety of surfaces that offer extension points… e.g. the Stripe Dashboard, or the Shopify Admin. These surfaces have specific extensions with rich context. They offer embeddable UI points, with building blocks to have your extensions fit in (e.g. components that feel consistent for the users of that surface). These extensible app platforms have a variety of surfaces. In Shopify, you can ship an app that enhances the Admin for merchants, or Checkout for users, and more.

NOTE: I was particularly excited to see that Stripe is using the open source remote-ui library that we created and use in Shopify:

Ok. So, at this point, Shopi, is looking great with awesome clothing, a bionic arm, Tony Stark’s heart, and AR glasses. But you may want to customize EVEN more. This is where custom storefronts come in for Shopify. You can tie into the nervous system still via API (GraphQL or REST), but the body can be entirely different… with you building many more layers as you eschew the defaults. It doesn’t even have to be a binary choice… you should be able to weave together custom and the core headful experience.

I look forward to a future where merchants can customize their own Shopi to be exactly what they need, working with the foundations that Shopify gives them, and the creativity and skill of the developer ecosystem to provide apps, themes, and custom storefront work.

I’m also excited to see more extensible app platforms such as Stripe’s, and we share ideas and technology to raise all of the boats.

Extensibility is going to go from changes to the appearance, to bionic improvements, to providing genetic modifications.

Active Recall now out of beta and open for all learners!

I have been working with a great friend on a learning tool that gives you super powers, and I am very excited for it to launch today. I have been dogfooding it for some time but it’s also just the beginning of the journey to help people succeed through learning and retaining knowledge. The tool is Active Recall, and people are using it to become language proficient, study for exams, retain key knowledge for work, and so much more.

This is my story using it as a lifelong learner.

Active Recall Knowledge Base
Active Recall Knowledge Base

I wish I understood the power of spaced repetition and active recall as a kid. I believe it would have been life changing, and that it would have resulted in better results in school, life, and work… and all the while saving me time.

We know about the value of compound interest in growing wealth, and the best time to start compounding if you haven’t already, is today.

This is the story I would love to be able to time travel with, to share with a much younger me, and I hope it is helpful as you start your compounding journey.

How I became a lifelong learner

When Walmart acquired my small startup over a decade ago, I remember reconciling the fact that I was brand new to retail, with the knowledge of how Walmart was famously data driven. I knew I needed to up my game as I dove into this new domain, and pondered how.

My wife is a teacher, and we have discussed and debated learning and education the entire time we have known each other. This resulted in a deep dive into the research on how to best study. How can you optimize your time, and get results?

Leitner System

The magic of spaced repetition

The first step on the journey was spaced repetition, and learning how I had gone so wrong with my study habits. Put in the work. Keep repeating. Read and re-read. It turns out that this is wrong-thinking, that is wasteful of time, and doesn’t even work!

Once you start digging, you find that there is a lot of research out there on learning, and books such as Make It Stick bring it all together. It turns out there are two important pieces to the puzzle of long lasting memory. The first piece is to ensure that you are quizzing yourself vs simply reviewing. This forces you to actively recall the material which strengthens your memory.

The second piece is about being quizzed right at a time when you struggle to reach for the answer. This is where the “spaced” in “spaced repetition” comes in. To serve the question up at the right time, the gap in time grows longer when you find the answer, and shortens when you have forgotten it.

After I read this, I admit…. I didn’t quite believe it. Surely constant repetition is better? But it turned out to work wonders in practice. Previously, when I would re-read a passage, I would unwittingly deceive myself, as growing familiarity with the text comes to feel like mastery of the content. Now, when I spaced out the study with larger and larger intervals, my recall was drastically superior.

Thus, the life changing habit was born…

The Active Recall habit

The Dashboard

I have a morning routine, and it includes ~five minutes of using Active Recall as I hit “Study All”. It connects me to the knowledge that I want to have available. It gives me confidence that I have access to my knowledge, which will help me though-out my day:

“The very processes that teachers care about most–critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving–are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory (not just found in the environment).” — Daniel T. Willingham

What shocks me to this day, is that it only takes me a few minutes, thanks to the power of the exponential backoff of the prompting interval.

As I go through the day, I am capturing knowledge as I go. I don’t worry about taking time right then to make the content perfect, as I often don’t have time right away…. so I focus on capturing it and putting it into the Unsorted folder for later gardening.

At a later time, usually when at my laptop, I go through the unsorted content. I clean it up, and I use some tricks to make it more effective for recall and synthesis, such as:

  • Your brain casts around for answers, it results in generation which creates and firms up associations. Build associations that make sense to you, and your brain can find the path easier.
  • Much of our brain is tied to visual processing. Lean into that power, and use images in your content to build association. A picture is definitely worth a thousand words.
  • If you think of an emotional moment in your life, it’s probably quite easy to visualize. Emotions result in strong association, so lean into that too. One example that tells the tale is how I put names to faces. When I met someone named Justin Toupin, I put his information into Active Recall and pictured him being hit in the face with two bowling pins. A lil gruesome I know, but it gets across the point. I never forgot Justin Toupin again!
  • Create more questions to hit the knowledge from multiple angles. Find the atoms and build from there. An example here is studying the history of World Cup football (soccer for some of you ;). I start simply: For a given year, which country hosted the World Cup? Then I added more knowledge… which country won? Who was the other team in the final? What was the score? Finally I can have compound questions where a given year results in the full score between both teams and includes where it was played.

What do I put in my knowledge base?

After years of using Active Recall and growing my knowledge base, I have seen how it spreads to so many areas. My knowledge base now includes:

  • Work related. I am in technology, and I have probably the bulk of my cards here. I have general information on the technology I need to understand, engineering, product management, management in general, as well as the lessons I have learned throughout my career. I love how Active Recall is both a general purpose platform (you can put any information into it) but is also purpose built for certain content, such as code!
  • General knowledge. There is a ton of knowledge that I want to capture and save, on all kinds of topics. When I took a boating exam, I put the information into Active Recall and it is always fresh in my memory. Geography, Science, Health, History, Sport, and on and on. When I read a non-fiction book, I now capture all of the lessons. In the past I would read something and forget 99% of it after the fact… after all that time that I invested in reading it! Now? The important information is always there.
  • Personal information. Information on people, both my loved ones (What was the name of my uncles first hairdressing salon? What instruments could my Grandad play?), new connections (What was the name of $NEW_PERSONS children?), and… myself (Who was my favorite teacher? How much solar power does our house produce? What is the silent Notepad.exe story?) It is always fun to get a “tickle” when this information pops up. This is why I often put information in that isn’t a Question / Answer…. but just pops up as I enjoy having it back in my consciousness! Quotes from things my kids did and said is a particular pleasure 🙂

Over time, you may not need all of this information top of mind. This is when I suspend that content. Now, it’s available to me via search, but doesn’t come up in studying.

Active Recall gives me what feels like a super power. I am so excited for you to start and share your journey. There are so many other tips and tricks that I am excited to share, but for now… welcome to lifelong learning!

The right thing to do, is the right thing to do.