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Dion Almaer

Software, Development, Products

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

May 4, 2022

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!

Agency developers are underrated

April 21, 2022

You hear about the developer who created Wordle, or who went on to found a large company, or contributed an open source project to the commons. You don’t often hear about the agency developer, and they are both important and often on their own journeys.

The Value of Agency

Agencies, and consultants, are out there helping make businesses a reality. They deliver expertise when it doesn’t exist in house. They quickly expand the workforce and when done right, leave employees better equipped for growth.

By working at multiple companies in a domain, they can bring learnings, just as employees do when they change companies as they journey through their career.

I have found that high quality agencies are true experts who have bet their business on your platform, understand your competition, and know what your users really want. They build true empathy on what it takes to be successful.

If a platform company doesn’t have programs that include agencies as a tier one cohort they are probably doing it wrong. Ask yourself:

  • Am I training the developers at agencies to have a great understanding of what my platform or product offers? If they are asked, or are given freedom to choose, what solution to build on… would they choose you?
  • Are these developers external advocates in the community? Is there a community for them to show their chops, be rewarded for their knowledge, and celebrated?
  • Does the business team at agencies understand your offering and are you supporting them so they can be an extended sales force for you?
  • Do you have agencies not only servicing customers directly, but also through self-service opportunities (e.g. building apps / extensions / themes)?

At Shopify for example, our agencies are a vital part of our ecosystem, working with us on a joint mission to be merchant obsessed as a way to improve commerce for all. As I have dived into the ecosystem I am constantly finding agencies who deeply understand commerce and our platform, and are at the heart of delivering for our merchants to make their experiences unique and high quality.

We often talk about learning the tech, and the product, but learning commerce is an important key, and agencies have a lot of that knowledge. And once you understand the domain, competition, and environment, opportunities are unlocked.

The Entrepreneurial Path

Many of the solo or small team entrepreneurial developers that I have met came from a past life working at a merchant or at agencies. That was the training ground for their knowledge.

I have seen some common patterns when getting to know our developers, including one very strong one:

“I worked at an agency working on commerce sites for $YEARS. I started to notice that several of our clients were asking for $FEATURE, so I decided that I would build a Shopify app that delivers the feature and enables any merchant the ability to unlock it!”

— Pat

This takes so much risk away from your app development. For one, you can do work for clients directly to prove things out, and this gives you a direct line to a customer with the clear need (else they wouldn’t pay!) Then by working with other merchants you can learn what needs to be customizable, and then when ready an app version unlocks scale. It’s nice to get paid decent money from a merchant to do guaranteed work, and it’s nice to get money whenever someone installs your app.

This is yet another example of the power of de-risking app development with Shopify.

Thank you agencies, and those of you working at them. You are at the heart of it all.


Others in the series:

  • Tech writers are underrated
  • Project managers are underrated
  • QA engineers are underrated.

Web Developers are Shopify Developers

March 29, 2022

tl;dr By staying close to the Web platform, web developers can use all of their web knowledge, and use the latest features as they become available. There is a difference between using the web platform vs. web technologies, a subtle difference I have seen in the past. If we are doing it right, anyone can learn the technical side of Shopify quickly as it’s so familiar, and I have seen developers start as tinkerers through themes and small apps… but also see how the key component isn’t learning the tech, but learning commerce.


The Shopify Platform and Ecosystem is very aligned to the Web. We want to empower our merchants to be long term successful, and that means using all of the channels available, but ultimately driving the LTV with their customers, which means building the brand connection to them vs. aggregators such as Amazon. To do this, merchants need to differentiate, which is where developers come in. They make their commerce sites come to life. They empower the merchants through tooling. And this can be through the developer ecosystem providing functionality through their apps and themes, or through agencies helping customize directly, or with in house developers doing that work.

How can we enable this to work for our merchants and developers?

Stay close to the Web platform

The largest developer community in the world is the web developer community. It is as broad as is the Web itself, offering experiences from content to commerce to apps and even games. We want any web developer to look at building on the Shopify platform and instantly feel at home. You know how to work with backend APIs and JSON. You know how to handle layout. You know how to build on the Web.

If we are close to the web platform itself, Web developers have fewer technical details to learn before being productive, and spend more time on their commerce offerings.

And as the Web evolves, Shopify developers can quickly use new platform primitives without having to wait for the Shopify platform itself to use them.

Losing your Mojo

I have seen how this manifests in past lives. One example that tells the tale is the Mojo framework that you used to build the first applications for webOS. While it used JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, you couldn’t rock up with your jQuery and node knowledge and build something. You had to learn Mojo.

It’s tempting as a platform to build these abstractions, because you want to bake in knowledge of the platform into a “happy path” framework. But, be careful, as you are throwing away a huge number of advantages. One of the first things I did was hack webOS to allow me to just render a “normal” web application within the Mojo lifecycle.

With Shopify you can bring the knowledge of the Web with you.

Approachability

Mistakes the CSSWG wishes they could undohttps://t.co/Y4k9IAgjL2

I appreciate this honesty and transparency, it's humanizing and great for me (or any dev) to learn from

— Adam Argyle (@argyleink) October 22, 2019

Some of us, who have seen the Web evolve over a couple decades, may bemoan parts of the platform. But I still contend that it’s the best platform to approach and start playing with. Part of this is because of the various entries to “development” on the Web.

I know a huge number of developers who started by hacking on some HTML. Some took their WordPress site and played with the themes. Then they built some plugins. And their journey continued from there. I often did this myself! The first version of SeekingAlpha was WordPress. Then we hacked on it to become a blog network. I was new to PHP at the time, and although it didn’t tickle my brain like Ruby and Perl did before… I had to see what it was about, and I couldn’t argue that it wasn’t productive.

We have this approachability at Shopify. You can start tweaking the theme for your store, or you can create your own one. Liquid is a templating library that is simple to use. You can go a long way in making your stores your own through themes, and then installing and customizing apps… including your own custom apps.

And for when you truly need customization that you aren’t able to get through the online store, you can build custom storefronts and reach for our own Hydrogen or other web frameworks. It’s all just talking to an API and building a web frontend after all!

We will always want to make building commerce experiences as simple as possible, giving you the canvas to bring your vision to life. We have so much more to offer here, as we open up the platform in new ways.

As I work with the developer community, I find that while the platform can and will improve, the key isn’t learning the tech, but instead…

Learning Commerce

If you think about an average shopping website, you quickly see that they are often quite different, and have many custom flows and options… they can be complex. I find commerce deceptively deep and broad, which is exactly why there are opportunities for so many merchants and developers, and so many niche use cases that can be large niches indeed.

When jumping into Shopify for the first time, you will want to put effort into understanding commerce and all of the surfaces that Shopify opens up for you.

It is important for us to help you learn the structure *and* opportunities of commerce.

There are many paths to get into Shopify development. As I meet more in the community I see agencies with commerce experts, former merchant developers, as well as entrepreneurial developers who dive in with passion to enable merchant growth and help make commerce great for everyone. 

I will talk more about the magic of agency developers in another post, but for now… if you are a Web developer, Shopify is here to enable you to leverage your web skills directly.

One reason I am so excited about the Shopify opportunity is that I think we can legitimately bring it to a massive population. Shopify can be both the most approachable platform for anyone new to development, and also offer all of the knobs and platform customization to let you build the most custom experiences imaginable.

/fin

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

Dion Almaer

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