Learning Brazilian Portuguese
On comprehensible input
What I learned in ~11 months of learning to read, write, speak, and listen to a new language.
Notify for Spotify released
Improving on Spotify for Apple Music users
Over the past 10 years, I've used Apple Music and previously Rdio but I finally switched because I wanted to more easily share songs and playlists with friends (most of whom use Spotify).
Thoughts on learning music
The perils of technical skills and how I actually learned music
For those who’ve known me for a while, learning to “speak” and understand music has been (and I hope will continue to be) a lifelong journey. From playing violin in middle school and high school to picking up guitar in college (and dabbling in voice lessons, classical guitar lessons, flamenco guitar lessons…). This post should be interesting to anyone interested in learning to play music, play the guitar, or just learning in general and my personal journey. Enjoy!
An energy “to-do” list
Identifying and transforming negative energy
A few weeks I unintentionally came up with a simple tool that I’ve been using recently that has led to some powerful changes in my environment and relationships. It’s pretty simple but I’ve shared it with a few people who have found it very useful, so figured I’d share it more broadly.
Community-driven product development
Or the difference between Etsy Prototypes and Gmail Labs
About four years ago, when I started at Etsy, I built a product called Etsy Prototypes, which let our users opt in to more experimental features. It was my way of hacking the product process—anyone could easily write a feature, put it behind a feature flag, and launch it as a prototype team that users could join or leave whenever they wanted. You (generally) didn’t have to ask anyone for permission to see if your idea was worth investing more time in.