Newsletter #3: Shopify Unite, Duolingo's impressive retention and Drake's Passionfruit

Hi there,

I hope you're feeling good.

If you read my article “Why I’m quitting freelancing after 4 years”, you know that in 2023 I’m taking good care of myself.

By switching from freelancing to a full-time job as a Shopify Theme Developer, I drastically reduced my mental charge. I’m now able to disconnect from work in the evenings and weekends. I enjoy the present moment and am here for my loved ones.

Last month, I took a 4-day vacation in Porto with a friend. It was absolutely lovely. Porto is a beautiful city. We enjoyed the seafood, seaside and sun.

In today’s edition, we're discussing the next Shopify Unite, Duolingo's impressive retention and Drake's Passionfruit.

Let's dive in.

Work

Shopify Unite is the company's annual developer conference.

In May 2022, Shopify published an article called Reimagining Shopify Unite. They stated their intention to bring this event to a city near us so that their team could connect with us, gain a deeper understanding of what we're working on, and share important updates.

Shopify Unite 2022 took place in 3 cities:

• London, England (September 12-13)

• Toronto, Canada (October 12-13)

• Melbourne, Australia (October 26-27)

I attended the London one. It was an amazing experience!

It was the perfect occasion to chat with very cool people I had talked to online but never met in person, such as:

• Rossella Ferrandino, partner at Nama Studio

• Jan Frey, creator of the YouTube channel "Coding with Jan" which helped me a lot when I started freelancing

• Liam Griffin, Senior Developer Advocate at Shopify

I also had the opportunity to meet Katie Welton, Suzie Swift and Marcus Seoighe, who I now work with at Clean Canvas.

As you can imagine, I was really looking forward to the next Shopify Unite!

My friend Youness was pushing for it to take place in Paris. He even promised to invite us all to his house for an after-party with wine, baguette and cheese (the full French treatment). See how I bookmarked his tweet to hold him accountable when the day comes…

Unfortunately, in June 2023, Shopify published a new article called Bringing our Developer Community Together where they sadly announced that Shopify Unite 2023 will be moving to a virtual event and will take place in early 2024.

What a disappointment…

I’m hoping that the developer community, as well as Shopify’s country-specific entities such as Shopify France, will jump in to organize in-person gatherings. These opportunities to connect other than through visio calls are so valuable and help building long-lasting relationships.

In addition to meeting new people, one thing I really enjoyed at the last Unite was the ability to get insights from Shopify’s employees themselves. It’s priceless to be able to get a glimpse at the vision behind Shopify’s choices.

Fortunately, whilst we wait for the next Unite, Jan Frey is doing an amazing job at this insights gathering pursuit.

I recommend you watch his last video where he digs into checkout extensibility with Mani Fazeli (Director of Product at Shopify) and Ilya Grigorik (Principal Advisor at Shopify).

Inspire

Outside of the ecommerce ecosystem, I watched an interview of Luis von Ahn, cofounder and CEO of Duolingo, the famous language learning application.

I was very impressed by some facts and numbers:

• Duolingo had a waiting list of 300,000+ people before it launched.

• 94% of Duolingo's active monthly users are on the free version. 6% are on the paid version. These 6% bring the majority of the app's revenue.

• Duolingo has over 1 million daily active users who have a streak (= consecutive days doing lessons on the app) longer than 365. So basically, it’s 1 million users who did not miss one single day in the last year.

Do you know a lot of apps that have this kind of stickiness?

Fun facts:

• Luis von Ahn invented something we all know: CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart).

• In 2006, he founded reCAPTCHA, which used images from scanned books to help digitalize The New York Times archives. He sold it to Google in 2009 for tens of millions of dollars.

Learn more about Duolingo and Luis von Ahn by watching his interview for CNBC Make It.

Explore

In March 2017, Drake dropped his album More Life, which includes the song Passionfruit.

In this fascinating video, the producer Nana Rogues explains step-by-step how he created Passionfruit’s unforgettable instrumental.

Enjoy.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for reading this edition until the end.

I'll talk to you soon.

Take good care of yourself.

Coralie