Scribelate

A lot has happened since my last post! Scribelate is officially live — though I launched it quietly, and intentionally so. It's functional, but it's also evolving fast. I'm learning what it takes to run a real production app: backups, auto-scaling, managing service quotas, and all the unglamorous details that come with it. More importantly, it works. And before I invest in any serious marketing, I want to validate the core theory behind Scribelate. What better way to do that than to test it on myself?  Using My Own Product Scribelate became functional in late January, and I've been using it daily ever since — sometimes as a developer, sometimes as a user. That dual perspective made it obvious where the gaps were. Since then, I've added a Vocabulary Review system, YouTube integration, and a Reporting feature. The Reporting Feature One of my favorite additions is the Total Listening Time graph, which tracks how long you've spent listening to podcasts or YouTube ...

There are many different paths to learning a language. Today it seems like the number of tools that you can use to start your journey are almost countless. Regardless of the process you use, you will eventually come across the concept of comprehensible input. Here is a great article by Steve Kauffman about comprehensible input  - what is it and how does it work.  Basically it's finding the right content that let's you understand almost all of what you are listening to and building those listening skills.  As your understanding grows you will be able to figure out new words when you run across them.   The key thing to understand is that it needs to be content that you can understand.  If you are listening to some content and you can't understand any of it, the process becomes frustrating and a chore.  Pretty soon you will dread the exercise and eventually you will just stop.  It has to be fun for you to continue and more importantly for you to want...

This was an exciting week for me. It was New Year's Eve, and I felt like working on Scribelate, but I didn’t feel like diving into a lot of code work. I had already done much of the coding to get a fairly functional version running locally. Plus, I’d registered the domain scribelate.com a while ago. So, I thought it would be a great idea to try setting up a production environment on New Year’s Eve. It ended up taking most of the day and into the evening. I got pretty close but didn’t quite have a fully working version by the end of the night. When you think about all the different things that go into a production build, it’s a lot. Setting up server environments, deploying the production build version of the code, configuring a database, deploying the database model… there are so many moving parts. The biggest challenge I faced—and as I told my wife, "Ignorance is a terrible thing"—was with my backend services, which are written in Go. Typically, building a Go application...

Hey there, welcome to Scribelate! You might be asking, "What is Scribelate?" Scribelate is a platform for learning languages—not in a DuoLingo kind of way, but in a real-world, real-work kind of way. Don't get me wrong; I do love DuoLingo. As of today, I have a streak of 2,173 days! But when you're ready to move from DuoLingo to real-world content, Scribelate is here for you. The word "Scribelate" is a combination of the words "transcribe" and "translate." With Scribelate, you can search for an almost infinite number of podcasts, break them down into short segments, and work through the manual process of writing down what the podcasters are talking about. It's hard, tedious work, but give it a try—you'll find your ability to listen in a different language takes significant leaps forward. You'll see improvements not just in listening but also in vocabulary and pronunciation. I'm sure there will be more posts about what I ca...