Studio711.com – Ben Martens

The other day I was telling the story of how my name showed up in many of the Windows 8 screenshots when they launched it. But look as I might, I could not find any blog post about it, so I’ll rectify that ~10 years later as Microsoft gets ready to release Windows 11.

The backstory is that lawyers sent a form to employees asking if they had our permission to use our names in marketing materials. I said it was fine with me, not expecting to see my name anywhere either because they wouldn’t use it or because I’d never see it since there are so many different products.

Fast forward a couple years and I started seeing my name everywhere because they used it for some marketing shots in Windows 8. You can still see some of the news stories, as shown in the example from CNN below.

Disclosure: I work for Microsoft.

[UPDATE 5/4/2022] It’s worth noting that this post was written in May of 2021. The scoring model has changed significantly, but the basic premise applies of doing some analysis of the different ways that you can score points and figuring out the best return for your time.

For the last seven months, I’ve been taking Spanish lessons every single day via the DuoLingo app. I feel like I’d struggle to communicate at a 2-year-old level, but progress is progress and it’s a better way to spend time on my phone than playing games or reading the news. This isn’t an ad, but if you are interested in trying it out, the app is free or you can pay to get rid of ads and support their cause.

The app is, obviously, centered around progressing through lessons, but along the way, you collect points and achievements. There’s one achievement for getting first place in the diamond league which is the highest league in the app. Other than getting the achievement, there’s literally no value in doing this. But I have a completionist itch that needed to be scratched so here’s how I did it…

I hung around in the league for weeks until I finally saw a week where it didn’t look like anyone was running away with the game. Then I pounced and did about 600 points in one day. A normal day for me is 100 which is enough to stay comfortably in the diamond league so it’s more than most people do but far from enough to win the league. Two other people had the same idea so I continued to put in 800-1000 points per day until finally they both gave up and my final day was pretty slow. The league finishes around UTC midnight on Sunday and I won with about 4200 points.

Here’s what I learned along the way:

• I think I probably could have done it with fewer points if I had gone hard straight from the beginning. Go in with guns blazing looking like you have a few screws loose and people are less likely to want to play with you.
• I timed myself on various parts of the app to figure out where I could make the most points per minute.
• In general, the stories are great ways to make points quickly. The highest value story I had unlocked was 28 points, and while the first run through took a while, after that I could do it while watching TV and not really paying attention. I could generate 17 points per minute with this approach.
• Using the app, you can choose between regular practice and hard practice. Every day I would do the hard practice on all the easy lessons. That’s 20 points plus 5 for a perfect run through the lesson.
• Missed words go into a separate challenge bucket and are worth two points per word. I would purposely miss all 20 questions on the easy lesson, get the 25 points for doing the lesson correctly and then get an extra 40 points for doing the words in the missed queue. None of that is more productive than doing the 28 point story over and over again but it was close and it was less mind-numbing. I could generate 15 points per minute with this approach.
• The DuoLingo Fandom wiki explains the leagues in details, but basically each room of the league is filled up with 30 participants based on when they record their first points after the start of the week. You could try to game that a little by waiting a while until less avid users are logging points, but I didn’t. In some games, leagues like this look different for everyone so you’re not actually competing head to head. That doesn’t seem to be the case with DuoLingo. Everyone else in the league sees the same participant list that you do.

The week finally ended and I won. I learned almost nothing about Spanish during the week and the whole thing was ridiculous, except now my achievements list is closer to being all gold. And that’s probably only marginally better than ridiculous.

It was an interesting experience and now I can stop thinking about when I might try it, but I’m glad it’s over so I can get back to actually attempting to learn Spanish. All week long, I kept hearing Drew Carey saying: “Welcome to ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’ the show where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter.”

This one is a little geeky but stick with me. Have you noticed how sometimes when you type in the address bar, it changes the UI a little bit and then performs a search on whatever you typed? For example, if you start with “amazon” and a space, it says “Search amazon.com”. Did you know that you can customize this? This post assumes you’re using the new Microsoft Edge browser (it’s fantastic, highly recommended) or Chrome. Let’s use my website as an example.

1. Search for the word “test” using the search box on the right side of this page. Notice how the resulting URL in the address bar is “https://www.studio711.com/?s=test”. Copy that URL.
2. Click the three ellipses in the top right of the browser window and click Settings. In Edge, search for the “address bar and search” setting and then click “Manage search engines”. Chrome is similar but I think you can search directly for “Manage search engines”.
3. On that page you can define your own search shortcut. So add a new one and call it studio711 and use that as the keyword too. For the URL, give it the URL that you copied from step 1 but replace “test” with “%s”. So you end up with “https://www.studio711.com/?s=%s”.
4. Close out of the settings, click the address bar and type “studio711 hot dogs”. Press enter. Now you’ve just searched my website for posts about hot dogs.

You can do this for any website that has your search string in the URL. I use it for all kinds of stuff at work like looking up bug numbers or live site incidents. At home I use it for quickly looking up Bible verses. I have defined a search engine called “ehv” (for Evangelical Heritage Version) with a URL like this “https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?version=EHV&search=%s”. I have another one for the NIV translation.

Once I learned about this, it took me a little while to grasp it’s power and also to remember to use it, but now I’m hooked!