u/Wats0n_D

“Llevo tres meses estudiando español” = “I’ve been studying Spanish for three months.” The same pattern works in “Llevamos una hora esperando” (“We’ve been waiting for an hour”): llevar + a time span + gerund describes how long an activity has been underway. Compare “Estudié durante tres meses,” which describes a completed period of studying. Context still matters, but this pattern is handy to recognize while reading.

I’m the developer behind Hola Cards, and one of the less glamorous bugs I fixed this week was losing a translation that was still in progress.

The flow looked harmless: start a translation, leave the screen to check something else, come back, and continue. But the pending result was tied too closely to the screen lifecycle, so navigating away could make the app forget work that had not actually finished.

I changed the state handling so an in-progress translation survives leaving and returning to the screen. It sounds small, but it changed the feeling of the app from “I hope that is still there” to “I can safely come back to this.”

This was a useful reminder that reliability is often about preserving unfinished work, not adding another feature. What is the smallest state bug that made one of your products feel unreliable?

I’m the developer behind Hola Cards, a Spanish learning app. A small product decision I made this week: I changed the main statistic from “answers completed” to “words learned.”

Answers are still useful for accuracy and practice time, but they were a poor headline for the progress view. Someone can tap through many reviews without learning many new words, while a smaller session can add meaningful vocabulary. So the overview, calendar, and period comparison now lead with words learned, with answer count, accuracy, and time kept as supporting context.

The lesson for me is that a dashboard metric is part of the product’s behavior, not just a label on a chart. If the headline number doesn’t match the user’s reason for returning, the interface quietly teaches the wrong goal.

How do you choose the primary progress metric in your own projects?