Practice Wrapped, v2.0
A(nother) year of making
It feels like the last few months of the year have flown by. We blinked, and suddenly it’s mid-December. Which means: it’s wrapped season, everyone!
Were you one of the disappointed Strava users who discovered this year’s review was for premium users only? Hopefully not! I am not an athlete, but Ben shared his Strava report with me and, in addition to being impressive, it was fascinating to see. The patterns, the personal records, and the most frequently traveled routes.
But I should probably stick to my lane, which is apparently semi-aggressive electronic music.
I have a goal to move off of Spotify in 2026, but for now I succumbed to the Wrapped hype. Turns out I was in the top 0.1% of Sammy Virji listeners. If you enjoy rapid BPM music and fun sounds and you haven’t listened to Sammy Virji or seen him live, I highly recommend both. His peppy jams are a great soundtrack for making tiny things and his DJ sets are impeccable.
And, as I’m sure you assumed, despite being 42 years old I am still very hip and with it, which is why Spotify assigned me a very flattering “Listening Age” of 21.
As I tapped through my Spotify Wrapped stories, I bopped my head to the soundtrack (curated by…me!) and learned more about my listening practices over the year. When Chris Lake popped up to thank me for being a top 1% fan, he said “you’ve been listening to too much of my music this year” which at first felt semi-rude. But he probably has a point.
The things we miiiight want to forget
One downside of being continuously measured is that your behavior is on full display, even when you didn’t ask for it. Sometimes the insights are affirming, other times…humbling? And while it may not be surprising to hear the results, that doesn’t mean you want to hear them (like this SNL sketch about the harrowing prospect of an UberEats Wrapped).
But there‘s absolutely no shame in being reminded of your creative practice. Instead of cringe, you get to revisit all the wonderful and challenging moments of making. You see patterns. You remember what you enjoyed, what was difficult, and what you stuck with. It is a testament to your effort and progress.
As I complied this year’s “Practice Wrapped,” I was reminded of so many good times from my practice and what I had seen from Ben in his Practice feed, and was intrigued to see some of the patterns emerge. So without further ado:
Ben’s Year of Practice 2025
Erica’s Year of Practice 2025
(if you’re on a computer and the images look small, you can tap to to enlarge and scroll through them)
Youthful nostalgia
This was my first time “wrapping” a full year of data (vs last year’s 6 months). Pulling it together was as simple as Jake generating a CSV from the iOS app—which felt surreal in itself—and then plopping the data into some of our UI mockups. But since it’s not automated (yet…) I stuck to just “wrapping” my and Ben’s practice.
Before analyzing it, I skimmed the raw data and noticed a few odd sessions with missing timestamps or 24-hour+ durations, which were leftovers from bugs in the earliest versions of the app. I sent them over to Ben, and he replied: “Early 2025 was a whole different world.”
And it’s SO true!
It’s kind of wild to remember that Practice started as a Google Form. Over the last year, Jake has single-handedly built a stable, reliable iOS app from scratch that makes tracking one’s creative practice effortless—all while having a full time job that’s not Practice! It’s seriously impressive (thank you Jake, you are the best!!!!). Version 1.0 (1) was released January 19, 2025, and Version 1.0 (61) was released just a few days ago on December 14, 2025. That’s a lot of updates, bug fixes, new features, and enhancements. Jake jokes that his craft is coding, but he still managed to track over 7 hours of Lego making this year. In the app! That HE built!
I feel bullish about turning creative hobbies into the next wave of self-care, which means I often focus on where I want Practice to be: the features we haven’t built yet, the scale we haven’t reached, the thousands of users I wish we already had. But seeing the data laid out gave me pause and made it harder to skip past how far we’ve actually come.
It’s not just what Ben and I made at our craft mats this year. Or the app that Jake has created. It’s that Practice has gone from an idea into something real enough to generate data, stories, and patterns worth reflecting on. It is, truly, a gift to be part of it.
But, as we look forward to 2026, I feel impatient, eager, and ready for Practice to be huge. Practice Wrapped 2026 won’t just be for Ben and I to enjoy based on some manual data crunching, but ideally something our future users get automatically and that they’re SO EXCITED to see and share during “wrapped season.”
The excitement I feel for Practice, and its potential, grows every day. You all may be getting tired of reading about all of my hopes and dreams, but remember: according to Spotify, I’m just a youthful, 21 year old ingénue. So my passion, impatience, and starry-eyed optimism is age-appropriate.