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DeveloPassion's Newsletter #119 - Baby steps

Edition 119 of my newsletter, discussing Knowledge Management, Knowledge Work, Zen Productivity, Personal Organization, and more!

Sebastien Dubois

May 2, 2023 — 8 min read

Hello everyone! I'm Sébastien Dubois, your host (I'm on Twitter). You're receiving this email because you signed up for DeveloPassion's Newsletter. Thank you for being here with me ✨

Welcome to the 119th edition

Another week, another newsletter! I hope that you all had a great one 🤩

This week, I've continued working on Knowii. I'll tell you more in the lab section!

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Alright, let's gooooo 🚀

The lab 🧪

Gareth, a friend on the Slack PKM took some time to analyze my revenue on Medium. The graph is rather interesting and helps me reiterate a point I've made before: cross-posting articles on different platforms is a valuable approach. I've published most of my article on my own domain and cross-posted those on Medium for a while, and it generated ~$100/month on average, without me doing anything specific for that platform.

What matters is setting the canonical URL to my own domain, to make sure I keep control over the search results. Other than that, it's an interesting source of income. I think there's value in providing more options for my readers. Some already have a Medium subscription and don't necessarily want one-more on their list. The main downside I see is the dilution. Some of my readers will just follow me on Medium and might miss some of my content and promotions I run from time to time...

I didn't have as much time as I wanted for Knowii, but I was able to make some more progress this week. I implemented social logins in production and a solution for usernames.

When users log in using a social provider like Google, Twitter or GitHub, we (developers) don't always have the same information available. In particular, the username is not always there. GitHub provides a "username" field, but Google does not. In their case, the email also the username, and it's not something I want for Knowii... As a community platform, I want users to be able to use their real name and/or a nickname/username. I see a lot of value in the anonymity. That's why I needed to build a little system to take care of that. Now, when users sign up using Knowii, they'll be able to pick a username:

And they'll directly see if it's still available:

I also needed a way to generate a random username so that users who log in using Google also get one (albeit temporary):

At this point, I didn't want to have a complicated multistep onboarding process. I want users to be able to dive right in, without being bored by administrative overhead. The username generation mechanism took me a lot of time to implement. I needed to write PL/SQL functions to randomly pick nouns, adjectives, and random numbers, make those long enough but not too long, etc. Finally, the implementation wasn't easy because I couldn't see the logs when something went wrong 😂

Anyway, one more step forward!