DeveloPassion's Newsletter #123 - Escape the game

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 123rd edition

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

What a week!!! I don't know about yours, but mine was hectic 😂

My youngest son was home sick on Monday, so that day quickly went by. After that, I had several appointments with banks because I'm buying a new home. That was already quite tiresome, but it was just an appetizer...

I managed to work one day on Knowii. I introduced means to safely validate API calls (a must for security) and started implementing the community creation API. Usually in application, the first of everything takes a lot more time, as there's a lot of architectural/design work to do. Hopefully, now that I've paved the way, the next APIs should be easier to implement. An added benefit of the API is that Knowii will be (almost) ready for third-party integrations from day 1. By the way, contributions are welcome since it's officially an Open Source project 🎉

On Sunday, I participated in the 20Km of Brussels race, here in Belgium, along with 30K other participants. It was tiresome, but tons of fun! Now I need a few days to repair my legs 😂

Alright, let's gooooo 🚀

The lab 🧪

As I've mentioned, I focused mainly on Knowii during my "free" time. I must admit that I'm always frustrated when I hear about other people creating apps in 2-3 weeks and generating revenue. I just don't seem to be able to cut corners enough. Truth is that I'll probably always remain a craftsman. I care too much about quality ;-)

In the lab this week, I've also set up an automation rule (Zap) in Zapier to crosspost my articles from Ghost to Medium. It's not enough, but it already simplifies my life. Unfortunately they don't seem to support Substack yet, so I still have to manually post there for now. I should really work on my Obsidian Publisher plugin later this year...

I've updated the navigation on my Website to include a link towards my new Knowledge Management Coaching activity. I've thought a bit more about it and actually want to also target small and larger businesses. There are tons of knowledge management issues to tackle in all companies and teams. And I have useful answers to share. That's why I've updated my headline on LinkedIn. I'm also preparing a "battle plan" to pitch some companies and offer my services. If you or your company need some guidance, please let me know.

Aside from that and as expected, I've noticed that the price increase of the Obsidian Starter Kit negatively impacts the sales. I prefer to keep the price as is for now. My idea is to re-open access to more of my PKM articles, and let more people benefit freely. My hope is that some of them will be convinced and will take a look at my products.

In other news, my newsletter now generates $20 per month. It indirectly pays the sandwiches that my son wants each week 😂.

The revenue of this newsletter

Jokes aside, I'm really happy about this. It doesn't seem like much, but it means a lot to me. It means that at least a few of you do see the value in the work I deliver week after week.

In total, my projects generated ~$770 in the last 30 days, down from $875. The main problem with my current indie revenue streams is that they're one-offs. If sales drop, there's nothing left. That's why I would really like to convince more of you to support me through memberships, as it would give me more security.

New articles

I've shared my ideas about what's coming and how to prepare:

Preparing for the future of knowledge work
Large Language Models are here to stay, and they might change everything. How can we prepare for the future of knowledge work?

Quotes of the week

  • You'll never not be afraid
  • Don't get caught up in thinking about what to build. Just build

How cool is that?!

I didn't know that solving mazes could be this fun:

Thinking and learning

A spot-on article by TfTHacker. Yes, TfT and note-taking/note-making tool makers really should put more emphasis on workflows. At the end of the day, workflows matter a lot more than nifty gritty editor features. That's why the Obsidian Starter Kit exists in the first place!

Tool Makers Should Help us to Easily Share Workflows
Tools for Thought are known for having steep learning curves, which can overwhelm us as users.

A cool guide to getting things done (i.e., task management) in Obsidian:

Journaling with the help of GPT-4:

Reflective journal entries using GPT-4 and Obsidian that demand less willpower. - LessWrong
Something I’ve wanted to do for years, but can’t make myself do consistently because I’m bad at forming new habits and seem to have a limited reservoir of willpower that is generally depleted by the…

Cost-Benefit analysis for the Design of Personal Knowledge Management systems

A podcast episode that I found fascinating. It's an interview of Stephen Wolfram:

Another tool to summarize Web articles:

summate.it
Summarize web articles.

Indie Hacking and bootstrapping

He got "rich" quickly, but how long will it last?

How a college student reached $64,000/mo in 6 months by being an AI first mover
Just a few months ago Yasser Elsaid was in his 4th year of college, interning at FAANG companies like Meta and Tesla. Then he placed his side hustle in…

Solving real problems... Sounds like a good idea...

I gave up looking for a cool idea and decided to try to solve a huge problem
After the failure of my last SaaS project, I ceased my pursuit of singular, innovative ideas. Instead, I attempted to unearth a substantial problem that…

Towards your first advising contract:

The path to your first advising contract.
Not sure how to get started? Then this post is for you.

https://twitter.com/agarwal__gaurav/status/1636080935048282113

Tech

Everything you ever wanted to know about GDPR:

General Data Protection Regulation
The busy privacy pro’s easy, swift access to the full GDPR legal text.

Passwords be gone:

The beginning of the end of the password
We’ve begun rolling out support for passkeys across Google Accounts on all major platforms as an additional option that people can use to sign in.

A prompt engineering toolkit

GitHub - typpo/promptfoo: Prompt engineering toolkit. Evaluate and compare LLM outputs, test prompt quality, and catch regressions.
Prompt engineering toolkit. Evaluate and compare LLM outputs, test prompt quality, and catch regressions. - GitHub - typpo/promptfoo: Prompt engineering toolkit. Evaluate and compare LLM outputs,…

Technical debt. Is it really that bad?

Society’s Technical Debt and Software’s Gutenberg Moment
Abstract There is immense hyperbole about recent developments in artificial intelligence, especially Large Language Models like ChatGPT. And there is also deserved concern about such technologies’ material impact on jobs. But observers are missing two very important things:

AI

How ChatGPT works:

How ChatGPT Works: The Models Behind The Bot
A brief introduction to the intuition and methodology behind the chat bot you can’t stop hearing about.

Take a look at the list of (current) ChatGPT plugins:

How To Use Third-Party Plugins In ChatGPT? 80+ Plugins Just Added by ChatGPT For Public
How To Use Third-Party Plugins In ChatGPT? Step 1 Open https://chat.openai.com/ Step 2 Click on the left bottom three dots and then click on settings Step 3 Click on ‘Beta Features’. Turn on the ‘Web browsing’ and ‘Plugin’ Step 4 close the pop up and hover over the GPT 4 or GPT 3 on the top bar. The…

So many people have yet to discover the power of LLMs:

A majority of Americans have heard of ChatGPT, but few have tried it themselves
Just 14% of all U.S. adults say they have used ChatGPT for entertainment, to learn something new, or for their work.

More and more experiments with AI agents:

AgentGPT: Autonomous AI in your browser 🤖
Assemble, configure, and deploy autonomous AI Agents in your browser.
GitHub - Significant-Gravitas/Auto-GPT: An experimental open-source attempt to make GPT-4 fully autonomous.
An experimental open-source attempt to make GPT-4 fully autonomous. - GitHub - Significant-Gravitas/Auto-GPT: An experimental open-source attempt to make GPT-4 fully autonomous.

About Sébastien

Hello everyone! I'm Sébastien Dubois. I'm an author, founder, and CTO. I write books and articles about software development & IT, personal knowledge management, personal organization, and productivity. I also craft lovely digital products 🚀

If you've enjoyed this article and want to read more like this, then become a subscriber, check out my Obsidian Starter Kit, the PKM Library, my collection of books about software development and the IT Concepts Wall 🔥.

You can follow me on Twitter 🐦

If you want to discuss, then don't hesitate to join the Personal Knowledge Management community or the Software Crafters community.