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DeveloPassion's Newsletter #128 - Betting on yourself

Edition 128 of my newsletter, discussing Knowledge Management, Knowledge Work, Zen Productivity, Personal Organization, and more!

Sebastien Dubois

Jul 4, 2023 — 6 min read

Welcome

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

This week, I've spent a lot of time thinking/worrying about houses. I'm selling mine and buying a new one. And the whole process is quite stressful. Hopefully I should soon receive good news.

I've started looking for a new freelance contract, as I still rely on that to cover my business expenses. The challenge for me is to find: (1) an interesting project with a great/positive team, (2) a fully remote contract, (3) a part-time contract, and to be able to negotiate a reasonable daily rate, given the inflation... No luck so far, but hopefully I will find something before Q3 begins. If not, then I'll need to find solutions to save my business 😂.

Alright, let's gooooo 🚀

The lab 🧪

I've recently joined David Vassalo's "Small Bets" community. The group is quite large (> 3K people in the chat), and the content is quite interesting. There are live classes and courses (and recordings), as well as quite a few deals/free products for members. It's cool to be surrounded by so many people making bets on themselves and choosing a different path.

I've decided to resume work on my Obsidian Publisher plugin. My goal with that one is to be able to write and publish everything from Obsidian. It would save me so much time. Cross posting articles is really time-consuming (and boring). For now, the plugin only supports Ghost, but I will add support for Substack and Twitter.

I've also updated the IT Concepts Wall with a bunch of new resources about architecture, best practices and security. I wish I could stop everything else to focus on writing my Dev Concepts series. I keep noticing how many poor quality articles there are discussing supposed "best practices" about IT and software development.

New articles

I've published an article discussing why and how founders can benefit from adding journaling to their daily routines.

Quotes of the week

"In the age of distraction, focus is a superpower" — Cal Newport
"Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world" — Robert McKee

Thinking and learning

An introduction to the "Compass" approach of Fei-Ling. Great to go further with Zettelkasten:

Obsidian 1.3.6 has added support for deep linking to PDF selections and annotations:

Obsidian 1.3.6 adds deep linking to PDF selections and annotations (available for early access on desktop)
by u/kepano in ObsidianMD

Zsolt has made huge progress with his Excalidraw plugin for Obsidian. It's a Canvas on steroids!

I have just released @excalidraw-@obsidian 1.9.5 featuring Web and Markdown Embeds. This is like Canvas on STEROIDS 🤯🚀

I've been at this for over a month now. The solution has many rough edges but I think it is ready for wider use.

👉👉👉 https://t.co/C7YHK8lkv2 https://t.co/lXgNfzketA pic.twitter.com/qDighhtokp
— Zsolt Viczián (@zsviczian) June 25, 2023

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Having trouble organizing all of those articles you bookmark online? Follow this simple system to bring some sanity back to your bookmarks.

Gregory CiottiGregory Ciotti

Indie Hacking and bootstrapping

Tech

I don’t fear automation all that much. It’s so direly lacking in today’s world, and many opportunities for people to do more interesting things in their lives.