Welcome to the 128th edition

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.

Why and how to approach journaling as a founder

Why and how journaling can supercharge your journey as a founder.

Sebastien DuboisSébastien Dubois

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:

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

How to Read and Organize Online Articles (Without Driving Yourself Crazy)

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

Plain Text Journaling

a static site {for, by, about} me

Managing Oneself

Throughout history, people had little need to manage their careers—they were born into their stations in life or, in the recent past, they relied on their companies to chart their career paths. But times have drastically changed. Today we must all learn to manage ourselves. What does that mean? As P…

Peter F. DruckerHarvard Business Review

Indie Hacking and bootstrapping

Discord plans to let creators sell downloadable products

Discord wants to help you monetize your server.

The Verge

110+ days MVP build to front page HN

Late last year I decided to pivot my saas boilerplate Parthenon to focus on Billing. I started by improving the billing functionality within Parthenon m…

Iain CambridgeIndie Hackers

1 year of being an Indie Founder

It’s been a year since we got our first payment notification for MakerBox products. Since then, we launched 10 products, made over $67K, and sold 1 prod…

Sveta BayIndie Hackers

Tech

TypeScript 5.2’s New Keyword: ‘using’

TypeScript 5.2 introduces ‘using’, a keyword that disposes anything with a `Symbol.dispose` function upon leaving scope, making resource management easier.

Matt PocockTotal TypeScript

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.

Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation

(Summer 2015) - In this essay, I begin by identifying the reasons that automation has not wiped out a majority of jobs over the decades and centuries. Automation does indeed substitute for labor—as it is typically intended to do. However, automation also complements labor, raises output in w…

David H. AutorAmerican Economic Association

AI

Prompting techniques:

https://tfthacker.medium.com/boost-your-chatgpt-skills-7-gems-straight-from-openais-dev-docs-c5ff57dd4e47

Neural networks need data, even if it’s fake: https://www.quantamagazine.org/neural-networks-need-data-to-learn-even-if-its-fake-20230616

GitHub - mpoon/gpt-repository-loader: Convert code repos into an LLM prompt-friendly format. Mostly built by GPT-4.

Convert code repos into an LLM prompt-friendly format. Mostly built by GPT-4. - GitHub - mpoon/gpt-repository-loader: Convert code repos into an LLM prompt-friendly format. Mostly built by GPT-4.

mpoonGitHub

GitHub - RafalWilinski/telegram-chatgpt-concierge-bot: Interact with OpenAI’s ChatGPT via Telegram and Voice.

Interact with OpenAI’s ChatGPT via Telegram and Voice. - GitHub - RafalWilinski/telegram-chatgpt-concierge-bot: Interact with OpenAI’s ChatGPT via Telegram and Voice.

RafalWilinskiGitHub

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 PKM coaching page, my collection of books about software development and the IT Concepts Wall 🔥.

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