DeveloPassion's Newsletter 207 - Month in Review
Edition 207 of my newsletter, discussing Knowledge Work, AI, Knowledge Management, Management, Zen Productivity, Personal Organization, and more!
Hello everyone! I'm Sébastien Dubois, your host. You're receiving this email because you signed up for DeveloPassion's Newsletter, or bought one of my products. Thank you for being here with me ✨
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Welcome
Welcome to all the new readers ❤️
This is a special edition: a Month in Review 🎉
January and early February have been some of the most productive and exciting weeks I've had in a while. I shipped new Obsidian plugins, published multiple articles, crossed 2,500 concepts on the Concepts Website. Most importantly ,I started started a really cool with bleeding edge AI tools that made me realize something important about the future of Knowledge Management.
I'm also feeling much better physically after the leg injury I mentioned in the last edition. Still not 100%, but getting there. Small wins matter.
Alright, let's gooooo 🚀
This Week's Highlights
- 🤖 Agentic Knowledge Management: A new concept I've been thinking a lot about
- 🔌 3 new Obsidian plugins shipped: Bookshelf, Typefully v2, and Expander
- 📊 20,850 visitors across all sites in January
- 📝 4 articles published in the last few weeks
- 🧠 2,500+ concepts on the Concepts Website
Before You Go Any Further
I want to reach more people. Got 20 seconds? Then share the link with one friend/colleague who would benefit from joining us! And of course, don't forget to also mention the Knowii Community ❤️
And if you bought some of my products or courses? Then please leave a rating/review. It REALLY matters a lot ❤️
The Lab 🧪
Obsidian Plugins: 3 New Releases
It's been a busy month on the plugin front. I shipped three plugins in a short span:
📚 Bookshelf Plugin — A brand new plugin for managing your reading list right inside Obsidian. I built this because I wanted a better way to track books without leaving my vault. This made my Books Obsidian Base even better
👉 https://github.com/dsebastien/obsidian-bookshelf
📤 Typefully Plugin v2 — A complete rewrite of the Typefully integration. Switched to the v2 API, moved to Bun for the build, and made the whole thing much more reliable. If you use Typefully for social media scheduling, this is a nice upgrade.
👉 https://www.dsebastien.net/new-release-typefully-plugin-for-obsidian-v2/
🔄 Expander Plugin v0.0.1 — A new plugin that can expand and update note content and properties. Still early, but already useful.
I've also published documentation websites for the Life Tracker plugin for Obsidian and the Journal Bases plugin for Obsidian. Making things easier to discover and use.
Reddit: #1 Post of All Time 🏆
I shared my graph view of 15K+ notes on Reddit and... it kind of blew up 😅
- ~ 100K views
- ~1K upvotes
- ~100 comments
- My #1 post of all time on r/ObsidianMD
👉 https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/1qxegz8/graph_view_of_my_15k_notes/
I didn't expect that kind of reaction. It just goes to show that people are genuinely curious about what a large, well-maintained knowledge base looks like in practice. If you haven't seen it yet, go take a look. The comments are full of great questions and discussions.
Concepts Website: 2,500+ and Growing
The Concepts Website keeps growing. I went from ~2,100 concepts at the time of the last newsletter to 2,500+ now. That's roughly 400 new concepts in two weeks.
I've also added a light theme and theme switcher to both the Concepts Website and my Store Website. Plus accessibility improvements for better readability (color contrast fixes). Small things, but they matter.
👉 https://concepts.dsebastien.net
January Analytics: The Numbers
Here's a transparent look at how things went across all my sites in January 2026:
Portfolio Overview
- Total Visitors: 20,850
- Total Pageviews: 42,767
- Active Sites: 10 of 12
Main Blog (dsebastien.net)
- 15,259 visitors | 26,979 pageviews
- Avg Duration: 1m 40s
Winners 🏆
- Digital Garden (notes.dsebastien.net): +173% year-over-year — Content notes are clearly resonating with people
- Concepts Website: +419% month-over-month — The concept glossary is gaining real traction
- Knowledge Management for Beginners: +130% year-over-year — Beginner content keeps performing well
- Store Website: 1,139 visitors with a 35% bounce rate (best across all sites!)
The Digital Garden and Concepts Website are growing fast because they provide real value without asking for anything upfront..
Back-Office App
I've started building a back-office app to centralize my business operations. It's still early days, but the goal is to have a single dashboard for sales, content pipeline, analytics, and more. More on this in future editions. Note that the number below are fake; it was just a first mockup.
Store Website
In January I also launched my new store website. It's still a bit early to know if it really is a net positive, but I am quite confident it is. At least now I have a more beautiful place to let people discover my work.
Record Sales Month
January was my best sales month ever on Gumroad 🎉
I also launched a new store website, and made pricing adjustments to better reflect the value of my products (OSK is now $129.99, AI Ghostwriter Guide went from $19.99 to $49.99). Prices are something I keep experimenting with, so this is certainly not final.
In part, I think that these results are also coming from the successful Knowledge Management for Beginners course Ad that I've launched with Google Ads. I'll do more experimentation in February.
Note Village
In January I also created the Note Village plugin for Obsidian, which was a fun experiment around knowledge management + gaming.
AI Skills
Each week, I keep building and adding new skills to the Obsidian Starter Kit within my Obsidian vault. Those will soon be part of the official Obsidian Starter Kit releases.
The last one I added is one that can identify person notes without a picture, that finds an appropriate one, downloads it, optimizes it and adds it to the note. That makes for beautiful people Obsidian Base. Especially cool for "tracking" people who you find inspiring.
Besides that, I'm also improving my AI skills week after week. I think it's really important to not just be a passenger, but to take the driver's seat when it comes to innovation. Things are moving faster than ever. I saw and lived the boom of the Internet and the smartphones wave too. But those were way slower than the shift we're going through today.
Month in Review: When AI Stops Advising and Starts Working
This is the part I'm most excited about. It's also the part that might change how you think about Knowledge Management entirely.
From Chatbot to Employee/Partner
In late January, I set up OpenClaw; an open-source AI agent framework. I set it up on a dedicated Virtual Private Server (VPS). The idea was simple: give an AI agent access to my knowledge base, my tools, my processes and my workflows, and see what happens when it actually does the work instead of just advising about it.
Here's what it can do now:
- Indexes and searches my entire vault using qmd for semantic search
- Contributes to my existing projects (almost) on autopilot
- Works on article drafts autonomously
- Improves my existing notes automatically
- Creates social media drafts via Typefully based on my notes and writing style
- Sends me daily briefs about my sales on Gumroad, website analytics, traffic spikes, trending GitHub repos, Obsidian plugin news, etc
- Analyzes my content performance across platforms and suggests what to double down on
- Transcribes images for me
- Runs on a schedule with versioned cron jobs for every automated task
- ...
I connected it to Plausible Analytics, Typefully, a dedicated Discord server with channels for each product, and even gave it the ability to submit PRs to my repositories (with its own identity). I use short-lived tokens for this, and remain very careful about the privileges I grant, applying the Least Privilege Principle.
Knowledge Systems Are the Multiplier
It's obvious to me that having a well-structured knowledge system makes AI exponentially more useful.
Most people who try AI agents quickly hit a wall. The agent doesn't know enough about their work, their style, their goals. It hallucinates. It produces generic output. It keeps forgetting what matters.
But when you've spent years building a knowledge base with clear structure, consistent metadata, linked notes, and documented processes? The AI agent has context. Real context. Not a quick prompt, but thousands of interconnected notes about who you are, what you do, and how you do it. And it's not that it "remembers" anything in particular (LLMs aren't there yet), but rather that it's easy to point them to relevant and up to date information. And that's much harder to do when your information is only in your head or scattered around tools and platforms.
My ideas? It's in my notes. My writing style? Same. My content strategy? In my notes. My products, their history, their positioning? In my notes. The agent doesn't guess. It knows.
This is why I've started calling this approach Agentic Knowledge Management (AKM). To me, it's the next evolution of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), where AI agents don't just search your notes, they operate on them. They create, connect, analyze, and act.
What This Means for Solo creators
If you're a solo creator: writing newsletters, building products, managing social media, tracking analytics, you know the feeling of being pulled in a hundred directions. There's always more to do than hours in the day.
With AKM, solo creators can now operate like small teams. Not by replacing your own creativity or judgment, but by delegating the operational work to an AI partner that truly understands your context.
I'm NOT saying this is plug-and-play. It took me time to set up (an entire weekend). It requires a structured knowledge base. And there are real questions about security and trust when you give an AI agent this much access to your systems.
That's exactly why I'm preparing dedicated articles to explore the security angle, the guardrails I've put in place (e.g., Tailscale, firewalls, disabled SSH, Principle of Least Privilege, Zero Trust, ...), and the practical lessons I've learned. Stay tuned for those.
But the potential is enormous. And I strongly believe that creators who build their knowledge systems now will have a massive advantage when these tools mature further.
The Numbers Behind the Month
Here's what January + early February looked like:
Writing
- 4 articles published (including the AKM piece that hit Hacker News and Reddit)
- Shared an OpenClaw setup tutorial on my Digital Garden (article coming soon!)
Development
- 3 Obsidian plugins shipped (Bookshelf plugin for Obsidian, Typefully plugin for Obsidian v2, Expander plugin for Obsidian)
- Documentation websites published for 2 more plugins
- 300+ new concepts added to the Concepts Website
- Started building a back-office app
- Light themes + accessibility improvements across websites
AI & Automation
- OpenClaw fully operational with daily briefs, content drafts, analytics, etc
- AKM concept developed, clarified and published
YouTube
- Dataview Serializer v2 video published
Social Media
- Posts: 1.24K (+8.5% growth)
- Impressions: 173.55K (+10.6% growth)
- Profile Clicks: 645 (+5.6% growth)
- Followers: 2,780 (+83 new, +3.1% growth)
- Avg Engagement Rate: 2.6%
- Profile Conversion Rate: 54%
Knowii News
The Knowii Community just crossed 380 members 🎉
Thank you to everyone who's part of this growing community of practice. Whether you're a Knowledge Explorer, Knowledge Builder, or Knowledge Master: your presence makes this community richer.
The next set of workshops will focus on combining Obsidian with AI, particularly Claude Code. And don't worry if you're not a developer; these workshops are designed for everyone. AI-powered workflows help with all sorts of tasks beyond coding.
Join the Knowii Community: https://www.store.dsebastien.net/product/knowii-community
Weekly Challenge
This week's challenge is about awareness.
Take 15 minutes to list every tool that has access to your notes, your content, or your workflows. Then ask yourself:
- Which of these tools could do more if they had better context?
- Where are you doing repetitive work that could be automated?
- What would change if your tools could actually understand your knowledge base?
You don't need to set up an AI agent on a Virtual Private Server (VPS). But start noticing where the bottlenecks are. Awareness is the first step to improvement.
Latest YouTube Videos
I've published a video about the Life Tracker plugin for Obsidian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrHwD1QWako
I've also published a video about Periodic reviews and the Journal Bases plugin for Obsidian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHdccDohK10
Last but not least, I've published a video about v2 of the Dataview Serializer plugin for Obsidian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21bZdrJ4nns
Latest Articles
How I Use AI With My Obsidian Vault Every Day: 16 Practical Use Cases
A deep dive into the practical ways I integrate AI into my daily Obsidian workflows. From note creation to content generation to knowledge discovery.
👉 Read it: https://www.dsebastien.net/how-i-use-ai-with-my-obsidian-vault-every-day-16-practical-use-cases/
Agentic Knowledge Management — The Next Evolution of PKM
The article that introduces the AKM concept. What happens when AI agents don't just search your notes but actually operate on them?
👉 Read it: https://www.dsebastien.net/agentic-knowledge-management-the-next-evolution-of-pkm/
How One System Feeds Everything I Do
A look at how my knowledge system, content pipeline, and business operations all connect into one integrated system (I call it the 'Builder OS'.
Also, my article abut tagging remains quite successful: The Tag System That Finally Made Sense for Me - From Perfectionism Paralysis to Discovery Freedom (Article)
While you wait for the article, don't hesitate to check out the notes i've share about OpenClaw: https://notes.dsebastien.net/30+Areas/33+Permanent+notes/33.02+Content/OpenClaw+VPS+Configuration+Guide as well as what I did so far with it: https://x.com/dSebastien/status/2018363892968362333
Quotes of the Week
The difference between an archive and a system is intentionality. An archive stores. A system transforms
Notes without action are just pretty thoughts. Notes connected to action become leverage
Most knowledge workers are drowning in information but starving for knowledge
You can't scale inconsistency. You can't build a sustainable creator business on hoping inspiration strikes
Inspiration follows action, not the other way around. Momentum creates inspiration
Go Further
Sébastien Dubois
Sébastien Dubois
Sébastien Dubois
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Sébastien Dubois
About Sébastien
I'm Sébastien Dubois, and I'm on a mission to help knowledge workers escape information overload. After 20+ years in IT and seeing too many brilliant minds drowning in digital chaos, I've decided to help people build systems that actually work. Through the Knowii Community, my courses, products & services and my Website/Newsletter, I share practical and battle-tested systems.
I write about Knowledge Work, Personal Knowledge Management, Note-taking, Lifelong Learning, Personal Organization, Productivity, and more. I also craft lovely digital products and tools.
If you want to follow my work, then become a member and join our community.
Ready to get to the next level?
If you're tired of information overwhelm and ready to build a reliable knowledge system:
- 📚 KM for Beginners — 10+ hours of structured video lessons
- 🚀 Obsidian Starter Kit — Ready-made vault with 40+ templates
- 💼 Knowledge Worker Kit — Complete guides + lifetime community
- 🦉 1-on-1 Coaching — Personalized guidance
- 🎯 Join Knowii — Community + ALL courses & tools
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