DeveloPassion's Newsletter #22 - Ecosystems and Integrated Thinking Environments

Welcome to the 22nd edition of my newsletter. Hello everyone! Welcome to all the newcomers. I hope that you’ve all had a great week! This one has been another productivity shipwreck for me. But it’s all right; life has a way to remind us that we can’t control everything; far from it! It’s humbling. Still, I wanted to show up and share interesting things I’ve discovered recently and a few of my recent thoughts.

One thing I strongly believe is that ecosystems have a lot more value and potential than single platforms and single products. Ecosystems allow both users and developers to combine platforms and products in ways that often surprise their creators, and allow for seamless experiences. And the key is to create interoperable platforms rather than siloed products. As you know, I’m embarked on a journey to improve the way we manage our personal knowledge. And while I want to create a product that combines the features of multiple others (content curation and note-taking/knowledge management), I certainly don’t want to create an isolated island. I want my product to integrate nicely with others. I want to let users make use of their data as they see fit, retaining full control and full ownership. Simply put, I want my project to become an integral part of the existing ecosystem, and embrace cross-collaborations. Technically, this translates into a number of elements. The most important one is creating a platform rather than “just” a product. On one hand, the product itself will provide an experience to manage personal knowledge. On the other hand, the platform will provide additional capabilities for users and third-party developers, such as the possibility to integrate with other platforms/products, the ability to extend the product through add-ons, the possibility of importing/exporting data in open formats, etc. Some say that one has to choose between building a product or a platform, but I disagree. I believe that we can move forward on both fronts; just one step at a time, and improve incrementally. But doing that requires thinking about the long-term vision right from the start. So this is my long-term vision. But of course, I need to start small. IMHO, the best starting point for a platform is to expose easy-to-use APIs. First for the product itself, but also for others. By having a solid public API from the very beginning, third-party integrations become much more natural. Then, over time, the platform can grow and be improved to support more use cases. Join my community on Slack if you want to discuss these ideas with us: https://dsebastien.net/pkm-community References:

An idea that I’ve encountered recently and found really fascinating is a parallel between Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and the world of knowledge management: https://axle.design/obsidian-roam-and-the-rise-of-integrated-thinking-environments%E2%80%94what-they-are-what-they-do-and-what-s Software developers have IDEs at their disposal; super powerful tools that can not only be used to edit the source code of their applications but also integrate most of the tools necessary for them to be productive. For instance, tools to debug their code, tools to test it, tools to discover quality issues, tools to transform data, tools to explore databases, and many more. The idea of Integrated Thinking Environments (ITEs) is to be to knowledge workers what IDEs are for developers. ITEs should become the “home” of lifelong learners; the place where they go when they want to think and learn. The question is of course: what are the tools that should be part of an ITE? Since it’s still the early days of ITEs, it’s pretty much open-ended and for us to imagine. Here’s my take on what an ITE should include (i.e., its Jobs-To-Be-Done):

To me, the goal of an ITE should be to support the complete funnel from content to atomic/networked knowledge. We start by capturing our thoughts, ideas, and content. Then we send everything down the funnel. Later, we need to ingest/digest/review it all to extract the gems: facts, ideas, knowledge. Finally, we can leverage the knowledge to expand our own universe and strengthen our second brain. This is what I would like to see in the world. What about you? Would you like to use such an integrated environment?

TypeScript keeps getting awesomer (is that a word? Probably not, but you get the idea!). I haven’t checked the roadmap (https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/Roadmap) recently, but it’s definitely something that I’d like to do in the coming weeks, just to get an idea of what’s coming next. Here are a few articles/links that I found interesting this week:

Content-wise, it’s been a very slow week for me. I only found time to publish a single article taken out of Dev Concepts. This article discusses the tradeoffs between quality and user satisfaction. It shares a few ideas about how to deal with that tension and help customers make better decisions: https://dsebastien.net/blog/2021-09-03-quality-vs-user-satisfaction

This week, I want to share a few books that I plan on reading next:

There are a few hundred more in my “to read” list, but those are high on my list ;-) Tell me about what you plan on reading next, I’m curious!

Here are a few links that I found interesting this week: