DeveloPassion's Newsletter - Boomerang

Edition 68 of my newsletter, discussing Knowledge Management, Knowledge Work, Zen Productivity, Personal Organization, and more!

DeveloPassion's Newsletter - Boomerang
Hello everyone! I’m Sébastien Dubois, your host. You’re receiving this email because you signed up for DeveloPassion’s Newsletter. Thank you for being here with me ✨
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Welcome to the 68th edition
Another week, another newsletter! I hope that you all had a great one 🤩
Welcome to all the new readers ❤️
This week has come and gone so quickly! I didn’t have much time to work on side projects this week. I participated in SecAppDev in Leuven (Belgium), a conference dedicated to IT security.
As some of you know, I ❤️ all things ITSEC, so participating in such a conference was a real blast. I’ve learned quite a few things.

The rest area outside the conference rooms. Delightful!
It’s always fun to discover all the ways systems can get hacked… In particular, a really fascinating talk by Abhay Bhargav focused on Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) and explored how to turn Webhooks into dangerous boomerangs. In this case, the attacker controlled a Webhook target and replied to the Webhook request with a redirect, leading to data exfiltration and ultimately AWS account compromise (woops 😂).
I’ve also participated in two whole-day workshops that were really fun. It’ll take me a while to publish my notes, but those will ultimately become part of my Dev Concepts books.
While I was there, I also took the opportunity to visit the wonderful city of Leuven.
Refreshing sights in Leuven
If you come to Europe and/or Belgium, then do consider visiting the city.
The city is even more beautiful at night
The Lab 🧪
Since I was at the conference for a part of the week, I didn’t have much time left to work on my side projects.
Although, I did write a few more guides for the Obsidian Starter Kit:
  • Iterative and Incremental note-taking
  • How to capture information
  • How to capture quotes
  • How to capture information about persons of interest
Those start completing the picture of how to take smart(er) notes in practice.
Here’s a small update on the $$$ for those who like numbers:
  • Obsidian Starter Kit: 58 sales in the last 30 days ($910, down from ~$960 last week)
  • Personal Knowledge Library: 20 sales in the last 30 days ($395, up from $380 last week)
I’ve started developing a plugin for Obsidian called Obsidian Publisher. The goal of the plugin is to help me publish my notes on the Web more easily. Currently, I manually copy my notes to my blog, and fiddle with pictures/metadata. Then I manually import articles from my blog to Medium. And sometimes to other sites as well (e.g., DEV.to, HashNode, etc). This takes quite some time and effort and is “dumb” work. Moreover, whenever I need to fix typos, it’s a nightmare as I need to edit n different places.
With the plugin, it will be possible to publish/update as many articles as I want, all in one go.
Things I've learned this week
A few of the things I've learned this week
Here are some ideas I found interesting (apart from everything at the SecAppDev conference):
  • The opposite of distraction is traction
  • Increase cold outreach success by providing scenarios
  • Impostor Syndrome
  • Meetings need to be designed
I will publish those for all my supporters 🎉
Recent articles
No new articles this week.
Quotes of the week
  • “Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will”
  • “Everything will be okay in the end. And if it’s not okay, it’s not the end” — John Lennon
  • “Negotiations are won by whoever cares less” — Naval Ravikant
Tips of the week
How cool is that?!
Thinking and learning links of the week
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost - Poems | Academy of American Poets
The Kool Aid Factory :: All Zines
Tech links of the week
Function Declarations and Expressions
Clean Architectures in Python - Introduction