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DeveloPassion's Newsletter - Community building

Sebastien Dubois

11 Oct 2021 — 7 min read

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 27th edition

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

This week I’ve spent a surprising amount of time changing diapers… and thinking about life (nope, those are not mutually exclusive!).

Community building

This week, I’ve participated in the “Before Community” learning sprint organized by Orbit. This free workshop was dedicated to what happens before a community is formed. It was fascinating and a ton of fun. Our hosts were Rosie Sherry and Erin Mikail Staples.

Rosie has been building communities for many years now, so it was a treat to have her teach us about her craft. The results of the workshop are accessible here for free. It’s really worth a look! If you’re interested, then I’ll share my notes.

Creating online communities was not a skill that I planned on acquiring, but the more I think about it, the more I’m realizing that it’s a valuable skill to learn, so I’m diving right in!

If some of you are interested, then I’ll share my notes. I hope to leverage the things I’ve learned in order to better shape the two communities I’ve created recently:

If you’re curious about community building, then check out the upcoming events that Orbit is organizing:

Orbit also has a nice Discord server.

Svelte

This morning I want to have a bit of fun. What should I learn? Svelte or Rust?
— Sébastien Dubois (@dSebastien) October 8, 2021

After hesitating a bit, I’ve finally decided to start learning more about Svelte. I’m just getting started, but what I’ve discovered so far looks really promising. I like the simplicity and the interactive tutorials.

As some of you know, I’m a huge fan of Nrwl NX, so the first thing I did was look for a Svelte plugin. Fortunately, Dominik Pieper has got me covered. He has created @nxext/svelte, which is a breeze to install and configure. Thanks to it, I was quickly able to add a Svelte application to my Nx workspace. Neat!

Next, I wanted to add Tailwind to the mix, because there’s no going back for me; Tailwind is a must now. I found a documentation page by Dominik which showed me one possible way, but I didn’t want to hide away my PostCSS config, so I looked for other options. I ended up creating a template:

Alright, I've started learning #Svelte

I've created a template app with Svelte + #Tailwind + TypeScript + Nrwl NX: https://t.co/WMpTqBH1kb

Do you want me to write an article about this?
— Sébastien Dubois (@dSebastien) October 10, 2021

I’ll write an article to explain the few steps required to get started.

My next step is to continue to explore the documentation and create a Chrome extension to do something concrete while learning.

If there’s interest, I could maybe try and stream my explorations on Youtube. You’d get to see the gazillions of silly things I try while learning new things ;-)

Recent articles

This week I’ve published a lengthy article (~20min read) about periodic journaling & daily note-taking:

How periodic journaling can lead to a more fulfilling life - Part 1: Introduction – Dubois Sébastien

The first part

dsebastien.net • Share

How periodic journaling can lead to a more fulfilling life - Part 2: Going further – Dubois Sébastien

The second part

dsebastien.net • Share

It may sound silly, but journaling & periodic reviews are really transformative. Both play an important role in my productivity system. Do you also keep a journal? If not, why? What’s keeping you from keeping track of what happens in your life?

Tips of the week

5 steps to designing the life you want | Bill Burnett | TEDxStanford

On using Design Thinking techniques to design a better life for yourself

www.youtube.com • Share

How to get in the flow in 3 easy steps

Getting in the flow may feel like that elusive, hard-to-reach state, but it doesn’t have to be! Want to feel deeply focused and do great, productive work?

www.youtube.com • Share

Chrome side panel

Did you know that you can enable a side panel in Chrome with Bookmarks & articles to read later?

twitter.com • Share

Books corner

This week I want to share a book that I’m curious about. As a workaholic, I certainly need to dive into this one re-learn the art of doing nothing without feeling guilty ;-)

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

On the benefits of doing nothing. From time to time, obviously.

www.amazon.com • Share

Quotes of the week

Life is about “Wanting what you get”, not “Getting what you want”
If it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem, it’s a circumstance
The mind has no firewall

Links of the week, ideas and tips

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

20 Things I've Learned in my 20 Years as a Software Engineer - Simple Thread

20 interesting lessons

www.simplethread.com • Share

GitHub - BuilderIO/partytown

Relocate resource-intensive third-party scripts off of the main thread and into a web worker. A super interesting technique to improve your Web vitals!

github.com • Share

Firefox 93.0, See All New Features, Updates and Fixes

Your description for this link…

www.mozilla.org • Share

daisyUI — Tailwind CSS Components

An awesome UI kit using Tailwind

daisyui.com • Share

PodRocket - A web development podcast from LogRocket | Podcast on Spotify

Given the quality of LogRocket’s blog, I’m convinced that the podcast is worth a listen!

open.spotify.com • Share

How to Use TypeScript with React Components

How to use TypeScript to type React components: validate props, mark props as optional.

dmitripavlutin.com • Share

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Go Further

Why Obsidian is All You Need - From Simple Notes to Complete Productivity

Discover why Obsidian isn't just another note-taking app, but a complete system for managing your knowledge, tasks, projects, and digital life.

Sébastien DuboisSébastien Dubois

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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.

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