DeveloPassion's Newsletter - Community-first learning

Hello everyone! I’m Sébastien Dubois, your host. You’re receiving this email because you signed up for DeveloPassion’s Newsletter or the Dev Concepts project. Thank you for being here with me ✨

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Another year, another month, another week, another newsletter! I hope that you all had a great end of the year 🤩

I’m personally happy that Christmas, my daughter’s birthday and New year’s eve and family visits are behind us. I need to breathe, rest, and start exercising again to get rid of the extra weight I’ve gained! 😂

I’ve also received good news from the publisher of my TypeScript book. After two years, I’m finally getting some money. It’s not much, but it means a lot to me ;-)

This year will probably be tough as I’m almost back at square one with entrepreneurship. But I’m not letting go just yet!

Now that 2022 has begun, it’s time to put our plans into motion. There’s no time to waste. Of course, the start will be slow, as we probably all need to recover from the past week or so of over-eating, over-socializing (or not), and under-sleeping. Still, as usual, every step counts.

So let’s goooooo! 🚀

The first idea I want to share with you for 2022 is to try to find joy in missing out on some things. The whole world wants to us experience Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). But maybe it’s time for us to feel good about missing out on some things instead. We need to go against the flow and focus on the Joy of Missing Out (JOMO).

We’re probably better off both emotionally and financially, avoiding falling for well-known marketing techniques. We all know these:

Maybe it’s actually great if we miss that 50% promotion. Maybe it’s good if we don’t pledge on that Kickstarter campaign ending tomorrow.

Let’s try and go to the opposite end. Let’s feel happy and proud about missing out. Let’s focus less on consumerism and more on what really matters.

This week, one sentence that caught my attention was this one by James Clear: “When you choose who to follow on Twitter, you are choosing your future thoughts”.

It resonated with me because I’m a huge believer in a “people-first” approach to learning. Whenever I decide to learn something new, my very first step is usually to find who knows and who cares about that topic. I try to identify the experts, the innovators, the most active/vocal community members. You could also call this a community-first approach to learning.

One thing is for sure: the more you read about a topic, the more you’ll be influenced, and the more it will change you. Especially if you learn it from the people who care deeply about it. That’s actually why I want to read a ton of non-fiction books this year. I expect those books to change me.

In the past, my go-to approach consisted in finding blogs covering the subject and following their RSS feeds. This immersed me in the topic and exposed me to both new and old ideas shared by those blogs.

But in fact, what matters isn’t really the blogs themselves, but rather the people behind those.

The modern version of that approach is to use Twitter, where many active members of various communities (especially the tech one) are present and active. Nowadays, I still use RSS, but I now complement it with Twitter and Twitter lists. Whenever I’m interested in a new topic, I create a list on Twitter and start tagging the people I find that have an obvious interest.

This is a great way to learn about any topic because it exposes you to both key and innovative ideas from the people who truly care.

If you want to know what I care about (at least professionally), then take a look at my Twitter lists; you might find yourself wanting to learn more ;-)

This week I’ve continued adding resources to my Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) Library: 20 more articles, 20 more videos, 20 more tools, etc.

It’s a background effort that is going to last for a while, but I’m confident that this resource will slowly become key for the community.

I’ve made a few more sales, which made me really happy ❤️

I’ve decided to experiment with tiered pricing. From now on, the price will gradually go up as I sell more and more copies.

One problem that I have with the current form of the product (i.e., a Notion space) is that people need to duplicate it to access the content. While that works, it makes it difficult for people who already got it to update with my latest changes without losing information.

To fix that, I intend to start creating my own platform to share this content. Each user having access to it will always be able to access the up-to-date version and will be able to know exactly which resources they’ve already explored.

This week, it was complicated for André and me to find time to collaborate. Still, we did manage to make progress on some components of our interface:

More importantly, we’ve also almost completed the storyline’s demo:

This storyline is the basis for the showcase video that we will produce right next. We have two main goals with:

👉 Join the waiting list: https://apps.developassion.be/productivity

No new articles this week!

This week I want to share an awesome resource about books. I’m definitely going to read many of those in the coming months & years!

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