DeveloPassion's Newsletter - New chapter

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 ✨

If you enjoy this newsletter, then become a supporter ❤️

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

June is already gone. And with that, 50% of 2022 is now behind us! 😨. I hope you’re all ready to rock the next half of the year! 🚀

This month is the beginning of a new chapter of my life. I’m both enthusiastic and scared shitless. For those who don’t know, my life partner and I have decided to end our relationship. It was the hardest decision ever. But life is complex, and not all choices can be simple and straightforward. Sometimes, the obstacle is the way…

Needless to say, the last months were extremely demanding, challenging, and exhausting. I’m still struggling, but I’m proud to have managed to keep coming back here with you, week after week.

My daily note-taking has clearly helped me a lot through all this. Not only as a way to vent my thoughts and emotions, but also as a way to better understand myself and think more clearly. 100% would recommend!

In June, the lab did not explode, which is rather good news. The formulas are stable and even though I didn’t manage to start new experiments, the ongoing ones have continued gaining momentum.

I’ve sold 40+ copies of the Obsidian Starter Kit ($630) and continued improving it. I didn’t deliver as much content as I intended, but it’s definitely coming. The kit was mentioned in the Obsidian Community Roundup newsletter of Eleanor Konik.

I’ve also sold 10 copies of the Personal Knowledge Management Library ($200) and also improved it. I’ve received a ton of useful feedback, especially from Raymond (thanks again!).

The PKM subreddit that I’ve launched has now almost 360 members. People keep coming back for new resources, and I really like sharing all the PKM goodness that I stumble upon. That experiment was clearly a Win-Win because it helps the community and also brings more visitors to my product pages and articles.

I’m slowly approaching 2K followers on Twitter. I’m not in a hurry, but I clearly feel like it’s growing too slowly. The thing is that I know exactly why: I don’t tweet enough. More importantly, I don’t engage nearly enough! I failed to keep the momentum I had, and now struggle to resume interacting more efficiently and scheduling more tweets in advance.

This month I’ve also decided to move my content over to Ghost, following the footsteps of Rosie with Rosieland. Ghost is really appealing as it provides a way to host multiple types of content such as articles and newsletters. In addition, it also makes it possible to target multiple audiences, manage subscriptions (with customizable tiers), etc.

My main problem with the migration is the time and effort it will take for me to move everything over. Being a nerd, I’ve decided to go at it using my tool of choice: programming. After an interesting discussion with Pete, I suddenly wanted to create my first Obsidian plugin: Obsidian Publisher. The goal of the plugin is to make it a breeze to bulk publish or update notes as blog posts or newsletters, all from the comfort of Obsidian. My ultimate goal is also to handle cross-posting articles to Medium, DEV.to, Hashnode, etc.

I’m also pleased with the momentum that my blog is getting. In June, impressions on Google Search went from 57K to 78K. I hope this trend will continue.

With all the chaos in my life right now, I didn’t find the energy to try and launch the YouTube channel. That remains on hold for now. I’ll give that project another go in September!

I also haven’t had the opportunity to get back in touch with André to continue working on our focusd app. Bummer!

I’ve taken a ton of notes in June, which I find quite surprising given how little time I actually found to even breathe 😂

Among those, here are a few cool ideas I’ve explored:

I mentioned this a few times, but if those topics look interesting, tell me, and I’ll publish my notes! 🎉

No new articles this week.

I know it’s been a while, but the best I can offer you right now is a small poem I wrote last week, called “Freedom”: