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DeveloPassion's Newsletter - Personal Knowledge Management Matters

Sebastien Dubois

Jan 31, 2022 — 8 min read

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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Welcome to the 45th edition

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

This month has been packed full of good news and awesome progress. 🚀

The most important news of the week is that my daughter does not have Covid. She was sick for a few days, but the tests came back negative. Phew! The second most important news of the week is that my oldest son just turned 12, and my youngest is now 4 months old❤️.

This week I’ve switched from AWS Glacier to Backblaze. Migrating was easy enough given the compatibility with Synology, but removing my old backups on AWS Glacier proved to be almost comically difficult.

The first month of the year is almost behind us. Time for a review!

Alright, let’s goooooo! 🚀

Month in review

Some of the things I've learned this month

General feeling

To be honest I’ve really been struggling this past month. I did manage to resume writing the third volume of my Dev Concepts collection, but I was not consistent yet. I had a hard time waking up earlier again. That being said, I’m satisfied with the new schedule I’ve designed for myself. Consistency will come; hopefully next month :)

The Indiependent community

In January, I’ve joined Rosie Sherry’s Indiependent Community. It was a small $9 bet but it has turned out to be a great investment. I’ve met cool people in that community and am really glad to be part of it! It stays alive too, and that’s great!

I keep going back day after day, and it feels great, unlike many other communities!

Personal Knowledge Management

I’ve put a lot of effort into expanding my Personal Knowledge Management Library. I sold quite a few copies this month, which filled my heart with joy 🎉

I’ve also just launched the PKM Journal (more about it below!) as well as a landing page with an overview of my overarching PKM project.

This is really just the beginning. There’s a lot more I want to do for the community ❤️

focusd app

We have launched the landing page of focusd, our Zen productivity app, and managed to raise quite some interest from the community (more on this further below). Next to that, André and I have also officially launched the focusd productivity community.

Writing

I’ve published 3 articles this month:

I’ve also managed to remain consistent with the newsletter, and even launch the new “Midweek Links” edition. I hope you like those!

Reading

As I intended, I’ve managed to read and take deep notes for two books this month:

YouTube channel

Towards the end of the month, I’ve decided to prepare myself for starting my YouTube channel. It’s one of my big goals for this year. I’m taking things slow (because I’m shy 😂), but I’ll start publishing content soon.

Affiliate marketing

Business-wise, I’ve also started experimenting with affiliate marketing. I don’t intend to turn into a door-to-door salesman anytime soon, but I really believe I can find synergies with other creators (e.g., with Elizabeth who wrote Calmer Notes).

PKM Announcements - Journal & Subreddit

I’ve decided to create a Medium publication dedicated to Personal Knowledge Management 📖

The main driver is the fact I haven’t found anything similar so far in my research, and I believe that it is direly needed by the community and by people willing to get started with PKM.

There are many authors writing about this topic, but there is very little centralization. Information is scattered all around the Web, and hard to find. And this is rather sad considering the subject!

In the hope of improving the situation, I’ve decided to launch a few initiatives.

The first one is the PKM Journal, a Medium publication. In the coming weeks, I’m going to reach out to other authors, and try to rally people around this project.

Personal Knowledge Management Journal

This publication is dedicated to Personal Knowledge Management and lifelong learners. Discover Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), Tools For Thought, Zettelkasten and more!

pkmjournal.com • Share

The second one is a subreddit dedicated to PKM that I’ve just launched. I’ll use it to share the interesting links I stumble upon with the community. Hopefully, it’ll become an information hub for PKM enthusiasts.

Personal Knowledge Management • r/PersonalKnowledgeMgmt

A space dedicated to the exploration of knowledge, sense-making, learning, writing, taking smart notes and thinking on a whole new level. A place…

www.reddit.com • Share

Finally, I’ve also launched a homepage for PKM. For now, it’s rather spartan, but I plan to grow it over time.

You don't have to feel overwhelmed by information overload

Personal Knowledge Management for the rest of us.

personal-knowledge-management.com • Share

focusd news

This week André and I have only managed to free up an hour to work together. We’ve tried to make the best of it and wrote a few pieces of content in the hope to trigger interesting exchanges and raise awareness for our project.

We were lucky with one piece in particular. It quickly got to the front page of Indie Hackers, which incidentally brought many visitors to the landing page of focusd.

And we received even more attention after that same article was featured within the newsletter of Indie Hackers.

Thanks to this little success, we now have 50 (up from 16!) people on the waiting list. This is pretty cool ❤️

As a result, a few people have also joined the focusd community on Slack.

I didn’t get to re-record the intro video, but I’ll get to it soon!

André and I stocked 🎉

Recent articles

My current Indie Hacking toolkit

Discover some of the tools I use as an Indie Hacker and creator.

dsebastien.net • Share

Product development process: From idea to code

Discover the whole process so far behind the creation of focusd. From idea to code.

dsebastien.net • Share

How cool is that?!

Animate Anything Along an SVG Path - Codrops

Learn how to code creative animations with JavaScript using SVG paths and the getPointAtLength() function.

tympanus.net • Share

Tips of the week

Presenting with VS Code – Screencast mode - DEV Community

Did you know that VS Code includes a screencast mode?

dev.to • Share

Note-taking is not as boring as it may sound. It's useful in so many contexts. At work, it's a way to never forget anything. And in general, it's a way to think in a deep and meaningful way.
— Sébastien Dubois (@dSebastien) January 9, 2022

Time blocking and regular reviews/planning sessions are my favorite productivity techniques. Let me tell you why. A thread 👇 pic.twitter.com/maqXA1wSwF
— Sébastien Dubois (@dSebastien) January 18, 2022

Books corner

No recommendation this week, apart from this one: read more and take notes to remember more of what you read! 🙏

Board game of the week

The Lord of the Rings Journeys in Middle-earth

The board game of the week is one I’ve played quite a lot since last year. Being a huge fan of JRR Tolkien and the LOTR movies, I simply couldn’t resist 😂.

In this cooperative game by Fantasy Flight Games, 1-5 players pick a character and go on an epic adventure against the forces of evil during a long campaign.

This game is supported by an application that guides the group, controls the enemies, etc.

In this game, players and monsters are represented by miniatures, and combat is driven by cards. Each player needs to carefully manage his/her hand to keep enough strengths and resolve the quests.

amzn.to • Share

Quotes of the week