DeveloPassion's Newsletter - The Lab

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

I’ve continued reading Josh Kaufman’s bestseller: The Personal MBA. I’m not very far yet (~10%), but the content is great. There’s a lot of signal and very little noise. I love it. Josh clearly describes the core elements of all businesses, the different ways to create/deliver value. I’m eager to continue reading this one.

I had fun re-discovering Season 5 of The Simpsons with the kids. We now try to watch an episode per day; tons of fun! When I was younger, I’ve watched the first seasons at least a hundred times. Matthieu and Amandine are always surprised when I “spoil” the upcoming dialogues 😂

I’m a huge fan of Matt Groening’s work and have watched most episodes of Futurama and Disenchantment. But I’ve actually never watched any episodes of the Simpsons past season 10. This means that I’ve got more than 2/3 of the episodes to watch. TBH I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand, it’s awesome because there’s so much I have yet to discover. On the other, I wonder how the show has evolved over the years. All I hope is that most of the voices will remain the same :)

Alright, let’s goooooo! 🚀

Welcome to the lab!

As you know, I’ve been thinking about small and riskless bets for quite a while now. Those are experiments. Some succeed, some fail, but there are always lessons to be learned.

In this new section of the newsletter, I’ll discuss the experiments I’m conducting and the ones I’m considering. Note that I’m eager to try new things, so if you have ideas, by all means, get in touch with me! A good lab needs a team of (mad) scientists! ❤️

Let me tell you about my next experiment!

Each week I spend countless hours capturing knowledge and ideas about various topics (e.g., PKM, learning, writing, business, entrepreneurship, product, software development, etc), inspiring quotes, and random facts that piqued my interest.

Here’s an overview of what I’ve captured this week:

I’m having tons of fun capturing ideas, but I don’t like the fact that my digital garden is not accessible to anyone else but me.

I try to capture high-signal information. Here’s an example from last week:

I would like my knowledge base to be like the East gardens of the Imperial Palace in Japan and have a limited number of visitors at any given time, ensuring a great experience for each and every one of them. My idea is to create a subscription model with a limited number of tokens (e.g., 20-25). People who subscribe will get access to my knowledge base as well as access to a private community with myself and other subscribers.

I see this experiment as a way to share ideas on a much deeper level with others, versus me publishing very specific blog posts. Sharing my notes means sharing what I capture and find “most” valuable, which is a very different, but IMHO very interesting value proposition.

Subscribers will get to see how I take my notes, how I improve my process week over week, things I discover, how I tag content, etc. I’ll also be available to answer any questions they might have about my content or my approach.

It’s a win-win proposition: I get rewarded for the efforts I put into my knowledge base, which motivates me to spend more time on it, and subscribers get access to high signal information, an insider view of my process, etc.

The PKM Journal is growing steadily. This past week, people have spent 3x more time reading our articles. And it feels great because we’re sharing ideas that can change lives for the better ❤️

The PKM community on Slack approaches 100 members. That will be an important milestone, but I don’t want this community to include a gazillion members that don’t know about each other. Many members are also inactive, which is far from great. I need to learn more about ways to approach this better. I’m thinking about trying to slow things down and maybe making the community invite-only.

I’ve added a ton of new resources to the PKM Library this week. The library now lists 200+ tools (!). I’ve also added a number of Podcasts that people should find interesting and many new YouTube Channels. The project has been featured in the newsletter of Curtis McHale, which was cool! Last but not least, I sold a few more copies, which always feels great 🎉

I’ve also spent (too) many hours thinking about a name for my upcoming PKM product. Choosing names is really really hard. And when good names come to mind, they’re either unavailable or trademarked… 😂

This week I’ve continued working on the third volume of my Dev Concepts collection.

I wrote about data storage units, storage devices, and cloud storage options.

Next week I’ll explore file systems, block storage, and dive into databases and database engine types.

This week I’ve published an article in the PKM Journal: