DeveloPassion's Newsletter - Void

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 🤩

This week, my family and I were tested positive for Covid. We had a good run, we avoided it for ~2 years. Not bad! Luckily we caught Omicron and haven’t suffered too much. I was apparently the most impacted in the family, with a lot of fatigue and headaches. But it’s probably because I’m a fragile little thing… 😂

I couldn’t do much work this week, but I still managed to make some things happen. I’ve finished reading Calmer Notes and finally started Josh Kaufman’s bestseller: The Personal MBA. So far, so good. I love the focus that Josh puts on mental models right from the start.

Since I had a lot of “Zombie time”, I binge-watched The Blacklist and Spielberg’s Amazing Stories (which weren’t all that amazing, unfortunately).

I’ve also watched a beta version of André’s course about VS Code, and let me tell you, it’s gonna be a great one!

Alright, let’s goooooo! 🚀

The PKM Journal now has 20+ followers. It grows steadily, which is great. People have spent 3x more time reading our articles this week.

The PKM community on Slack now has 90 members, and the one on Reddit now has just hit 50. To be honest I hope the growth rate will not increase too quickly. I like getting to know all the people who join us, and I like our cosy space ;-)

I’ve continued expanding the PKM Library this week. The list of tools now includes 185+ different ones. It’s getting scary. There are so many apps out there! In the coming weeks, I’ll add a few views to help people more easily figure out which applications correspond to their specific needs. The project was featured by Awesome Info Products this week.

Aside from that, I’ve published a small post to give more information about the project, as well as an introduction video:

With constant headaches and toothaches, focusing on focusd (pun intended) was quite complicated. I decided to take some time off.

This week I published the video intro for the PKM Library. This was the first time I actually used my Rode microphone and my Canon EOS 70D as a Webcam. It took me a while to get started, but I’m glad about the results.

The most annoying part was finding something to hide the whiteboard and board games behind me 😂. My desk is very close to the wall, so it’s difficult to decorate nicely for a YouTube channel. I’ve been thinking about hiring an interior designer, but it’s just me being unreasonable again ;-)

While recording, I also realized that I lacked a script. It’s something that I will need to prepare for my future videos. Lastly, I gave up editing for this first attempt; I didn’t have the time or energy to dive into a course.

Sometimes when we’re in-between the important stages of our lives, we feel like traversing cosmic voids (those vast spaces between filaments — the largest structures in the universe).

I’ve been having this feeling of going through the void lately. I think that this state of mind is still related to the failure of my previous startup project. As if my life was currently “on hold”, waiting for the next big thing to start. But it’s not true of course. Life goes on. Things evolve, life and circumstances change; all the time. Even if we let negative thoughts take over from time to time, those are mostly disconnected from reality.

Since I’ve killed my startup, I’ve grown, I’ve built new things, launched new ideas, and even created a new human being called Raphaël. My oldest son is now 12, almost ready to go to high school, and my daughter Amandine is already 9. Time flies!

It flies, and it also feels like standing still, depending on what we think about and how we feel like. It’s the weirdest thing…

Whenever I lose myself thinking about the void, I quickly remind myself that the void cannot exist in isolation. The void exists so that we can distinguish concrete things in the universe. If there was no empty space between galaxies, then would those be separate? The same is probably true with our lives. There’s no before and after if there’s no gap between those “big” stages of our lives. What feels like void is actually a transition. And transitions are as important as the rest of the show. We may want to skip ahead, but we would be missing important moments.

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