DeveloPassion's Newsletter #116 - Keep Going

Hello everyone! I'm Sébastien Dubois, your host (I'm on Twitter). You're receiving this email because you signed up for DeveloPassion's Newsletter. Thank you for being here with me ✨

Welcome to the 116th edition

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

This week, I've spent a lot of time working on Knowii. I'll tell you more in the lab section.

I've also officially appointed ChatGPT as my co-pilot. I use it A LOT! For instance, I've used it to help me build a small Python app to share interesting links more easily with my communities on Reddit, Slack and Twitter. I wouldn't say that the experience was perfect, but it did help me to develop it somewhat faster. I wrote about that experience on Twitter.

If you enjoy this newsletter and get value from it, please consider becoming a subscriber. You'll be able to join our community and meet like-minded people while enabling me to keep creating content. If you prefer, you can also buy one of my products on Gumroad or offer me a cup of coffee.

Alright, let's gooooo 🚀

The lab 🧪

This week, I've continued working on Knowii. I've continued iterating on the data model, implemented and tested the signup and signin flows, and deployed a first version on Vercel.

I've also started thinking about the "elevator pitch". Phases that I envision for Knowii:

• Phase 1: A modern social bookmarking tool for communities
• Phase 2: A community content curation solution
• Phase 3: A community knowledge management solution

Over time, I want Knowii to let users curate all sorts of content, create collaborative summaries, and ultimately turn it into a full-blown knowledge management solution. But I have to start somewhere, and that's link sharing. At first, communities will be able to capture, tag, organize, and share interesting links (resources). At that stage, Knowii will thus be akin to the long gone del.icio.us, or Pinboard. The major difference is that Knowii will put the focus on people and communities.

For this phase, I've identified the following concepts:

• Communities: public or private groups that will collect, organize and share resources
• Resource collections: regroup a number of resources
• Resources: at first bookmarks only, but those will later expand to include support for videos, tweets, and posts of all sorts
• Tags
• People: Community members and users. This will include users of the platform that create/share content, but also people that aren't using the platform but who are the creators of the resources.

The people and communities parts are key, as the idea is to put them front and center throughout the platform. People and users will both have public profiles where their contributions will be visible. That will provide an interesting way to explore content shared on the platform.

I still haven't made up my mind about going Open Source or not. It's a tough decision. But I think that the community-first approach will probably be enough to ensure that the instance of Knowii that I will host will be the most interesting to be a part of. The more communities there will be on Knowii, and the more value there will be.

Aside from that, I've noticed that I'm losing more and more momentum with my existing products and articles. That's why I want to ask you again to support my work. I hate asking this, but it's the only way for me to make this activity sustainable in the long run:

New articles

The value of timeless concepts

Timeless concepts are safe bets when learning

Sébastien DuboisSebastien Dubois

Quotes of the week

• "You only need to know the direction, not the destination. The direction is enough to make the next choice" — James Clear
• "Culture isn't about what you say. It's about what you do"

How cool is that?!

The Deep Sea

Scroll down the deep sea in this interactive page.

Thinking and learning

Master divergent and convergent thinking

A productivity expert explains how you can be creative and a powerhouse of productivity.

Big ThinkTiago Forte

Feel first, think second: Is our brain really cut out for the modern world?

The brain evolved to deal with immediate risks, like hunger and danger, not complicated, creeping risks, like obesity and climate change.

Big ThinkRoss Pomeroy

Takeaways From Daily Writing

Embrace Writing and Produce Valuable Content

MediumClayton Miller

https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-uniqueness-of-human-recursive-thinking

Cross-Domain Thinking Drives Insights & Innovation

Using ChatGPT to Apply Concepts from One Domain for Innovation in Another

Mimir's WellMark McNeilly

Indie Hacking and bootstrapping

Quit Monkey, Grit Monkey

The thing you’ve been pouring yourself into isn’t working. Now what?

Cory Zue

Revenue is easy, profit is harder

The fundamentals needed to run a business in the next economic cycle.

Entrepreneur's EdgeRyan Waliany

The One Thing Large Creators Do Differently To Build An Audience

Why Showing Up In Your Power Is The Key To Long-Term Growth As A Creator

MediumEv Chapman

4 things i learned after getting users

last month, i posted about my website basement community on hacker news and it sorta blew up. you can view the post here. it blew up so much, i was totally u…

front page | basement community

How to promote your book on Substack

Nothing sells books like a great Substack. Read top tips from writers at all stages of the publishing process

On SubstackOn Substack

How to Find Your Niche and Own It in 3 Simple Steps | Entrepreneur

Here are the three steps you need to take to find the right business niche for you.

EntrepreneurAndres Tovar

Tech

Signals in Angular: The Future of Change Detection - ANGULARarchitects

Angular is going to rely on a reactive mechanism called signal to make change detection more lightweight and powerful.

ANGULARarchitectsManfred Steyer, GDE

Choosing a Postgres Primary Key

Turns out the question of which identifier to use as a Primary Key is complicated -- we’re going to dive into some of the complexity and inherent trade-offs, and figure things out

Supabase

offsec.tools - A vast collection of security tools

A vast collection of security tools for bug bounty, pentest and red teaming

offsec.tools

Every Repo is a Monorepo

When comparing “regular” repos and monorepos we imagine this:

Nx DevtoolsVictor Savkin

AI

Cheating is All You Need

There is something legendary and historic happening in software engineering, right now as we speak, and yet most of you don’t realize at all how big it is.

Sourcegraph

GitHub - npiv/chatblade: A CLI Swiss Army Knife for ChatGPT

A CLI Swiss Army Knife for ChatGPT. Contribute to npiv/chatblade development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHubnpiv

And Yet It Understands

In high-dimensional vector spaces, numerical optimization is omnipotent.

Fernando BorrettiFernando Borretti

The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI

Proving you’re a human on a web flooded with generative AI content

Maggie AppletonLuciano Strika

Generative AI is good at cooperating with people and bad at full automation

Random variety is fun but not great for repetitive tasks

Skybrian’s Blogskybrian

Introducing Mozilla.ai: Investing in trustworthy AI | The Mozilla Blog

We’re committing $30M to build Mozilla.ai: A startup — and a community — building a trustworthy, independent, and open-source AI ecosystem. We’re o

The Mozilla BlogMark Surman

Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter - Future of Life Institute

We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.

Future of Life Institute

About Sébastien

I am Sébastien Dubois. You can follow me on X 🐦 and on BlueSky 🦋.

I am an author, founder, and coach. I write books and articles about Knowledge Work, Personal Knowledge Management, Note-taking, Lifelong Learning, Personal Organization, and Zen Productivity. I also craft lovely digital products . You can learn more about my projects here.

If you want to follow my work, then become a member.

Ready to get to the next level?

To embark on your Knowledge Management journey, consider investing in resources that will equip you with the tools and strategies you need. Check out the Obsidian Starter Kit and the accompanying video course. It will give you a rock-solid starting point for your note-taking and Knowledge Management efforts.

If you want to take a more holistic approach, then the Knowledge Worker Kit is for you. It covers PKM, but expands into productivity, personal organization, project/task management, and more:

Knowledge Worker Kit and community

Unlock the next level of your career. Stop feeling disorganized, unproductive, or overwhelmed.

Gumroad

If you are in a hurry, then do not hesitate to book a coaching session with me:

Personal Knowledge Management Coaching

Receive personalized coaching to quickly reach your goals

Gumroad