DeveloPassion's Newsletter #117 - Works

Edition 117 of my newsletter, discussing Knowledge Management, Knowledge Work, Zen Productivity, Personal Organization, and more!

DeveloPassion's Newsletter #117 - Works

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 117th edition

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

This week, I've continued moving forward with Knowii. Unfortunately, I couldn't make as much progress as I wanted. I've been fighting against the "It works on my machine" syndrome. It's very frustrating when you deploy code to production, and it doesn't work the way it does on your own machine. This happens more than we usually care to admit, and it's costing billions per year to companies around the world. In my case, this was mainly due to the way Next.js applications are built and deployed to Vercel. The front-end development world is quite complex, and there are many surprising subtleties. Some of the differences I've stumbled upon include: libraries and files missing in production because they haven't been flagged as "required" by the tracing module, routing that doesn't work in production, path differences to load files, libraries that are included for production while they're not necessary, causing serverless functions to go over the 50MB limit, etc. It's an endless stream of issues that keep popping up. Take this one for example. And it's just one among many.

Apart from that, I've spent time with my kids and enjoyed a new Carnival last weekend. Once again, tons of fun!

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 🧪

The lab is focused mostly on Knowii these days. I leave my existing products continue enjoying their momentum, while I focus on the next wave.

I've finally managed to record and publish a new video on YouTube. I'm not proud of it, but at least it's out there. There will be more opportunities for me to learn more and improve.

New articles

No new articles this week.

Quotes of the week

  • "Never judge people by their past. People learn. People change. People move on"
  • "When teachers stop learning, so do students" — Jim Knight

How cool is that?!

The newest developer tool is ChatGPT
ChatGPT acquired as many users as Instagram in two months. Here’s how you can use it as a developer tool to make you more productive.

Thinking and learning

Reverse Outlining with Language Models
Using language models to generate reverse outlines of writing drafts
Retroactive Journaling
I wish I was better at journaling. I love it and love having documentation of the things I’ve done, feelings I’ve felt, experiences I’ve had, etc. I just haven’t built the habit yet. I’d like to change that. While I want to document my life moving forward, I also want to start painting a coherent
How to protect our memory? Education is key, new research suggests
However, going to college in our 20s isn’t the only way to keep memory, judgment and focus sharp.
Man and machine: GPT for second brains · Reasonable Deviations
Note-taking strategy 2023
I wrote about my note-taking approach for the first time in 2016 (read for fun), and then pretty expansively about its evolved version in 2019. In spite of the title of these posts, already in 2019 it had become more a system for personal knowledge management than just for note-taking. It is now aga…

Indie Hacking and bootstrapping

Balancing diapers and dreams: How to succeed as a parent founder
Starting a startup is no easy task. It requires mastering a valuable skill, building a successful business from the ground up, and constantly adapting t…
Our Shift to Usage-Based Pricing
We are launching usage-based pricing for Appsmith customers who won’t have to worry about unpredictable pricing or expenses - costs are capped at an affordable price.
How To Do Hard Things
A founder explores his journey with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

Tech

ECMAScript 2023 spec for JavaScript adds methods for arrays
ECMAScript 2023, due in June, is set to add new methods for searching and changing arrays, allow symbols to be used as WeakMap keys, and standardize support for hashbang grammar.
How to Use the React Context API in Your Projects
Managing state is an essential part of developing applications in React. A common way to manage state is by passing props. Passing props means sending data from one component to another. It’s a good way to make sure that data gets to the right place in a React application.
Inlining SVGs for Dark Mode
I will here indulge in the traditional practice of using my blog to talk about how I’m using my blog. This page is built with the Hugo static site generator. I recently updated it to use the latest version of the beautifulhugo theme, which unbeknownst to me included a dark mode colorscheme. Recent b…
Generalists are rare gems
One day I read the code of Chromium in C++ to optimize screenshot rendering. The other day, I tuned a database engine reasonably well because I wrote a…

AI

What GPT-4 Does Is Less Like “Figuring Out” and More Like “Already Knowing”
Yes, It’s a Stochastic Parrot, But Most Of The Time You Are Too, And It’s Memorized a Lot More More Than You Have
GPT-4: A Copilot for the Mind
Never forget what you read again
GitHub - Significant-Gravitas/Auto-GPT: An experimental open-source attempt to make GPT-4 fully autonomous.
An experimental open-source attempt to make GPT-4 fully autonomous. - GitHub - Significant-Gravitas/Auto-GPT: An experimental open-source attempt to make GPT-4 fully autonomous.
Exclusive Q&A: John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence
John Carmack, the iconic Dallas game developer, rocket engineer, and VR pioneer, is taking aim now at solving AGI. If successful, his moonshot effort would be a ‘change-the-world-level’ event.
Vicuna: An Open-Source Chatbot Impressing GPT-4 with 90%* ChatGPT Quality
by the Team with members from UC Berkeley, CMU, Stanford, and UC San Diego
Simply explained: how does GPT work?
By now, you have probably heard of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or any of the alternatives GPT-3, GPT-4, Microsoft’s Bing Chat, Facebook’s LLaMa or even Google’s Bard. They are artificial intelligence programs that can participate in a conversation. Impressively smart, they can easily be mistaken for humans, a…

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.

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