Welcome to the 134th edition

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

This week, I was on vacation with the kids, but we stayed at home. Unfortunately, while I love being with the kids, it means that recording my course was nearly impossible. It's a bit frustrating, since I wanted to focus on that, but I couldn't find quiet times to record (yes, I know, I could've been inventive 😂). That's why I've continued working on Knowii instead. I'll tell you more in the lab section.

By the way, I've decided to let go of the "Tech" section of this newsletter. While I remain a software crafter and will always be passionate about IT and programming, I want to focus more on Knowledge Management, and Bootstrapping. I'll keep the AI section for now because I strongly believe that it matters a lot for the future, but that's it. If you are disappointed and want me to do something different, please let me know! Note that I'm always interested in ideas to increase the value you get out of this newsletter, so don't hesitate to chime in!

Alright, let's gooooo 🚀

The lab 🧪

In the past 30 days, I've sold 22 more copies of the Obsidian Starter Kit ($658) and 8 copies of the Personal Knowledge Management library ($135). I didn't have new coaching sessions; I suppose it's because I didn't take enough time marketing that service, and people are also away on vacation, less motivated to learn new things.. ;-)

I resumed working on Knowii, for which the backlog is still insanely long. It took me a while to find my marks, as I didn't touch the codebase for a while. It's always frustrating when you feel lost looking back at the code you wrote a few weeks back. But it's okay now. I've remembered how React and Next.js works, and how I've structured the project. I've created the first version of the Community homepage, which is where public and private communities will regroup and share their knowledge:

The initial version of the community page on Knowii

As you can see, it's pretty raw at the moment, and there's nothing much to see. The first step for Community Knowledge Management is really to let communities curate useful resources. That's why I'm now going to work on the screens and APIs to create resource collections and resources. Those will enable communities to share things that they find (1) interesting and/or valuable. Then, I'll update the page above to include resource collections and recently shared resources. At first, these will only be links. Then I'll iterate to include metadata, images, and much more. As a reminder, Knowii is Open Source, and I hope that it will grow into a useful tool for communities out there.

This week, I've also added support for state management, which is the only reason why the little "Show recent resources" switch is present on that screen. The goal there is to enable users to customize the screen any way they want. Later on, those choices will be persisted, so the experience remains the same across devices.

Creating a platform is a complicated, but fun experience. Being a crafter at heart, I'm fighting against my urge to make the code perfect. It's clearly a struggle for me, as bad code makes me nervous 😂.

The most frustrating part is working alone on that project, and having so little time to dedicate to it. If I had more financial support and time, I could go so much faster. But hey, that's the indie life. Navigating efficiently around hard constraints!

New articles

I've published an article about continuous note-taking and the idea of evergreen notes:

Continuous note-taking

Note-taking/note-making is continuous. Keep coming back to your notes to improve them, instead of considering those as “final”. Here’s why.

Sébastien Dubois •Sebastien Dubois

It's a topic that near and dear to my heart, as I believe it is key to create valuable knowledge bases.

Quotes of the week

• An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence — Honoré de Balzac
• All happiness depends on courage and work — Honoré de Balzac

Book of the week

Up from Nothing is a book about success by John Hope Bryant. In it, John write about the five pillars of success: massive education, financial literacy, strong family structure, self-esteem, and supportive role models. It's all about the American dream. Turning away from distractions, and focusing on what we can control. It's not about how to make more money, but about thinking and approaching challenges differently.

Thinking and learning

@Clayton Miller shared an article about his current PKM system. Always interesting to see how others manage knowledge "ingestion" and organization:

My Current PKM Ecosystem

Visualizing & Creating My Life With These Apps

Personal Knowledge Management Journal •Clayton Miller

Using Omnivore and Obsidian to Read, Highlight and Take Notes From Research Papers

Sometimes you discover a combo of software and plugins which work so well together for your intended purpose, it would seem criminal not to…

Obsidian Observer •🌿Annette Raffan 🌼

Tips to Overcome Obsidian’s Learning Curve Quickly

It’s all about simplicity and focusing on what you want to produce rather than learning…

Obsidian Observer •Theo Stowell

(note that there’s also the Obsidian Starter Kit for that!)

I personally wouldn't want to go folderless, but I do believe that less is more when it comes to folders:

3 Lessons From Going Folderless in Obsidian

#1: When it comes to taking notes, you need to minimize friction. And folders add lots of it.

Medium •Victor Correra

Notes by Martine: Time to Think

Today’s Notes by Martine digest includes mindfulness, hidden costs, shower thoughts, note-taking methods, pancake-based productivity …

Medium •Martine Ellis

An interesting interview of Tiago Forte:

Indie Hacking and bootstrapping

Bootstrapping a white labeled product:

Mac Martine shares how he ideated, bootstrapped, and white-labeled his way to $58k MRR

Mac Martine bootstrapped his business to $58k/mo and a life-changing exit in 2.5 years. I caught up with him to see how he did it. Turns out white-label…

Indie Hackers •James Fleischmann

Sahil reflects on his "failure" to build a billion-dollar company, and where it led him:

Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company

In 2011, I left my job as the second employee at Pinterest — before I vested any of my stock — to work on what I thought would be my life’s work…

The epic story of Marko Saric, the Indie Hacker behind Plausible Analytics (which I use and heavily recommend):

From $400/mo to $188,000/mo in 3 years. Marko Saric of Plausible tells us how he did it.

Marko Saric and Uku Täht built their privacy-friendly analytics platform from $400/mo to $188,000/mo in 3 years. No investment. No slimy marketing tacti…

Indie Hackers •James Fleischmann

Useful tips for building newsletters:

How I’d do it again: Growing from 0 to 50k newsletter subscribers

Emanuel Cinca is the founder of Stacked Marketer, a daily marketing newsletter with over 50,000+ subscribers. They also publicly report on their revenue…

Indie Hackers •Darko

AI

OpenAI Platform

Explore developer resources, tutorials, API docs, and dynamic examples to get the most out of OpenAI’s platform.

Boost Your ChatGPT Skills: 7 Gems Straight from OpenAI’s Dev Docs

Essential lessons uncovered from the documentation of the inventors of ChatGPT that anyone can apply in writing better prompts

Medium •TfTHacker

Civitai | Stable Diffusion models, embeddings, LoRAs and more

Civitai is a platform for Stable Diffusion AI Art models. Browse a collection of thousands of models from a growing number of creators. Join an engaged community in reviewing models and sharing images with prompts to get you started.

Stable Diffusion models, embeddings, LoRAs and more

An interesting analysis of the economic consequences of AI by the National Bank of Belgium: https://www.nbb.be/doc/ts/publications/economicreview/2023/ecorevi2023_h01.pdf

About Sébastien

Hello everyone! I'm Sébastien Dubois. I'm an author, founder, and CTO. I write books and articles about software development & IT, personal knowledge management, personal organization, and productivity. I also craft lovely digital products 🚀

If you've enjoyed this article and want to read more like this, then become a subscriber, check out my Obsidian Starter Kit, the PKM Library, my PKM coaching page, my collection of books about software development and the IT Concepts Wall 🔥.

You can follow me on Twitter 🐦

If you want to discuss, then don't hesitate to join the Personal Knowledge Management community or the Software Crafters community.