DeveloPassion's Newsletter #164 - A Thousand Fans

Welcome

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

We're taking our flight to Rome tomorrow at 6AM, so I don't have much time left to write this newsletter for you all. We'll be back next Thursday, so don't worry, I'll be in your inbox next week too ❤️

This week, I've worked on different things, but I realize that I've avoided the most important work, probably out of fear. So, I did not make progress on my Knowledge Management course. I'll tell you more about what I did instead in the lab section...

Alright, let's gooooo 🚀

A thousand fans

We've reached a cool new milestone this week. There are now more than a thousand of you reading me regularly ❤️ Thank you so much for staying around

A thousand true fans

Unfortunately, while this is a great milestone, there are only 7 of you who support me directly:

Newsletter revenue

As now that we have passed the 1K members bar, the price of hosting this newsletter has now increased even more:

Cost of hosting this newsletter

With the current $39 MRR, this newsletter is still costing me money, not even counting the time it takes me to prepare it. I don't want to give it up just yet, but I have to think strategically about what to do next. Maybe giving free access to all my articles isn't the best idea, especially now that the visits are going way down (cfr previous editions about the SEO issues I face).

Offer of the week: 30% off

Do consider becoming paid subscribers to support my work. I'm offering you 30% off a paid subscription:

New published notes

I've taken a lot of notes this week. And I took the opportunity to publish some more on my Website. You can find the list of recently added notes over here:

Recently added - DeveloPassion

Recently added - DeveloPassion

DeveloPassion

There's a lot of stuff in there. I've shared almost 3K notes out of the ~15K I currently have in my Obsidian vault...

I enjoy being able to quickly share new ideas.

Thinking is awesome, but if you don't take notes, you're missing out. If you write your ideas down, you can leverage your thinking in myriads of ways.

By the way, I shared my current workflow on X:

The lab 🧪

As I've said, I have avoided the important work I had to do this week (i.e., preparing my Knowledge Management course). I felt like writing code, and so I did. I'll take some time in Rome to think about the next steps for me, but I know that I'm highly disappointed by the results of all my efforts. Sales keep going down, and I'm getting more and more worried:

Sales of the last 30 days

It's the first time since 2022 that sales are below $500. So the signal is clear, my efforts are not enough. And given that I have lost my last consulting client a while ago, this is not a detail for my business...

Coding was an easy way to take my attention away from the worries about my business. That's why I've accepted my unconscious need to change my mind...

So instead of recording my upcoming course, I've decided to build an Obsidian plugin:

GitHub - dsebastien/obsidian-update-time: Obsidian plugin that updates front matter to include creation and last update times

Obsidian plugin that updates front matter to include creation and last update times - dsebastien/obsidian-update-time

GitHub •dsebastien

This plugin is an alternative to the update-time-on-edit plugin. I created an alternative, because that one caused issues with Obsidian publish.

Since I didn't like the default Obsidian template, I then decided to create mine using Nrwl Nx. It will make it easier for me to create new Obsidian plugins in the future.

GitHub - dsebastien/obsidian-plugin-template: A Nrwl NX workspace for easily creating Obsidian plugins

A Nrwl NX workspace for easily creating Obsidian plugins - dsebastien/obsidian-plugin-template

GitHub •dsebastien

Apart from that, I also decided to start using Zotero, and shared my notes about that:

Why and how I started using Zotero - DeveloPassion

Why and how I started using Zotero - DeveloPassion

DeveloPassion

Why I love Obsidian ❤️

Here are the top reasons why I love Obsidian:

• Free
• Extremely fast
• Data stored locally
  • You own the data
  • Works offline
• Tons of awesome features for Knowledge Management
  • Links, backlinks, tags, global and local graph views, automatic outline/table of contents, and MUCH more!
• Markdown
  • De-facto standard
  • Portable
  • Open data format
  • Supported by many editors
• Highly customizable
  • Huge plugin library
  • Possible to create your own plugins
• Huge community
• Mobile application
• Various ways to publish notes online (e.g., Obsidian Publish)

New articles

No new articles this week.

Quotes of the week

Being creative is the opposite of anxiety. But you can’t get to creativity if you don’t start with acceptance and compassion and simple kindness toward the self, toward the parts of the self that are doing the things you can’t stand - DeveloPassion

Being creative is the opposite of anxiety. But you can’t get to creativity if you don’t start with acceptance and compassion and simple kindness toward the self, toward the parts of the self that are doing the things you can’t stand - DeveloPassion

DeveloPassion

Thinking and learning

This is a bit meta, but I've also shared some notes about the note-taking system shared by Thibaut Lopes. It's an interesting approach, although I don't intend to change my current system:

Note-taking system of Thibaut Lopes - DeveloPassion

Note-taking system of Thibaut Lopes - DeveloPassion

DeveloPassion

I'm curious about the upcoming evolutions of Evernote. At this point, Obsidian is the clear winner for me, but things might change in the future...

Text expanders are awesome tools. Check out this video about espanso and Obsidian:

Like Cornell Notes? You can take those in Obsidian too:

Cornell Notes Learning Vault - TfT Hacker

Cornell Notes Learning Vault - TfT Hacker

TfT Hacker

Second brain, infinite memory. Isn't that appealing? (French)

What's your PKM stack like?

The PKM Stack: A Simple Framework for Making More of Your Notes & Ideas – The Sweet Setup

Trying to use a single app for PKM is destined for failure. In this article, I’ll explain why and share a simple framework for thinking about personal knowledge management that can help you get more out of the notes and ideas that you put into your PKM system.

The Sweet Setup •Mike Schmitz

Task logging with Obsidian:

Obsidian: Task Logging

This article shares how to seamlessly log time against tasks that you perform during the day and to see a summary of how that time was…

Medium •Gareth Stretton

Cool PKM Community Showcase meetup organized by Collider:

Ready to get to the next level?

If so, then check out the Knowledge Worker Kit, the Obsidian Starter Kit, the Obsidian Starter Course, the Knowledge Management for Beginners course, the PKM Library, a PKM coaching session with me, my collection of books about software development and the IT Concepts Wall 🔥.

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

About Sébastien

Hello everyone! I'm Sébastien Dubois (you can follow me on Twitter 🐦).

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 🚀

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