DeveloPassion's Newsletter - Prototyping

By Sébastien Dubois • Issue #33 • View online

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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Welcome to the 33rd edition

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

This week I’ve spent quite a lot of time reading. I’ve finished going through How To Take Smart Notes again, and this time around I’ve captured the important bits. I will publish my summary of the book if you’re interested.

I’ve also continued exploring design, which is a field I don’t know nearly enough about.

And I’ve also learned a few more things…

Prototyping

Together with André, I’ve continued working on the UX of my current small bet, a tool for productive thinkers. Our goal is to marry note-taking and time blocking to boost mindfulness and productivity.

We haven’t chosen a name for the product yet, but the core experience is now pretty well defined. We have created wireframes for the whole user journey and made those interactive. Learning by doing is my favorite thing. And even though we knew little about Figma when we got started, we picked up a few things while working together, such as how to create an interactive prototype.

We’re now busy with the UI design; taking care of the important visual elements. Our goal is not to design the whole thing right away, but instead to design the bare minimum so that we have supporting material to showcase the project.

André and I are real productivity nuts, and it shows. Creating a prototype has enabled us to explore various aspects of the product that we wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.

We’ve had a few strokes of genius along the way 😂. The main one is that we want to make the calendar integration a first-class citizen in our product. We will let you display the calendar right next to the notes. Thanks to that, you’ll be able to plan tasks and move things around with ease. Planning your days and weeks will become a real piece of cake 🎂.

Here’s a sneak peek at UI we have in mind so far:

An important idea here is to be able to drag/drop bullet points onto the calendar to schedule those.

Being able to show/hide the calendar will be very convenient; no need to switch between multiple applications! You’ll be able to stay focused by always having a clear overview of what you should do next. A “focus” mode will also be available to get all the noise out of your way and let focus on one thing.

We have tons of ideas in mind to turn this into a powerful Tool for Thought (TfT) and productivity combo.

The next step for us is to create, publish and promote the landing page in order to try and (in)validate our idea. We will launch it really soon!

👉 Join the waiting list: https://apps.developassion.be/productivity

Recent articles

This week I haven’t published anything new.

How cool is that?!

The Deep Sea

Scroll down the deep sea in this interactive page to get down to challenger deep!

My children loved it, and so did I!

neal.fun • Share

Tips of the week

The tip of the week is dedicated to newcomers in IT. It’s a Twitter thread that I’ve shared earlier this week. It’s a tiny glimpse into the roadmap proposed by Dev Concepts:

Sébastien Dubois

@dSebastien

If you want to #learntocode, focus on learning and understanding concepts.

Here's a small thread to help you out! 👇🏻

3:53 PM - 18 Nov 2021

Books corner

This week, since I’m knee-deep into design, I want to share one of the best books on the subject by Don Norman:

The Design Of Everyday Things

A timeless classic about the design of everyday things.

www.amazon.com • Share

Quotes of the week

“Boring is only for boring people with no imagination.” (Tim Tharp)
“A startup with revenue has 100 problems. A startup without revenue just has one.”

Links of the week

Here are a few links that I found interesting this week:

Remix - Build Better Websites

After over a year of development, Remix v1.0 is now available AND Open Source. The other big news is that they’ve got funding and hired Kent C. Dodds. Epic! 🎉

remix.run • Share

Rich Harris has joined Vercel

The other big news of the week is that Rich Harris has joined Vercel to work full-time on Svelte. There’s no doubt that this is a great step forward for Svelte!

twitter.com • Share

New in Chrome 96 - Chrome Developers

Chrome 96 is rolling out now! There are two new properties in the web app manifest, including the possibility to define protocol handlers. This is huge! And there’s a lot more, as usual 😂

developer.chrome.com • Share

What's new in Lighthouse 9.0 - Chrome Developers

Lighthouse 9.0 arrives with a refreshed report and a preview of support for user flows.

developer.chrome.com • Share

CSS Shadow Palette Generator

Another wonderful tool created

www.joshwcomeau.com • Share

Letting users tick a ‘none’ checkbox - Design in government

Design tips for checkboxes

designnotes.blog.gov.uk • Share

That’s all folks!

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I’m really interested to know what you think of this edition. If you have remarks/ideas/articles/links to share, then please don’t hesitate to reply to this mail or send me a DM on Twitter.

PS: check out my Dev Concepts books, join the Software Crafters community, the Personal Knowledge Management community, and come say hi on Twitter!