DeveloPassion's Newsletter - Laser Focus

By Sébastien Dubois • Issue #32 • View online

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

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Welcome to the 32nd edition

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

I’ve continued to dedicate most of my energy to Raphaël, my baby boy. He’s almost two months old already! ✨ ❤️

Let’s dive in!

Laser Focused productivity

This week André and I have continued exploring our product idea.

We want to combine an outliner (similar to tools such as Workflowy) with calendar integration and a focus mode.

Our goal is to promote and support the productivity technique of blocking time and applying a laser focus towards a specific goal.

The app will make it dead easy to define plans and routines, schedule those, and focus on execution. After all, we only ever have time for the things we actually prioritize.

We have started with the product vision and then created a User Story Map to uncover the major stories/features we envision. After that, we dived into UX design, information architecture, user personas, etc.

Next week we’re going to continue exploring the user experience, and we will hopefully dive into UI design.

👉 Let me know if you’re interested in giving the first alpha versions a try once we’re ready! 🙏

Starting community

This week, I’ve also participated in the “Starting Community” workshop organized by Orbit and led by Rosie Sherry and Erin Staples. Again, it was super interesting, and I got to learn a ton. This inspired me to write one more article this week.

The results of the workshops can be found here: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lmn8Egg=

The session recordings are also publicly available:

Day 1 — Ready, set, go! https://app.butter.us/recording/e14a8a8c-4b2c-4359-bc51-c64372bce5fbD

Day 2 — Minimum Viable Communities: https://app.butter.us/recording/a082b0ac-a660-4897-a7d5-883ab6db2d82

Day 3 — Community Tool Box: https://app.butter.us/recording/703e66a1-e451-45eb-8585-4e1d88c5b258

Day 4 — Community Conversations: https://app.butter.us/recording/83af3bdc-898d-4190-acc7-bf5bd6b33bdf

Day 5 — Community Journeys: https://app.butter.us/recording/4cf3efe4-1aff-4756-be9c-608e685678b8

Recent articles

This week I’ve published a guest post on the blog of Yennick Trevels a fellow software craftsman:

Software Engineer Career Paths

What is the (best) career path of a software engineer? Understand the various options and how to plan your career in the software industry.

digitalbuff.dev • Share

I’ve also posted an article to properly introduce the Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) community, a group of lifelong learners:

An online community for lifelong learners

Discover the Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) community, a community for lifelong learners.

dsebastien.net • Share

How cool is that?!

Generate awesome French content using Cedille AI

Use the largest and most powerful French model openly available to generate amazing copywriting! Like GPT-3, mais focalisé sur la langue française

app.cedille.ai • Share

A small ASCII art tool...

A small tool I’ve stumbled upon this week. Since my teenage years, I’ve always been a big fan of ASCII art. Back in the day, NFO files were full of wonderful illustrations… (if you’re old enough to remember 😂)

ascii.alienmelon.com • Share

Tips of the week

The tip of the week is dedicated to my fellow freelancers. Go increase your rates now!

FT 020: Increase Your Consulting Rates with Patrick McKenzie (aka patio11)

Patrick McKenzie shares how he went from $100/hr to $30,000 a week and what makes such rates possible.

freelancetransformation.com • Share

Books corner

This week I want to share the next book on my reading list:

Ego is the Enemy: The Fight to Master Our Greatest Opponent

Ego really is our strongest opponent. Why not learn how to turn it into an ally?

www.amazon.com • Share

I haven’t read anything written by Ryan Holiday so far, but I’m really eager to dive into this one. I grew up being told I’d never get anywhere in life. So I set out to prove those people wrong. Turns out I’m still fighting with my ego from time to time. It sure takes time to know yourself.

Quotes of the week

“Check your ego at the door. The ego can be the great success inhibitor. It can kill opportunities, and it can kill success.” (Dwayne Johnson)

Links of the week

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

How To Learn Stuff Quickly

As software developers, we’re always learning new things; it’s practically the whole gig! If we can learn to quickly pick up new languages/frameworks/tools, we’ll become so much more effective at our job. It’s sort of a superpower.

www.joshwcomeau.com • Share

Rust Is The Future of JavaScript Infrastructure – Lee Robinson

Why is Rust being used to replace parts of the JavaScript web ecosystem like minification (Terser), transpilation (Babel), formatting (Prettier), bundling (webpack), linting (ESLint), and more?

leerob.io • Share

Why I Love Remix

I’ve written tens of thousands of lines of code with Remix and I want to tell you why I love using this framework.

kentcdodds.com • Share

Firefox 94.0, See All New Features, Updates and Fixes

Cool new features in Firefox!

www.mozilla.org • Share

20 Ways to Switch Off From Work | Racket

20 Ways to Switch Off From Work by @martineellis

racket.com • Share

Excalideck | Weapon for Legendary Slides

Excalidraw-style slide decks. Excalideck is an app for authoring slide decks that look hand-drawn.

excalideck.com • Share

That’s all folks!

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I’m really interested to know what you think of this newsletter. 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!