DeveloPassion's Newsletter - Community-first learning

By Sébastien Dubois • Issue #39 • View online

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Welcome to the 39th edition

Another year, another month, another week, another newsletter! I hope that you all had a great end of the year 🤩

I’m personally happy that Christmas, my daughter’s birthday and New year’s eve and family visits are behind us. I need to breathe, rest, and start exercising again to get rid of the extra weight I’ve gained! 😂

I’ve also received good news from the publisher of my TypeScript book. After two years, I’m finally getting some money. It’s not much, but it means a lot to me ;-)

This year will probably be tough as I’m almost back at square one with entrepreneurship. But I’m not letting go just yet!

Now that 2022 has begun, it’s time to put our plans into motion. There’s no time to waste. Of course, the start will be slow, as we probably all need to recover from the past week or so of over-eating, over-socializing (or not), and under-sleeping. Still, as usual, every step counts.

So let’s goooooo! 🚀

Things I've learned

Some of the things I've learned this week

The first idea I want to share with you for 2022 is to try to find joy in missing out on some things. The whole world wants to us experience Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). But maybe it’s time for us to feel good about missing out on some things instead. We need to go against the flow and focus on the Joy of Missing Out (JOMO).

We’re probably better off both emotionally and financially, avoiding falling for well-known marketing techniques. We all know these:

Promotions that bizarrely end in 10 minutes
Products that are always almost not in stock anymore
Campaigns that always end soon
Limited-time free shipping
People that are looking at the same product as we are
Content that expires
Special offers
…

Maybe it’s actually great if we miss that 50% promotion. Maybe it’s good if we don’t pledge on that Kickstarter campaign ending tomorrow.

Let’s try and go to the opposite end. Let’s feel happy and proud about missing out. Let’s focus less on consumerism and more on what really matters.

Community-first learning

This week, one sentence that caught my attention was this one by James Clear: “When you choose who to follow on Twitter, you are choosing your future thoughts”.

It resonated with me because I’m a huge believer in a “people-first” approach to learning. Whenever I decide to learn something new, my very first step is usually to find who knows and who cares about that topic. I try to identify the experts, the innovators, the most active/vocal community members. You could also call this a community-first approach to learning.

One thing is for sure: the more you read about a topic, the more you’ll be influenced, and the more it will change you. Especially if you learn it from the people who care deeply about it. That’s actually why I want to read a ton of non-fiction books this year. I expect those books to change me.

In the past, my go-to approach consisted in finding blogs covering the subject and following their RSS feeds. This immersed me in the topic and exposed me to both new and old ideas shared by those blogs.

But in fact, what matters isn’t really the blogs themselves, but rather the people behind those.

The modern version of that approach is to use Twitter, where many active members of various communities (especially the tech one) are present and active. Nowadays, I still use RSS, but I now complement it with Twitter and Twitter lists. Whenever I’m interested in a new topic, I create a list on Twitter and start tagging the people I find that have an obvious interest.

This is a great way to learn about any topic because it exposes you to both key and innovative ideas from the people who truly care.

If you want to know what I care about (at least professionally), then take a look at my Twitter lists; you might find yourself wanting to learn more ;-)

My Twitter lists

Check out my lists to discover thousands of wonderful people!

twitter.com • Share

Personal Knowledge Management Library 📖

This week I’ve continued adding resources to my Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) Library: 20 more articles, 20 more videos, 20 more tools, etc.

It’s a background effort that is going to last for a while, but I’m confident that this resource will slowly become key for the community.

I’ve made a few more sales, which made me really happy ❤️

I’ve decided to experiment with tiered pricing. From now on, the price will gradually go up as I sell more and more copies.

One problem that I have with the current form of the product (i.e., a Notion space) is that people need to duplicate it to access the content. While that works, it makes it difficult for people who already got it to update with my latest changes without losing information.

To fix that, I intend to start creating my own platform to share this content. Each user having access to it will always be able to access the up-to-date version and will be able to know exactly which resources they’ve already explored.

Productivity App

This week, it was complicated for André and me to find time to collaborate. Still, we did manage to make progress on some components of our interface:

Sébastien Dubois

@dSebastien

Finished creating the focus variants for our calendar events.

#design https://t.co/uZ3zLlgJBR

5:21 PM - 28 Dec 2021

More importantly, we’ve also almost completed the storyline’s demo:

The storyline for our product demo

This storyline is the basis for the showcase video that we will produce right next. We have two main goals with:

Show and explain the most important features that we intend to build
Gather feedback before we actually start building!

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

Recent articles

No new articles this week!

How cool is that?!

Ocarina of Time has been fully decompiled into human-readable code | Ars Technica

Zelda Ocarina of Time is one of my favorite games of all time. This news made my day. I’m really curious to dive into the code behind the game!

This code could eventually lead to PC ports, new mods, and more.

arstechnica.com • Share

Tips of the week

BlockSite: Easily block distracting websites and apps

Block Site allows you to block any website for any period of time. Remove distractions, block adult content, customize your browsing environment.

blocksite.co • Share

Books corner

This week I want to share an awesome resource about books. I’m definitely going to read many of those in the coming months & years!

The Greatest Books: The Best Books of All Time - 1 to 50

The Top 50 greatest fiction books of all time determined by 130 lists and articles from various critics, authors, and experts.

thegreatestbooks.org • Share

Board game of the week

Scythe Board Game

Scythe is one of the best strategy games out there. It’s currently ranked #14 on the overall BoardGameBeek ladder, and #12 in the strategy section.

It’s a game that combines many different mechanisms such as action drafting, grid movement, king of the hill, etc. And it does so wonderfully. There’s no luck or randomness involved, so if you want, it’s because you played better (or because others screwed up 😂).

Everything about this game is wonderful; the mechanics, the visuals, the universe, etc.

It takes a bit of time to understand the rules, but it’s definitely worth the effort! Note that there’s also a much simpler version that you can play with kids: My Little Scythe

amzn.to • Share

Quotes of the week

“Belief is the willingness to take irrevocable action” — William James
“The only way to find out if it will work out is to do it” — Simon Sinek

Links of the week

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

MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MIT News is dedicated to communicating to the media and the public the news and achievements of the students, faculty, staff and the greater MIT community.

news.mit.edu • Share

How We Make Sense of Time - The New York Times

January 2022 arrives as our methods of keeping time feel like they are breaking. Calendar pages turn, yet time feels lost. In this year of all years, what does it mean for a year to be new?

www.nytimes.com • Share

Stoic quotes - Marcus Aurelius & more | Best Stoic Quotes

The best Stoic quotes from Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and other Stoic Philosophers. Explore the stoic learnings and meaning of the stoics and their quotes.

www.beststoicquotes.com • Share

React Js roadmap - 2022 - DEV Community

It’s so exhausting trying to figure out where to start or head to while learning something, something… Tagged with react, webdev, javascript, 100daysofcode.

dev.to • Share

Wesley Aptekar-Cassels | web3 is Centralized

Interesting take on Web3

blog.wesleyac.com • Share

That’s all folks!

If you want to support my work, then become a supporter and share the link to the newsletter with your friends: https://newsletter.dsebastien.net ❤️

PS: join the Personal Knowledge Management community, the Software Crafters community, and come say hi on Twitter!