DeveloPassion's - DeveloPassion's Newsletter - Flywheels

DeveloPassion's Newsletter - Flywheels

By Sébastien Dubois • Issue #46 • 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 46th edition

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

This week I’ve almost finished reading Calmer Notes. I really like Elizabeth’s book. The methodology she has distilled to help us design our very own Personal Knowledge Management system is both intuitive and to the point. It’s a very practical book, which is nice. As long-time knowledge management and personal organization enthusiast, a lot of her advice resonated with me, and I can’t wait to share my notes.

I’ve listened to a few very interesting episodes of the Indie Hackers podcast this week:

As for the rest, I haven’t been at my best this week. I’ve re-discovered toothaches… I forgot how horrible those were! I went to the dentist, but he couldn’t fix the issue right away. I’ve been taking painkillers for almost a week now and I’m still waiting to get a new appointment 😞.

The net result is that I didn’t write much compared to what I had planned…

But I still have some news to share with you all 🎉

Alright, let’s goooooo! 🚀

Personal Knowledge Management News

Last week, as part of my end-of-month review, I’ve announced the launch of the PKM Journal as well as the launch of the homepage for PKM. Next to that, I’ve also mentioned the creation of a subreddit dedicated to PKM.

This week, I’ve created a Twitter account dedicated to PKM: @PKMDaily. Using this account, I am now sharing content and news about Personal Knowledge Management.

My goal with all these initiatives is to create more visibility for all creators and contributors in this space, but also to help newcomers find useful/relevant information more easily.

This past week I’ve managed to convince awesome authors to join the PKM Journal: Martine Ellis, Paco Cantero, Rosie Sherry, Kevin Cunningham, Matt Giaro, Nam Nguyen 🤩. This is great news for the community, and I intend to get a few more people on board in the coming weeks.

Aside from that, I’ve continued expanding my PKM Library.

focusd: Zen productivity news

This week, André and I have dived into the architecture of our product. We’ve started the exercise by listing the different topics to explore, like front-end, back-end, infrastructure, security/privacy, CI/CD, testing, source code management, emails, payments, and more.

After making a few simple and obvious decisions (e.g., using TypeScript), we turned our attention to data architecture. We went back to our initial information architecture draft and expanded it with different ideas. We haven’t decided which type of database we will be using, but that’s the next decision we need to make before we move forward.

There are still major and very impactful decisions to make, such as whether we’re going to open-source the code or not, whether we want to support offline-first right away or not, etc. Since there are now 69 people on our waiting list (up from 50 last week!), we will probably send out a small survey to let them help us build the right thing.

This week I’ve also written a blog post to properly introduce the focusd community:

The focusd community: Let's focus on Zen Productivity

Discover the focusd community, a space for people who want to be more focused and productive without burning out.

dsebastien.net • Share

Dev Concepts

As I’ve mentioned, I wrote much less than I would’ve liked this week. I continued working on the Data Storage section of Dev Concepts, but there’s still a lot that I would like to cover: storage devices, cloud storage, file systems, database types, data de-duplication, data replication, data availability, etc.

Data storage is really just the tip of the data architecture iceberg though. I’d also like to write about concurrency, data modeling, enterprise data architecture, data analytics/science, big data, linked data, and more. After that, I also want to write about infrastructure architecture, security architecture, scalability, tech stack selection and clean architecture.

But done is better than perfect, right? That’s why I’m probably going to reduce the scope for the initial release. Otherwise, Volume 3 will never hit the shelves 😂

YouTube Channel

Since I’m now preparing to launch my YouTube channel, I want to share some background details.

So recently I’ve bought the audio hardware. This past week I’ve also bought a dummy battery for my Canon EOS 70D and bought a license for SparkoCam. Thanks to this, I’m now able to use my Canon DSLR as a Webcam 🎉

This does wonders compared to my crappy 720p Webcam 😂

So in theory, I now have more than necessary to get started. The main problems that remain are:

My eyes look scarily tired at the moment
I haven’t got a nice background for my videos and need to think of a solution

Flywheels

This week I’ve started thinking a bit more seriously about flywheels. Rosie Sherry has written a number of pieces about that topic in the context of community building.

But flywheels are of course relevant for business and audience building as well. The general idea is to create systems that feed into each other and help the different parts gain visibility, grow, and provide more overall value for the people who discover those.

Flywheels are very useful because audiences are generally scattered. For instance, a part of my audience is on Twitter, another (probably partly overlapping) is on Medium, yet another is on LinkedIn, etc. Different sub-groups that follow me are aware of a part of what I do. But of course, my goal is to let as many people as possible know about the other things I’m working on.

I’ve been thinking about flywheels for a while, but have let mine grow organically so far, apart from a few isolated improvements here and there. I started by adding links to my Twitter account in my blog post signatures, cross-posting my articles, mentioning my products, sharing my content on different social networks, etc.

Now, I want to be more thoughtful and carefully design my flywheel(s). To kickstart this effort, I’ve created a few mind maps to help me visualize all of the places where I host, publish, share or sell content. This includes my Websites, the communities I’m a part of, my social media accounts, all of the places where I have a user profile, etc.

The next step for me will be to think about the pathways I want to put in place between the different pieces of the puzzle.

Recent articles

No new article this week.

How cool is that?!

Andy Matuschak

Andy Matuschak’s blog is a real gold mine about PKM. If you have never heard of it, take some time and go explore some of his essays!

andymatuschak.org • Share

Tips of the week

sherlock: 🔎 Hunt down social media accounts by username across social networks

Sherlock is an interesting tool. It can be used to find social media accounts across social networks

github.com • Share

Books corner

The Personal MBA

The Personal MBA is a real classic by now. Written by Josh Kaufman, who was interviewed recently on the Indie Hackers podcast. This is the next book I’m going to read because it’s time for me to get an MBA or sorts 😂

amzn.to • Share

Board game of the week

Maximum Apocalypse

Maximum Apocalypse is a survival game. With Zombies! And who doesn’t love to be chased by the undead crowd, and use shotguns to repel them?

In this cooperative game, 1-6 players team up during the zombie apocalypse. Each player picks a survivor class, and the whole group must cooperate to find a way to survive — at least one more day.

The game map is randomly generated, so each game will be unique. During each turn, you have a few actions at your disposal: explore, play cards, equip weapons, look for resources, draw cards or fight against monsters.

www.amazon.com • Share

Quotes of the week

“The more you share, the faster you learn”

Links of the week

PKM Weekly for February 6 2022 – Issue 005

A new edition of Curtis McHale’s PKM newsletter

curtismchale.ca • Share

Note Taking — The Underrated Productivity Tool

An interesting article about note-taking and productivity. I’ve shared my notes about this one on the PKM subreddit.

pkmjournal.com • Share

How I take notes from books

Today we’re taking a look at how I take notes from the non-fiction books I read.

www.youtube.com • Share

Some of the characteristics that need to be considered while designing the data architecture of a system

Some ideas I gathered while writing about data storage for Dev Concepts

twitter.com • Share

Why Should You Focus on Workflows Instead of Apps in Your PKM System?

Focus on Workflows, not apps!

www.worrybehappy.com • Share

That’s all folks!

If you want to support my work and receive even more from me, then become a paid member and share the link to the newsletter with your friends: https://newsletter.dsebastien.net ❤️

PS: don’t forget to join the Personal Knowledge Management community, the Software Crafters community, and come say hi on Twitter!