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DeveloPassion's Newsletter - The Lab

By Sébastien Dubois • Issue #49 • 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 49th edition

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

I’ve continued reading Josh Kaufman’s bestseller: The Personal MBA. I’m not very far yet (~10%), but the content is great. There’s a lot of signal and very little noise. I love it. Josh clearly describes the core elements of all businesses, the different ways to create/deliver value. I’m eager to continue reading this one.

I had fun re-discovering Season 5 of The Simpsons with the kids. We now try to watch an episode per day; tons of fun! When I was younger, I’ve watched the first seasons at least a hundred times. Matthieu and Amandine are always surprised when I “spoil” the upcoming dialogues 😂

I’m a huge fan of Matt Groening’s work and have watched most episodes of Futurama and Disenchantment. But I’ve actually never watched any episodes of the Simpsons past season 10. This means that I’ve got more than 2/3 of the episodes to watch. TBH I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand, it’s awesome because there’s so much I have yet to discover. On the other, I wonder how the show has evolved over the years. All I hope is that most of the voices will remain the same :)

Alright, let’s goooooo! 🚀

The Lab 🧪

Welcome to the lab!

As you know, I’ve been thinking about small and riskless bets for quite a while now. Those are experiments. Some succeed, some fail, but there are always lessons to be learned.

In this new section of the newsletter, I’ll discuss the experiments I’m conducting and the ones I’m considering. Note that I’m eager to try new things, so if you have ideas, by all means, get in touch with me! A good lab needs a team of (mad) scientists! ❤️

Let me tell you about my next experiment!

Each week I spend countless hours capturing knowledge and ideas about various topics (e.g., PKM, learning, writing, business, entrepreneurship, product, software development, etc), inspiring quotes, and random facts that piqued my interest.

Here’s an overview of what I’ve captured this week:

Some of the things I've learned this week

I’m having tons of fun capturing ideas, but I don’t like the fact that my digital garden is not accessible to anyone else but me.

I try to capture high-signal information. Here’s an example from last week:

A part of my notes about the Value Proposition Canvas

I would like my knowledge base to be like the East gardens of the Imperial Palace in Japan and have a limited number of visitors at any given time, ensuring a great experience for each and every one of them. My idea is to create a subscription model with a limited number of tokens (e.g., 20-25). People who subscribe will get access to my knowledge base as well as access to a private community with myself and other subscribers.

I see this experiment as a way to share ideas on a much deeper level with others, versus me publishing very specific blog posts. Sharing my notes means sharing what I capture and find “most” valuable, which is a very different, but IMHO very interesting value proposition.

Subscribers will get to see how I take my notes, how I improve my process week over week, things I discover, how I tag content, etc. I’ll also be available to answer any questions they might have about my content or my approach.

It’s a win-win proposition: I get rewarded for the efforts I put into my knowledge base, which motivates me to spend more time on it, and subscribers get access to high signal information, an insider view of my process, etc.

If at least 10 persons reply with a “YES”, then I’ll prepare and launch this experiment in the coming weeks.

Personal Knowledge Management News

The PKM Journal is growing steadily. This past week, people have spent 3x more time reading our articles. And it feels great because we’re sharing ideas that can change lives for the better ❤️

The PKM community on Slack approaches 100 members. That will be an important milestone, but I don’t want this community to include a gazillion members that don’t know about each other. Many members are also inactive, which is far from great. I need to learn more about ways to approach this better. I’m thinking about trying to slow things down and maybe making the community invite-only.

I’ve added a ton of new resources to the PKM Library this week. The library now lists 200+ tools (!). I’ve also added a number of Podcasts that people should find interesting and many new YouTube Channels. The project has been featured in the newsletter of Curtis McHale, which was cool! Last but not least, I sold a few more copies, which always feels great 🎉

I’ve also spent (too) many hours thinking about a name for my upcoming PKM product. Choosing names is really really hard. And when good names come to mind, they’re either unavailable or trademarked… 😂

Dev Concepts news

This week I’ve continued working on the third volume of my Dev Concepts collection.

I wrote about data storage units, storage devices, and cloud storage options.

Next week I’ll explore file systems, block storage, and dive into databases and database engine types.

Recent articles

This week I’ve published an article in the PKM Journal:

How to capture book notes and turn those into smart notes

How to capture thoughts, ideas, and knowledge to retain more from the books you read.

In this article, I’ve described my current process for taking book notes and turning those notes into smart ones as part of my PKM system.

pkmjournal.com • Share

How cool is that?!

The Quest to Make a Digital Replica of Your Brain | WIRED

Digital twins are already used in manufacturing, industry, and aerospace. Now a European project called Neurotwin wants to make virtual copies of brains.

www.wired.com • Share

Tips of the week

Note-taking systems have a startup problem

twitter.com • Share

Books corner

Board game of the week

The LOOP

The LOOP is a cooperative game for 1-4 players. Everyone collaborates to try and stop Dr. Faux through time.

Each round, Dr. Faux goes to another epoch and creates clones of himself. Players need to eliminate those clones to keep the situation manageable and prevent Dr. Faux from destroying the universe.

To win the game, you’ll have to think about what to do and in which order. Small mistakes can quickly lead to game over, while smart moves can create awesome combos.

The game has excellent replayability with different game modes, randomization, etc.

boardgamegeek.com • Share

Quotes of the week

“When giving your wife or kids a kiss, repeat to yourself, I am kissing a mortal” — Epictetus
“All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

PKM & Learning Links of the week

How Do We Read? It’s Magic (Almost)

How do we actually read?

www.youtube.com • Share

Learning a technical subject

Tips to learn technical subjects

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com • Share

How To Take Smart Notes: 10 Principles to Revolutionize Your Note-Taking and Writing - Forte Labs

I long ago stopped reading books on note-taking. They were always too vague and boring, full of platitudes that had little to do with the world outside

fortelabs.co • Share

PKM Weekly for February 20 2022 – Issue 007 – Curtis McHale

Issue 7 of Curtis McHale’s PKM newsletter

curtismchale.ca • Share

Tools For Thought Roundup | Revue

Tools For Thought Roundup - We’re a community for folks fascinated by the concept of using tools to solve problems, think better and organize our lives.

T

www.getrevue.co • Share

Tech Links of the week

Blog - Next.js 12.1 | Next.js

Next.js 12.1 introduces on-demand ISR, support for styled-components and Relay, zero-config Jest support, and more!

nextjs.org • Share

FOSDEM 2022 - Home

I missed FOSDEM this year!

fosdem.org • Share

Be proactive when you join an Angular project - Tim Deschryver

Tips to help improve the shape of an older Angular codebase.

timdeschryver.dev • Share

awesome-tunneling

List of ngrok alternatives and other ngrok-like tunneling software and services. Focus on self-hosting.

github.com • Share

CSS { In Real Life } | Aspect Ratio is Great

Tips, tricks and tutorials on the web’s most beautiful language.

css-irl.info • Share

Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You | by Steve Yegge | Medium

Not new but still relevant.

steve-yegge.medium.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!