# DeveloPassion's Newsletter 32 - Laser Focus 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 ✨ If you enjoy this, please forward it to your friends 👍. If this email was forwarded to you, then don’t forget to subscribe. ![[DeveloPassion's Newsletter Logo.png|DeveloPassion's Newsletter logo: lightbulb sprouting colorful idea nodes]] ## 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](https://x.com/theandrecasal) 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. LINK: https://www.amazon.com/User-Story-Mapping-Discover-Product/dp/1491904909?tag=dsebastien00-20 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](https://x.com/erinmikail). 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](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](https://x.com/YennickT) a fellow software craftsman: LINKS: - [[Developer Career Paths (Article)]] - https://digitalbuff.dev/articles/career/developer-career-paths I’ve also posted an article to properly introduce the Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) community, a group of lifelong learners: LINK: [[An online community for lifelong learners (Article)]] ## How cool is that?! Use the largest and most powerful French model openly available to generate amazing copywriting! Like GPT-3, but focused on the French language: LINK: https://app.cedille.ai/welcome 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 😂) LINK: http://ascii.alienmelon.com ## Tips of the week The tip of the week is dedicated to my fellow freelancers. Go increase your rates now! Patrick McKenzie shares how he went from $100/hr to $30,000 a week and what makes such rates possible. LINK: https://freelancetransformation.com/blog/increase-your-consulting-rates-with-patrick-mckenzie ## Books corner This week I want to share the next book on my reading list: LINK: [[Ego Is the Enemy (book)]] Ego really is our strongest opponent. Why not learn how to turn it into an ally? 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]] ## Links of the week Here are a few links that I found interesting this week: 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. LINK: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/how-to-learn-stuff-quickly 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? LINK: https://leerob.io/blog/rust I’ve written tens of thousands of lines of code with Remix and I want to tell you why I love using this framework. LINK: https://kentcdodds.com/blog/why-i-love-remix Excalidraw-style slide decks. Excalideck is an app for authoring slide decks that look hand-drawn. LINK: https://excalideck.com LINK: - [[Why Obsidian is All You Need - From Simple Notes to Complete Productivity (Article)]] - https://www.dsebastien.net/why-obsidian-is-all-you-need-from-simple-notes-to-complete-productivity// LINK: - [[Overcoming Perfectionism - How to Break Free from the Enemy of Progress (Article)]] - https://www.dsebastien.net/overcoming-perfectionism-how-to-break-free-from-the-enemy-of-progress// LINK: - [[Overview of my Personal Knowledge Management System (Article)]] - https://www.dsebastien.net/overview-of-my-personal-knowledge-management-system// ## Related - [[Laser Focus]]