Weeknotes - 02/06/23
These notes will be about what I've personally done during the week to ship, move forward, and will be a great way for me to keep track of my progress on things. All inspired by Simon Willson's weeknotes
Side Projects
"Side Projects", (naming is hard, ok?) is a project that helps you track your side projects.
It's a "domain-first" approach, meaning you enter the domain you intend for your project, and then it will list them in the app for you to see:
- have a quick link out to the project
- search all the projects you have
- expiration time of that domain, so you know when to renew
There are other features I'm considering:
- track time against each project and see where you're time is spent
- reminders on domain renewals
- reminders that you can setup so you can be reminded to work on your project, because motivation is hard
- list the projects in the menubar when you click
- keyboard shortcut to show app
But I'm going to start simple and put a beta out there and see where it goes, try to get feedback quickly.
One of the reasons I started this is that I wanted to build more useful things with Rust which I started programming in about a year and a half ago. I still find it interesting, so I'm continuing to explore that.
If you look at my projects page you'll see more small things I'm building in Rust, mostly CLIs at the moment - this is a more significant Rust project involving a Rust ORM called diesel that connects to a local SQLite database where it keeps all the information about your domains. It uses Tauri as the app framework, which allows a really small memory footprint compared to Electron. I'm using Next.js as the UI/JS framework that serves as the UI.
Looking forward to using Tauri more.
OMG AI Newsletter
I soft launched OMGAI.xyz website, that is a companion to the newsletter I launched late last year. Thinking about how fast AI has progressed lately.
Announced it on linkedin to 350+ impressions at the time of this writing. And announced it on twitter to a paltry 66 impressions.
Added about 6 pieces of short form content. Plan on adding more news, links, medium and long-form content, all while trying to drive people to the newsletter which currently has 65 subscribers.
I asked Sam Paar on twitter what I should do to grow my audience and replied with "Blog". So here we go.
AI Enabled Product
I have been noodling on an AI-enabled product to build.
What I don't understand I build. 😃 With OpenAI, StabilityAI, Midjourney, and others making great strides in AI recently I really want to understand what it's like to build a product with AI as part of it. I don't have experience with that, and want to grow that muscle.
I have a domain, an idea that I think could get traction and be useful in a few different ways, and a remix on some preexisting things I know that have been popular. More details coming soon when I have something to show.
I'll keep this simple for myself to start - use an existing third-party AI API, and then back into something more custom.
Ship more, noodle less. See what works.
YouTube and Streaming
I've been thinking about how to get into streaming in on TwitchTV and/or posting videos to YouTube.
I have experience editing in Final Cut Pro, and consider myself a "dangerous amateur" - meaning I know how to get around and do a lot of things, but I don't necessarily know how to do them well yet in video editing.
So far I've only posted two videos on Youtube. My plan is to increase that number dramatically in the next few weeks.
I've been streaming Call of Duty Modern Warfare II gameplay at lunchtime nearly daily. I think streaming gaming is the least likely thing I'll continue to do, but I do think there is something to be said for streaming the "sawdust" or things that I'm just starting to build. That actually might garner some interest.
Perhaps livestreaming some of the building of the these products would be more useful.