Weeknotes - 02/21/23

Side Projects - a native macOS app to track your side projects

As mentioned previously I've really enjoyed working on this native macOS app that is built with Tauri!

Things completed this week for it:

• Adding nice macOS titlebar that is draggable, style changes.
• Fix input field property name misspelling.
• Adding basic search of sideprojects.
• Adding a lot of fixes for displaying, and styling.
• Correctly autoincrementing record on insert for primary key of domains.
• Adding a dope 80's synthwave vibe icon

I definitely got tripped up on how SQLite does autoincrement, and what data type that needs to be in Rust with Diesel. But I finally figured out the right (1) SQLite query to create the table (2) data type to refer to those fields (3) macros to include in the query so Diesel would interpret everything correctly (3) and inserting with an autoincrement ID field the right way.

All learnings are happening! Not ashamed to say I literally dance a little when I got records inserting correctly!

The last thing I did yesterday was make sure window-handling works how I expect, with a modern macOS design for the titlebar. I still have a bug to work out there though.

Adding the icon was really seamless with the Tauri, just a little:

pnpm tauri icon <path_to_icon>

This is getting much closer to having some users try it out!

I have worked out querying DNS with Rust in a seperate Replit.com instance, so I'm excited to bring in that library, and show how many actual days left are for renewal of the domains you put into the program. Rust!

Things still to do:

• fix taskbar icon (it's not quite right, and the tauri icon command doesn't account for transparency or something I'm missing) It's showing as a white square, not the actual dope icon
• show how many actual days until renewal for the domain as mentioned above
• allow the user to delete a domain
• add DNS provider info next to domain
• show button with link to DNS provider when the domain is up for renewal (or within a week)

OMG AI Newsletter - a newsletter about AI

I've been working on the next draft of the newsletter, but writing is hard. My goal is to get a new newsletter post out this week.

I've added ten or so pieces of content to the site, but I need to keep adding a lot more to get more SEO juice. Last week I spent probably too much time making sure the SEO tags were correct for the image, etc. for the site. And probably was doing too much yak shaving happening with generating post cover images using Playground.ai.

But the cover image that took twenty minutes to generate looks so good!. Anyways, less of that, more content on the blog, that is what will drive more readers to the newsletter, is SEO dripping to the site, so more folks discover the newsletter.

I've been trying to post everyday to LinkedIn to start to entice folks into learning more about the amazing AI stuff that is t here. I think this will be another potiental growth channel that I'm going to continue working on as well.

I've added 28% more subscribers! At 78 subscribers now! Let's keep it growing.

YouTube Channel - experimenting with YouTube

I filmed the A-roll of a new video I was going to do about using Raycast, my favorite productivity tool of the last year. I filmed it, but didn't get to edit it yet. The amount of hours needed to make a video are pretty impressive. I'm here to build systems though and keep slogging along.

My goal is to have 50 videos done this year, and then assess where I'm at, at that time.

AI Enabled Product

I've been avoiding this – because it's so new to me, and I'm scared I'll not make anything worthwhile.

I have the tech stack, and general gist in my head, I've just avoided actually sitting down and starting the MVP.

I bought a domain. Sigh. For two years, because apparently that's what Namecheap requires of .ai domain names now?

I've written 300 words about what I'll do, design, and how I'll make money – time to just start it, and figure it out as I go.