In this episode, I provide an update on the tasks I set for myself two weeks ago and share my progress. I successfully completed all four tasks, which helped me get better organized. I discuss the improvements made to my Notion Todo app, the challenges faced with the Watch Your Numbers app, and my ongoing work with the AnyQuery application. Looking ahead, I outline new accountability tasks for the next two weeks, including updates to my project boilerplate, enhancements to DebuggingDan.com, and exploring better mail hosting solutions. I also touch on learning about SEO and potential changes to my GitHub username.
Episode 12 of the Debugging Dan podcast. This is the second accountability update.
So I started in episode 10, two weeks ago, by defining some tasks and making those public
via the podcast to keep myself accountable. So the idea is that I share the things that I want to do in the coming two weeks in public. That gives me more drive to actually complete those tasks that I've defined because I'm sharing it in public and I don't want to make a fool of myself without by not completing the tasks.
So this is the second update where I shortly go over the previous tasks and how they were
completed and if they were completed and I defined some new ones for the next week.
So I'll shortly go over the schedule of the podcast, discuss the past ones and the future
ones.
If you're listening to this via the podcast app, there's also a YouTube video available
where you can see the visual aids that I use. But I try to do a voiceover so that you're not required to use the YouTube video. You should be able to be fine just using the audio. The schedule for this podcast is what I tried to do, what I established two weeks ago is in the first week I do an accountability update.
I define the tasks in the second week I do a specific topic or project update that's more free format and the week after that I repeat it. So I do again do an accountability update and another topic.
So last week I did a project update on the Notion Todo thing that I was creating and I showed what it is and how I'm using it. Next week I will be doing something else.
So I was able to complete all four tasks that I've defined. So I got better organized and the accountability really helped with that. By I started defining in the slots of two weeks things or high level topics that I wanted to achieve in those accountability things. So I have like three or four periods planned ahead and now I also have a better task list that I can do from the top down.
I could do some tasks in parallel for some projects but it got me better organized and it also got me better and that helped me to get things done.
Past two weeks were a little bit strange because of the vacation period. One task that I set myself out to do was to improve my notion to do app. I was always doing the to do is a notion but now I've added a layer on top of it that allows me to make a short term planning with the tasks that I want to do and also combine them with tasks that I don't necessarily track in notion but do need to do in the weekend for example like doing laundry or chores in the house.
The previous podcast number 11 is about Notion Todo so if you want to know more about that
just have a listen or have a look because it's a video. And there is still a list of things to do but I set a time box and I wrote down the items for improvement and I'm going to look at that at a future period in time.
The next task that I set out to do was watch your numbers that's the app that I'm building
currently still privately only for myself to get better insights and to get a centralized
location for analytics and stuff like that so I started dogfooding it. I already found some bugs related to generating the reports which makes it not really usable. I can watch the reports when I open the app but one of the important features is also that the reports can be sent via telegram for example to get updates pushed but that part isn't working correctly so I might even be looking into that besides the other accountability items into fixing some of those issues.
I investigated the AnyQuery application which is an open source Go application that somebody
created that allows you to use MySQL syntax to query a lot of data sources and I figured
that if I can create a wrapper around AnyQuery that would allow me to very easily very fast
introduce new data sources to WatchYourNumbers. I tried to install it but I ended up creating a GitHub issue for it because it only didn't work on the Ubuntu versions that I tried and as it turns out it's compiled for Ubuntu 24 while I was using Ubuntu 22 so hopefully that gets fixed else I might be using it in a Docker Ubuntu 24 image but else I won't be able to use it because I'm not going to update my local dev environment or the web server that I use for hosting to Ubuntu 24 in the short
period that's not on the planning.
Yesterday evening was the final deadline so I'm recording this on Sunday and the podcast is
published on Monday morning European Central Time so on Saturday evening I was still working
on Aspire Dan. And I am still really impressed by how powerful the function calling in the
OpenAI LLM is because I'm able to tell it things and it sets a schedule for me. I can
update the schedule I can add goal updates and so I still need to add some goals to it
and one of that might be the accountability stuff. So and then I'm going to see if it works
for me and if I should create it into a product so that it works for other people. That
would be one of the first products where I really use a third party service that I need
to pay for because using the OpenAI GPT models is not free so that also has impact on the
pricing and stuff like that so it's also interesting.
So the future accountability things that I want to do in the coming two weeks it's a
list of small tasks I want to complete. I'll show those tasks or I'll talk about those
tasks after this this high level list. And the second one is for my projects I use a
boilerplate. So if I create a new project I use a boilerplate that I created for myself.
I check it out I change the text boilerplate to the name of the project and that boilerplate
uses some private packages that I use to simplify things so I want to do an update to the boilerplate. And I also have some updates planned those are open already for a while on the private
packages that I use. Some fixes there and I'm also going to apply those so not something
that's really visible because the output functionality will still be the same but I will update dependencies. I will change a little bit how things work fix some bugs that I worked around in the
applications themselves and make the boilerplate faster to use. Because now I do the boilerplate
I check it out and then I need to check in the previous projects that I did what changes
I made to the boilerplate to make it work. And I want to do that in one go.
So the third item then is some updates to debuggingdan.com I use a private project that I internally
call notion blog to generate the site. And some updates that I want to do to debuggingdan is showing the podcast icons, some fixes to the font size. There were some SEO remarks
from Google so I'm going to look into improving the site. Because I found that while working
on watchyournumbers and dogfooding it I checked the Spotify statistics and the Apple podcast
statistics and there kind of been no listeners from those platforms. So I hope that
by improving debuggingdan.com and linking better to Spotify and to Apple that they will
be more approachable and better visible. Yep I think that's it yeah for the debuggingdan.com
updates.
Also related to that I'm also learning about SEO well I started learning
about SEO I watched one YouTube video and I started on the Ahrefs SEO course video which
is a beginner video and I just need to follow up on that. Finish the video and after that I have
some remarks in Google search console for different projects that I have and I just need to follow up on those notes and there are some small tasks also related to that.
And the last item in the list is the mail hosting so I have several domain names for my projects and I always create Dan at and then the domain name for email and I use the mail hosting myself currently by doing a on my server but that's pretty complex and pretty brittle so mail is slow to send. And I also have the feeling it's slow to receive. So I already did that earlier that I watched into some mail hosts that were not that expensive and allowed you to have different mailboxes and different sites within the same account and I'm gonna follow up on that and I'm gonna probably spend some monthly subscription to just don't have to do it myself anymore. And have somebody else do the mail hosting because it's getting too difficult and I want to spend my energy somewhere else. So I'll be probably hopefully migrating my mail in the next two weeks.
Those are the future accountability items for the next two weeks and I promised that I would expand on the small tasks that I want to do. And for some newer projects I didn't do the 404 page yet correctly. So I'm not doing server-side rendering in my stack so I had express and preact. Express on the back end to preact to generate static and the static HTML. And it's an SPA a single page app but it's not pre-rendered. So to have it server-side rendered so we have some preren middleware in express that checks is this a Google or search bot or a different kind of crawler then I'll invoke the pre-render.io service and return the rendered contents and that works pretty pretty fine but I saw some Google search console messages about soft 404s which means that the HTTP code that is returned is not a 404 it's a 200. But the page itself says hey I'm not found let's try somewhere else. And in pre-render it's pretty straightforward you set a meta tag it says pre-render status code something like that. You set that to 404 on your not found page and when it's pre-rendered pre-render will take care of returning the status code so I need to do that for watch your numbers for foundertooling and I believe it's those but I'll check on the projects.
Second small task I'm going to do is that in July I shared podcast on reddit there I got some feedback and somebody said hey I see that episode 2 is not visible on the website so I watched that via YouTube. And I need to look into that when the remark came in I quickly checked and I believe that I did see episode 2 on the site it was in Notion so it should be there but I'm gonna have a look at that in Notion blog.
So as the third small task I want to support some additional blocks so I want to support columns, tables and I need to look into the YouTube embed. Because if you go to debuggingdan.com/accountability it should show all the posts related to accountability and not only the podcast but I also create a post with a graphic and some some visuals but I wasn't able to embed a YouTube video there of the podcast. And I want to be able to do that so I need to implement that.
The last small task is related to the stream deck. So I use a streamdeck when editing the audio but now that I'm moving to video I do the editing in a video editing app and also during streaming I can use the stream deck to pause or change the scenery. And yeah I need to configure the stream deck to do that. So that’s not that big but it's something that falls into the small task category.
And yeah those are the small tasks that I want to talk about. So that's the accountability update so I
talked about what I did in the past two weeks what I want to achieve in the next two weeks and
I might even do some additional things since these are mostly small items. That if they go
well I'm able to knock out a few in an evening or in the morning or somewhere in the weekend.
So I was also thinking about doing the rename of my github username because it's still on my
old alias that I used but that one's too Dutch it's daangemist which is my first name but my
first name is pretty Dutch so I named the podcast instead of Daan I named it Dan. Because that's
easier in English and Gemist is also a Dutch word. But I want to change my github username also
that will also probably impact the namespace for the private packages for the docker container
images in the container repository that I use so that might have some additional impact. But
it's not something that's a high priority but it's something that I'd like to do so that might
be a bonus thing that I'm doing changing my github username.
So thanks a lot for listening or watching let's see you on the next one.