E10: Accountability #1

08/12/2024, duration: 15:40

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Welcome to Debugging Dan, where I share weekly my journey, balancing life, a full-time job and side projects. I'm Dan, your host. Let's dive in.

Hello and thank you for listening. This podcast, I decided to iterate and evolve and try something new. So, normally I just record the audio and YouTube creates a video for me, for my channel. This time, I've also prepared some updates on the video and I'm trying to do this hybrid. So, people listening on the podcast should have all the information that the people watching the podcast on YouTube have. They just have more visual aid. That's the goal.

Because today, I'd like to do a accountability update. So, the first one and the goal is to set goals for me for the coming two weeks. And after two weeks, reflect on that and by sharing it on the podcast, I hope to have those goals more anchored and to have more motivation to complete them. So, I copied a free template from SlidesGo to have something kept to keep going. Ideally, I would have done this live, all in one go, just sharing my desktop, having a camera on my face. But I don't have all the equipment yet and I don't really have the time and I figured I'd just evolve this shortly or in small steps. So, I'm using, I created a slide deck. I'll just talk that over and I'll also visually describe the slides.

So, as an introduction, this is the accountability update. No green screen yet. That's for me, that's a requirement for having a camera. Also having a proper camera and probably going to try to do that using my smartphone. But having a green screen, because I don't really have a space in my home to do recording. So, for this podcast, the accountability update, I'd first like to go into describing the schedule that I thought of for the podcast.

I'd like to shortly go over some numbers, because this morning I checked some analytics and statistics and I was surprised. That's, that's probably not something that I'm going to include regularly, because sharing analytics and sharing numbers are mostly vanity from the person sharing them. And that's not my goal, but if it fits into the story, I might share them. Past accountability is part of the contents, I guess. For now, that's just a placeholder and also for the future, the accountability for the coming two weeks.

I mentioned that for the schedule of the podcast, I think I'm going to do two week iterations. So, in the first week, I'll do an accountability update. And in the second week, I'll do a topic or a project update or something similar. And after that, so the third week would again be an accountability update. So that would give me two weeks to do the things that I said for myself for the coming two weeks. And that will allow me to reflect on that and how it went and what I could have done better and those kinds of topics. I'll also be sharing the accountability and summary. I'll set that on debuggingdan.com. Currently, I've only shared the podcasts there and their transcripts. But I'll also update or set the accountability updates there and making them easy to find for anyone interested.

So, numbers for the projects and the podcast. I'll shortly go over them. Numbers. As I mentioned, this will probably not be a regular thing. But this morning, my wife asked, how are the numbers for the podcast? And I, my feeling for this podcast is I'm basically doing it and there's not really someone listening. But when I looked at the analytics, I was surprised to see the numbers. There were like 113 unique listeners in July, 35, something like that in August. That really surprised me and the peak in July is probably from the Reddit post I shared where I got some feedback. So, there were people that didn't react with a comment. But obviously, I guess they did listen, which is cool. So, for me, that is, it was really motivational. And this is a vanity metric. I won't be looking too much into it. But, um, I found it cool for the sites or the project sites that I have, I have a analytics platform that I self-host.

And as you can see here, these are the different sites that I host to different projects. So, you don't see a lot of big visitor numbers here. Um, so that's what I'm trying to change by learning SEO. So, uh, for Teletron, sometimes it gets a, um, gets a new account. But I think those are mostly spam people because they don't react to the emails and they don't use it. For founder tooling, I was surprised to have 25 visits because I only shared it in the notes for the podcast. But, uh, people, I guess people found it. And there were even people that left their contact emails, uh, for updates. So, I was also surprised by that and, uh, it's cool. So, it shows that sharing works.

Since this is an accountability update, I also included the slide already for past accountability. So, this is the point where I would be talking about what I plan to do in the past two weeks and whether I was able to do those. Um, or not. And if not, why not? But I haven't set any goals yet, so this is just for the template. For the future, I'd like to do these two things.

So, the coming two weeks and the context is, uh, this week I have a normal work week, the coming week. And in the week after that, I have four days off with my entire family. So, not only my own family with the four of us, but also my brothers and sisters and my parents, because we're celebrating an anniversary. And we're going somewhere. So, I probably will not have time for those four days to really work on it, but I do have the weekends before it, the Friday and the weekend after it. So, it will probably not really impact my schedule, um, and hopefully it will even get me in a more relaxed and creative mindset by having some time on.

So, the things that I'd like to do in those two weeks are these four. However, I'd like to get organized. For the past week, I haven't been able to do programming really. I haven't been able to get other stuff done. I'm recording this podcast on Monday morning. While I normally want to do publication of the podcast on Monday morning at 7. That's how I schedule it, and I normally edit it in the afternoon, but I'm now doing the recording before work, and I will probably be doing the editing and some of the video editing this afternoon after I'm ready with work. So, it will probably be online on Monday evening, at least in my time zone, Central European time. And I need to sit down and get organized for also these accountability things to get them more fleshed out in more detail.

So, what exactly does that mean when I want to have something done? What does that entail? Um, and I might even add that to the blog post. And I also need to look into, for the podcast itself, how to not have YouTube automatically import this audio recording. From the podcast feed, but I have to manually upload this video. I need to do the video editing, um, which I don't really have a lot of experience with, but it's not that compliment complicated. It's just probably cutting stuff, exporting the audio, improving the audio, importing it back again, something like that. That's what I'm looking for where I need to get organized and get stuff done better.

The second item is my notion to do project. So, what I've built, I used to track to do's in notion, and then I would create small chunks of works for projects. And instead of having those to do's for each project, I interchange them with each other on a big list. And what I did, I created the front end for that using the notion API and the notion SDK for node. And on top of that, I've created a UI to kind of plan those tasks. So what I normally did, I did them from the idea was that I did them from top down. First complete the top item and then, uh, the one below it, and I would be doing prioritization by, uh, moving them, um, in the list, in the order.

But I'm doing currently, I'm doing two things, too many things at the same time. So I now also created a UI option to create a block, for example, this weekend or, uh, this week, and I can add tasks from the specific notion pages from those to do blocks. I can add to that planning and I can also add some manual items. So for example, in the weekend, I want to do some side project stuff, but maybe I also need to mow the lawn. Mowing the lawn is not a project that I track in notion, but I can add that manually and it just stored within the application itself. That's what I want to finish. I am still working. It's mostly done. I'm still working on some syncing stuff as tweaking some UI. You can open it at to do.debuggingdan.com. But there's no GUI or an explanation there, or there is a GUI, but there's no real explanation on how to get it, get it functioned. And the structure of the database, stuff like that. And that's what I want to add at a later iteration.

The third item is what's your numbers. That's what I've been working on to create, easily create tables and charts from data. For example, the number of interested users. And I got in it as far for myself to import my SQL data and also import external JSON. You can format it and you can have it sent to you on a regular schedule. And I just need to start dog fooding it. So I kind of completed it before the vacation, before my holidays. Then I figured, well, I'm going to add all kinds of tables and charts in there. So I can do that during my days off and configure that, but I didn't do it. And yesterday I wanted to do it for one project and then it didn't work. So I need to do some small bug fixes and just start entering the data there.

And in the past week, I also encountered a project called any query. Someone create a CLI interface and also something that can be run as a server using, and you can access it using my SQL syntax. It's called any query and it would expose all kinds of different data sources and would allow for plugins to be used. It's created in Go, which I don't know, so I cannot really create my own plugins. But if I integrate any query as a data layer, I might be able to easily unlock or simply lock, unlock different data sources using any query. So once I have the code for any query, I only need to modify it for the different data sources. And that would allow me to quickly and easily allow more data sources for watcher numbers.

And finally, Aspire Then, that's the personal chatbot that I've been working on that allows you to keep you on track for your goals. So that kind of also ties into organize together also with the notion to do. So the topic for this accountability update is mostly about getting organized is that it will ping you at an interval. Hey, how was you? You set a goal. How were you progressing on your goal? And the idea is that it can provide you with helpful tips, but it will also be more stern if you have no updates on the goal and it will tell you, hey, you set a goal, you discussed it with me and you haven't done something for it in a week. Well, you mentioned that you wanted to have it done in a week or you wanted to have an update every day. Um, you need to get working on it, for example, that's, uh, that's what I wanted to do with it. And also I want to start using it for myself, find out if it really works.

And for me, this is the first project really with side project, really with AI, uh, uses GPT for Omini. And currently it's on a, using a telegram bot. And at some point I'll create a web API or a web UI or even a native app or a react native app, which I haven't done before. But that's really a use case that would be fitting. That would really make a difference compared to a web page to have it on your phone.

Those are the things I want to do in the coming two weeks. Um, I might even have to find a way to update you on the program. So I might do that on the blog post. Um, or I, I'll probably also do it on Twitter. I need to find a way to maybe visualize that and properly, um, um, make it, make it, make it pleasing to look at, I think.

Um, so I'm going to look into that. I think updating the blog post and updating it on Twitter and creating some kind of visual. I like that. So I guess I'll add that also to the to-do list. Getting organized. That's the, that's the podcast for today. For those of you watching via YouTube. Thanks for watching those of you listening. Hopefully this was followable or followable. I don't think that's, uh, that's English. Hopefully it, um, it was still clear. Uh, if you have any feedback, things that could be better, just let me know. Reach out to me on X or YouTube or, um, or the website.

Thanks for listening. Have a nice day. Thanks for tuning in to Debugging Dan. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review. Stay curious and see you next week.