E12: Accountability #2

08/26/2024, duration: 16:54

Video

Transcript

Welcome to Debugging Dan, where I share weekly my journey, balancing life, a full-time job and side project. I'm Dan, your host. Let's dive in! 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 define 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 on, 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, um, 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, I can do an accountability update and another topic.

So last week I did a project update on the notion to do thing that I was creating and I showed what it is and how I'm using it, and 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, um, uh, 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, um, uh, projects, but it got me better organized and it also got me better. Um, and that helped me to get things done. The past two weeks were a little bit strange because of the vacation period.

The second task that I set myself out to do was to improve my notion to do app. I was always doing the to do's in 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, uh, doing laundry or chores in the house.

And I, uh, the previous podcast number 11 is about notion to do. So if you want to know more about that, just, uh, have a listen or have a look cause it's a video. Um, and there is still a list of things to do, but I set a time box and, um, 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. Um, and stuff like that. So I started dog fooding it, I already found some bugs related to generating the reports, which makes it not really usable.

I can watch the reports when they open the app. But one of the important features is also that the reports can be sent via telegram, for example, uh, to get, uh, updates pushed, but that part isn't working correctly. So I might even be looking into that besides the other accountability items, uh, into fixing some of those issues.

I investigated the any query, um, package, which is a open source go application that somebody created that allows you to use my SQL syntax to query a lot of data sources. Um, and my, I figured that if I can create a wrapper around any query that would allow me to very easily, very fast, uh, introduce new data sources to watch your numbers.

I tried to install it, uh, but I ended up training a GitHub issue, uh, for it because it only didn't work on the Ubuntu versions that I tried. Uh, and as it turns out, uh, 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, uh, but else I won't be able to use it cause I'm not going to update my local dev environment or my, uh, the web server that I use for hosting to Ubuntu 24 in the, in a short, uh, in a short period.

Uh, that's not on the planning. Yesterday evening, uh, some final, uh, deadline, uh, so I'm recording this on Sunday and the podcast is published on Monday morning, um, European central time. Um, so on Saturday evening, I was still working on Aspire then, and I am still really impressed by how powerful the function calling in, uh, in the open AI LLM.

Um, cause I'm able to tell it things and it sets a schedule for me. I can update your schedule. I can add goal updates. Um, so I still need to add some goals to it. And one of that might be the accountability stuff. Um, so, and then I'm going to see if it works for me and if I should create it into a product.

So then it works for other people. And 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 open AI, uh, GPT models is not free. Um, so that also has impact on the pricing and stuff like that. So that's also interesting.

So the future accountability things that I want to do in the coming two weeks, it's a, uh, there's a list of small tasks I want to complete. I'll show those tasks, uh, or I'll talk about those tasks. Uh, after this, this high level list, um, the second one is for my projects. I use a boiler plate. So if I create a new project, um, I use a boiler plate that I created for myself.

I check it out. I changed text boiler plate to the name of the project. Um, and that boiler plate uses some private packages that I use to, um, to, to, uh, simplify things. So I want to do an update to the boiler plate and I also have some updates planned. Those are open already for, for, uh, for a while on the, um, on the, the private packages that I use.

There's 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 boiler plate, um, faster to use.

Cause now I do the boiler plate, I check it out and then I need to check in the previous projects that I did and what changes I made to the boiler plate to make it work. And I want to do that, uh, in one go. So the third item then is some updates to debugging dan.com. Um, I use a private project that I internally call notion blog to generate the site.

Uh, and some updates that I want to do to debugging Dan is, uh, showing the podcast icons, uh, some fixes to the font size. There were some SEO remarks from Google. So I'm going to look into improving the site. Uh, cause I found that while working on watch on numbers and dog fooding it, I checked the.

Spotify statistics and the Apple podcast statistics, and there kind of been no listeners from those platforms, but forms, um, so I hope that by improving debugging.com and linking better to Spotify and to Apple, that, uh, they would be, will be more, uh, approachable and better visible.

Um, yep, I think that's it for the debugging them.com updates. And, uh, um, I'm also related to that. I'm also learning about sale while I started learning about sale. I watched one YouTube video and I started on the RF SEO course, uh, video, which is, uh, 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. Um, and there are some small tasks also related to that. Um, and the last item in the list is the mail hosting. So I have several domain names for my projects and I always create, uh, Dan at, um, and then the domain name for email.

And I use the mail hosting myself currently by, uh, doing a, um, on my server, but, uh, that's pretty complex and pretty brittle. So mail is slow to send, and I also have the feeling it's slow to receive. Um, 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 going to follow up on that. And I'm going to probably spend some monthly subscription to just don't have to do it myself anymore and have somebody else do the mail hosting, cause it's getting too difficult. Um, and I want to spend my energy somewhere.

Um, so I'll be probably, hopefully migrating my mail in the next step to those are the future accountability items for the next two weeks. Um, I promised that I would expand on the small tasks that I want to do.

Um, for some newer projects, I didn't do the 404 page yet correctly. Um, so I'm not doing server side rendering in my stack. So I had, uh, express and preact express on the backend to preact to generate static, uh, the static HTML. Uh, and it's an SBA, a single page app, but it's not pre-rendered.

So I have, um, or server side rendered. So we have, uh, some pre-render, pre-render middleware in, um, in express that checks, is this a Google search bot or a different kind of crawler, then I'll invoke the pre-render dot 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 ACTP code that is returned is not a 404, it's a 200, but the page, the page itself says, Hey, I'm not, uh, 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. And you set that to 404 on your not found page. And when it's pre-rendered, uh, pre-render will take care of returning the, um, the status code. So I need to do that for what's your numbers for founder tooling.

Um, I believe it's those, but I'll check on the projects. Second small task I want to do is that in July, I shared podcast on Reddit, there I got some feedback and somebody said, Hey, I see that episode two is not visible.

On the website. So I watched that via YouTube. Um, and I need to look into that, uh, when the, uh, remark came in, I quickly checked and I believe that I did see episode two on the site. It was in notion, uh, so it should be there, but I'm going to have a, have a look at that.

In notion blog. So that's 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 debuggingden.com slash accountability, it should show all the posts related to accountability and not only the podcast, but I also create a post with, uh, a graphic and some, um, some visuals.

Um, 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 and the last small task is related to the stream deck. So I use a stream deck when editing the audio, but now that I'm moving to video, I do the editing in, um, in, in, in the video editing app.

Um, and, um, also during streaming, I can use the stream deck to pause or change the scenery and, um, yeah, I need to configure the stream deck to do that. So that's false. It's not that big, but it's something that falls into the small task category.

Um, yeah, those are the small tasks that I wanted to talk about. So that's the accountability updates. So I talked about what I did in the past two weeks, what I want to achieve in the next two weeks. And, uh, I might even do some additional things.

Um, 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, cause it's still on my old aliens that I used.

But that one's too Dutch is Dan Gemist, which is my, my first name, but my first name is pretty Dutch. So I named the podcast for, instead of Dan, I named it Dan because that's easier in English. And Gemist is also a Dutch word.

Uh, 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, um, changing my GitHub builder. So thanks a lot for listening or watching. Let's see you on the next one. 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.