E14: Accountability #3

09/09/2024, duration: 21:28

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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 14 already. The topic for today is accountability. So, for those that don't know, every two weeks I update everybody or the listeners on what I did in the past two weeks. And what I am going to do in the next few, two weeks. And I'm going to share that and keep myself accountable by sharing that. And so, this week is another episode of The Accountability. This is the third one. First, I'll update you on what I did in the past two weeks. What I scheduled, what I planned, how it went. And then I'll tell you what I'm going to do in the next two weeks.

But first, I'd like to reflect a little on the past week. So, the Saturday before I recorded the previous podcast, podcast 13 on my tech stack. I normally record on Sundays. And that's Saturday. I spend most of the day building a script that automates publishing the podcast. So, when I record the raw video, I chop off the beginning and the end. And then I create the cover image. And I automated all the steps after that.

So, adding a beginning and an end. The intro and the outro. Generating the transcripts with Whisper. Creating a Notion page for my blog. And that is a major time saver. So, it wasn't really working 100% correctly on Sunday. But the big advantage is that it keeps going on after I gave the input. So, normally, I did it step by step using a checklist. And that worked. But what I now, I only need to do stuff like downloading a file, creating a file. And creating some image. And then, after that, it continues automatically. So, I can just walk away at that time. And it would have transcoded the video or something else. And that's a major time saver in the time it takes for me to do the total podcast. And it also gives me more time to do other things with my family, for example. Or work on some project.

So, I'm also recording with camera this week. I did it last week. And I liked it. So, I'm continuing that again. Because the thing is, I do like to go back to what I was previously saying. I enjoy recording the podcast. It's fun. It's a break from all the other technical stuff that I do in the week. But it does take time. And I don't have a lot of free time. And parts of the free time I like to spend on the important stuff, like my family, all my side projects.

And the podcast is also a side project. But I don't want it to take the largest amount of time in the week. Because I also want to do some side projects. I also won't have anything to talk about. And I'm not really enjoying myself. Because I like working on side projects. And additionally, this week, it was my birthday, my 40th. And it's, well, I don't know really how to describe it. But it is an indication when you're turning 40 that you're getting old.

I remember my father getting old. And there was a big party and a lot of traffic signs with 40. And it was a big thing. I'm not really into big things. So I planned something with friends. I planned something with my parents and my father-in-law. And that was also fun. But for me, it isn't really a big thing. I'm turning 40. But I still feel the same. And I'm still in the situation that I mean yesterday, which is fine. And yeah, it does give you more time. No, not really time. It does make you reflect a little bit more that you're thinking, oh, I'm now turning 40. I might be at a half time period of my life if I turn 80.

It's what I'm doing currently. What I want to be doing for the bigger part of my life, for the second part. And there's a generic feeling or a general feeling of getting old. So that was the past week for me.

Let's dive into the topic for today, the accountability update. If you're listening to this via the podcast and don't have the visual aid of YouTube, that's totally fine. I do a voiceover. You don't need to see the screen that I've prepared. But I'll just talk it over. So, the schedule for this podcast is a two-week cycle. So, in the first week of the cycle, I do an accountability update like this one. And in the second week, I do a topic or like I did my tech stack last week. Or I do a project update like I did for the Notion to do side project.

And that's something I keep iterating on. I started that six weeks ago since this is the third accountability update. And I like it. And it also gives me less pressure to come up with new topics or subjects to talk about. And that's also a good thing because I did start with the first ten, I believe. No, the first eight. I did different topics. And after a while, it got more difficult to think of new topics. So this gives me also some breathing room.

And I feel that with this schedule, I keep my creativity flowing. So I was thinking the past week, maybe I need to do some kind of just a rant or event about a specific topic. So I keep thinking of new things to do and to keep things interesting. And I think that this schedule, having an accountability update, which is planned and pretty structured, and having a free off-topic second week really fits me.

And I hope the listeners or the listener or viewer like you also. And if you have any feedback, let me know. Leave me a comment on YouTube. Send me a message on X, whatever you want. Let me know. So the accountability task that I created for the past two weeks, is it was a big collection of small things and some small tasks that I did, like check if a podcast episode really appears on the website. I did an update to the boilerplate that I'm using, so that when I copy it for a new project, I don't need to redo a lot of things.

So what I mostly did is I checked on the previous copy that I did, checked what I changed there, and also made the changes in the new project. So this should probably save me more time when setting up a new project. I'm thinking of more smaller tasks that I did, but nothing really comes to mind. Oh, I did some fixes to also to how I do forms in my applications. Things like that. The third item is, over a total of five, is I did some updates to debuggingden.com.

So I've talked about this before, but if you don't know, debuggingden.com is the website that I use to publish the transcripts and the podcast episodes are embedded there. I also have a specific page for the accountability updates. You can also track my progress during the week. I try to update that periodically when I have completed something and the content I manage in Notion, and I've set up an application, which is still private, to generate the blog and the pages for that.

And it was missing support for video, so I couldn't embed the YouTube video. I couldn't create columns. And so I added some more support for that. Table wasn't available. One of the items that I also wanted to include, which I hadn't been able to do yet because of the complexity that there was, but I didn't expect, is having a bullet list with an embedded bullet list within it, or a numbered list.

Because the other thing is that within Notion, Notion doesn't tell you in the blocks that it returns for a page that it says, hey, a bullet list is coming. These are the six items. No, it just tells you, hey, I have a bullet list item for you and you need to track yourself. Do I need to open the tag? And when does it end? Do I need to close the tag?

And I made some code for that, but the complexity of that was growing and I wasn't able to get it to a line right. So at the end, I figured let's keep this for now on the back burner. I'll pick this up later. I do have an idea now on how to do it. Basically, it would be just me retrieving. When I see a bullet item block or a numbered item, it would be just get all the next ones also and generate the block at once instead of generating the first item in the block and optionally an open tag and then doing the next one and the next one.

So yeah, I'm happy with that. I did some changes to the font size, font size on mobile because the titles of a block overview of the list were pretty big on mobile. So they didn't leave a lot of screen space for the rest. And the fourth item I did was SEO and that's the only one I haven't really completed. I did do the follow-up on the Google Search Console.

So for all the domains that I have configured there, I went over the URLs that Google reported that had some issues like soft 404s, which is something that I addressed by adding a pre-render meta tag because I used pre-render to render the static pages for this, for the crawlers.

And what I wasn't able to do for SEO was the AhaRefs course. So there's a YouTube video of like two, three hours, which I started. But I haven't completed it yet. I haven't found the time to just quietly sit and watch the video. So that's unfortunate because SEO, at least for me, it feels like the marketing channel that most, that fits most. It's more long-term. So it could take months for SEO to pick up. That's what I've learned from it so far.

But it's more stable than trying to chase viral posts or doing product and gamification or trying to manipulate product hunt or something else. So it feels that it fits for me the most. And so that's why I'm looking into it. I've also looked into the last item, which I also completed the mail hosting. So what I did, I used a mail cow setup on my server to do the mail hosting myself.

And I found out that I kind of already knew that, but mail hosting is difficult to do. It's slow. You need to set up all kinds of stuff for spam filtering and stuff like that. And it turns out that I wasn't able to invest the time to do it properly because, for example, I added debuggingdem.com as a mail address a few weeks ago while I hadn't touched the system in a while.

And after like a few days it started complaining, hey, your SSL certificate is not correct. And then I remembered I need to do some regular cron job running to copy the SSL certificate from caddy to mail cow so that it's able to have the certificate from Let's Encrypt. And then I figured I need to do this differently. So what I did, I picked a mail hosting provider.

I did a search earlier already, but then I didn't follow up on it. So for like 13 euros a year, I'm now hosting everything at Zoho Mail so I have one mailbox for all my domains. I just use aliases and now I should be able to just send out mail and I can remove mail cow and I can, I now have more confidence that the mail I'm sending will arrive because I was sending out email for new teletron accounts, for example, and I never got a reply from that.

And there was always something at the back of my head that said, hey maybe they don't even see the mail or they get it in spam because of your self-hosted mail setup. And now I no longer have that anymore. So those were the five items that I worked on. SEO, unfortunately, didn't really work out. I think also because it's a pretty complex and pretty big topic. I'm kind of hesitant to really dive into it to really so you really I really need the headspace for it to be able to learn more about it.

That's why I, for the tasks that I want to do in the next two weeks of the accountability, that's why I made a big change. So I only have two tasks planned right now, which is SEO. So there's only one tagline there. It's learn and apply. So I need to finish the video and I need to do what ARFs and SEMrush and other sites are doing with regards to your SEO possibilities. I need to see what I can do in the free tier.

I need to learn more about keyword research and stuff like that. And I follow someone on YouTube, Roberto Digital, and I believe he's a CEO SEO expert. So I might also look at his YouTube channel because I know that he did some short clips on SEO so that may also help in learning more about SEO. So SEO is important, at least I think it's important. It's something I need to invest in.

So that's what I'm going to do. And the second item is prepare for live streaming. So that's something that I've always wanted to do after I started the podcast. I just do programming, do live streaming and hopefully get some people watching. I've seen Kitze do it for example. And even though he is he’s pretty he’s cursing a lot in his videos, I think it's fun to follow it.

I don't always have the time because I often am working while he's streaming. And doing that and working on my own code, watching that and working on my own code is not always a good combination. I also want to do that myself and hopefully find some people that like to watch and also learn from it. So if there's questions in the chats for example, that's what I envision. People ask why you're doing it like this because I have a pretty self-setup way of working probably something that works for me but might not work for everybody else. But you could learn from it and also like to explain and dive into it.

The downside is that I don't have a lot of time for live streaming because live streaming of course requires you to have some consecutive time to sit set it up, start streaming and really build something. And what I've learned from doing side projects is an hour is completed before you know it. So I need to find some time in the day or in the week to have maybe a fixed day for streaming or something else.

And I also need to discuss that with my family of course if they can of course they can miss me for a couple of hours but if it really fits with everything that's most important. I don't want to do this and be selfish but it's a hobby treating it like that. So for with regards to live streaming, I need to learn how that works. So I'm hoping that I can do YouTube and Twitch at the same time from the beginning and Twitch I know I can live stream on.

So from YouTube I know that they at least in the past I did the requiring to have a certain number of subscribers or views or few hours in a month to do live streaming. But a couple of weeks ago I pressed the live stream button and then it told me, hey, you have a 24-hour wait period. But after that, you should be able to stream. So I'm curious about that and I'm also curious about how I can set it up.

I know there's a commercial service restream.io that allows you to send the same stream to different targets or destinations. But there are also some open source version of that which I am always more fun of because restream allows you to pay money directly if you want to do more than one channel. So I'm also going to look into that for the coming two weeks.

And in terms of equipment, I still want to see if I can set up my phone as a webcam because I'm currently doing this via the webcam of my laptop but that one is not that good the quality. So I'm hoping to do better with my phone and I have a ring light here you can see it but that's already giving me some lighting because I don't want to invest yet in an expensive microphone or an expensive camera because I don't know how long I'll be doing this and I don't want to spend a lot of money and have stuff getting dusty and sitting there waiting while I'm not using it.

So yeah, but the next two weeks I'm going to look into what I need. I'm going to buy some stuff that I need so I want to buy a green screen and I'm pointing behind me because currently, I use an OBS plug-in that just removes the background but the image is a bit shaky and hopefully a green screen will make it more relaxed and then I can also have a cool backdrop behind me instead of just my headache. So that's the only two things I want to focus on for the next two weeks.

And ideally, when I set up the live streaming I also want to use the live streaming to live stream the building of founder tooling because that's a tool I want to apply my SEO knowledge to. So I want it to be a directory of products and tools that founders can use once creating their startup or in the project or side project. And SEO will become very important there.

So that's what I want to do. That's what I and hopefully I don't think I can stream or live stream the entire building of the thing because I also have downtime where I'm not recording but I might be able to work on family tooling but it's something that I would like to do and the fun fun thing is even if nobody is watching the live stream, I'm still making progress because I am working on a project itself.

So that's good. It takes a lot for listening or watching and you can always reach me at debuggingdan.com. I'm available at X I'm with the same name and you can watch me on YouTube just search for debuggingdan and have a good 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.