E24: Get It Done #7

11/18/2024, duration: 14:42

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Transcript

Time for another get it done update in the Debugging Dan podcast. So this is episode 24 of the podcast and it's the seventh get it done update. The past week or two weeks I've been working on lots of stuff and first I'm going to reflect on the past and then I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do for the next two weeks for getting it done. Let's get started.

So for those that are unaware, haven't watched before seeing this for the first time, get it done is the section in my podcast where I try to be accountable by sharing what I'm going to do for the next two weeks and set up goals and when those goals are set I share them and hopefully by sharing them that makes me feel that I should finish them because I shared them in public regardless of how many people are watching this, I should finish them. So what I did two weeks ago is I set four goals, four.

I want to get Dan cuts my video editing, not really video editing, but getting videos ready for social platforms, ready for dog fooding. I want to make a strategy or a schedule for sharing on social for content. I want to approach a way of working there, how I'm going to do to organize all the different pieces of content I create, so blog posts, podcasts, other videos, maybe live streams in the future and the fourth item was updating my blog and I'll be getting into some more details for all of these.

So Dan cuts, my personal MVP is ready, but for those who have watched the previous episode, I'm thinking of pivoting Dan cuts to desktop. The biggest reason for that is computing and storage. So video is lots of megabytes and having a SaaS or hosted solution for that means that I have to pay for those megabytes for other people using them. There's also AI evolved there for generating transcripts and if I want to do that, I need to download the models and the models for, for example, OpenAI Whisper. If I do the processing locally are like hundreds of megabytes. The biggest models are more than a gigabyte and that's all stuff that needs to be stored. I need to host. I need to make available and this is kind of a product that needs a free tier. So when doing a free tier, I need to host all those different assets and share them and I figured maybe this is a solution that fits better with desktop than processing will all be done on the person's computer storage, things like that. And it's something interesting for me to work on because I haven't worked on it yet. If you're interested in knowing more, check out the previous episode, episode 23.

For social sharing, I wanted to create a calendar or schedule for me so that I can look at the end of the day, I can look at this and say for myself, okay, what do I need to do? So what I do, I wrote it out. I create the podcast on Sunday. That's when I record that when I publish it together with the podcast, I often record a social teaser summarizing what I'm discussing in the podcast and hopefully bringing people to watch it. On Sunday, I promise I publish the podcast together with that teaser as a real short on YouTube, Instagram threads, blue sky X, all those social networks.

And then what I'm currently not yet doing, but what I want to start with that on Tuesday and Thursday, I take a snippet out of the podcast episode. So I still need to figure out how to do that. I might give the transcript to AI, ask AI, hey, can you perhaps highlight some interesting parts of the video based on this transcript? Check out those parts of the video and then cut them. Use then cuts to then create the video and share it on social again as a short, as a reel.

And besides that, I want to be able to easier create and publish content. So I kind of forgot that I also created then cuts for, so what I in theory want to be able to do is I want to record a voice message on my phone, for example, saying, hey, this is annoying me or I just worked with this new feature on XDS and I'm really happy with it that by recording the voice note, there's already a lot of preparation work done for publishing it so that it becomes a lot easier and a lot less work for me to publish it because I'm still combining this with the full time job I need to do is on the sideline. It's a hobby, it's fun, but that means that I benefit from making it more efficient.

So what I skipped here, and for those that are listening to the podcast, I skipped content because I haven't figured that out yet. So that's something that I have on the list for the future. I have worked on debuggingthen.com and the interesting thing is the get it done section works. So I was working on then cuts until Thursday or something like that, still tweaking, still doing some stuff and then I was looking at my camera and I thought, wait, I need to record a get it done, but I haven't done anything yet on the blog yet. So let's work on that.

So my current blog debuggingthen.com is based on an internal project that I have Notion blog where I just create a blog post in Notion and there's a web app that generates a blog from that. And what I am currently doing is I am re-implementing it in Next.js. I just now read the podcast RSS file and I enhance that with YouTube video information, for example, so that you know I can on the detail page, I can show the video link. I also do something with the transcripts and I just noticed that there's a three somewhere in the screen.

I'm going to check where that's coming from. I'm back. It was some windows thingy when you drag a window between different desktops or different monitors. It highlights which monitor you're dragging it to and somehow it gets stuck. I missed that. Apologies. So debuggingthen.com I've been working on it and one of the things that I also did is that I wanted to make it layered. So it doesn't need to be perfect and have all the features at once, but I've been implementing it bit by bit. That's why I also started with the podcast RSS because at a later stage, I also want to create blog posts that are not related directly to a podcast episode. I currently cannot do that, but I want to add an API to Notion blog to read that information and then also add that as posts mixed in with the podcast.

So this screenshot that I'm currently sharing that you cannot see at the moment when you're listening but a video is on YouTube is the current homepage of the blog. It's just a list of the different blog posts. It has a title that shows on which podcast platform, which social platforms my podcast is available and I share content. And I wanted to make this better because it's not really inviting.

So what I've been working on is this in Next.js. So currently I'm showing the homepage which shows tiles with every post and there's a detail page there which I hadn't shown for the old blog. But as you're watching this, I've probably put part of the blog that I've updated with Next.js already live, but there's also a detail page there. And this is what I was working on yesterday morning, I believe. And I've been iterating, I've been continuing.

So in this screenshot, these screenshots, I've made it better responsively. I've replaced the square podcast screen shots or thumbnails with the ones from the YouTube videos which are 69 in ratio while the ones for the podcasts are square. So this is more pleasant to look at. I've added the sidebar with links to social which isn't that visible on mobile because I had to scroll down because of the responsive view. I'm going to iterate on that. Perhaps on mobile I'll show something else, then I'll do it on desktop to just highlight stuff that I'm working on. It could also be the second item in the list or something like that. I just need to figure that out, but that's the layered approach. I first wanted to make the basics work and then I'm going to iterate on that. And it's been fun to work on.

So for the coming two weeks, in the spirit of get it done, I'm again picking up four different items. It doesn't need to be four, but most of the time somehow it's four. So these four things I want to pick up. I want to finish DebuggingDamn.com to a certain point. So what I'm currently working on is the category page because the previous blog has a category page and tags, which I also want to use again in the future, but I don't want to lose all the SEO links that are perhaps there. I'm not sure that they are, but I just figured let's make sure that they are there.

I need to add the redirects for the numbers. So you can go to DebuggingDamn.com slash 12, for example, and you'll be redirected to episode 12 of the podcast. So the streamlined solopreneur does that, and that's something that I took from him. It also makes it easier to link for me, and I also think it's a fun gimmick. I also want to do some fixes to Watch Your Numbers. So Watch Your Numbers is an internal project, still internal, which I'm working on to help me gather my analytics in one place. It is something at some point that I want to make public or make into a product, but for now I'm using it internally.

It has some bugs with charts and errors. So I'm going to look into that so that it will be easier for me to get those statistics like website visitors, podcast listeners, and I also want to aggregate different parts of data into the same view. So for example, for podcast, I want to get the information from Spotify, from Apple, and from Custopod, myself hosted podcasting platform, and combine that. So that's the second one, Fix Watch Your Numbers. The third one is content. So content is combining how, thinking about how I'm going to combine the different content items that I'm working on. So is a video also going to be a blog post, or is a blog post going to be a video? How do I share that? Do I create a short about the blog post, and things like that.

And as last, last item is Dankad. So I want to start preparing some work for the desktop version. And first I want to do some feasibility checks. So I know a few weeks ago I encountered an open source project on Reddit that allows you to do simple video operations within a browser window. So it's not a GUI, but it's an API that you can tell to, for example, resize a video, add some text on top of it, things like that. And I didn't use that for Dankad, because I used it as a SaaS, and then you don't have a web view. But if I'm building a desktop app with Electron, this would be ideal for me to do the video editing part, or at least manipulate the video.

Currently, I'm mostly using FFmpeg, but I don't want to require people to download FFmpeg, for example. FFmpeg doesn't have all the operations. And there's also perhaps some licensing there. Can I include FFmpeg in my application, or would I force people to download it separately? So ideally, I would have it all part of the same code base. I've also been looking into creating a node extension for WhisperCPP, which is a C++ implementation of the Whisper implementation from OpenAI. So it downloads the Whisper model, and then I would not have to use Python, which I'm currently using to do Whisper, but I would be able to use it as a node extension, build that for Electron, and use that within the application. So those are the two things I want to check for feasibility. Building an Electron is not that difficult, I guess. There is a learning curve, so I do need to learn stuff, but that's not that difficult, I think. At least, I hope.

Famous last words. That's it. That was to get it done. Number seven. Let me know what you think. I always like comments or feedback. Please leave a rating in YouTube, your favorite podcast app. It helps me promote the podcast. Yeah, that's it. Have a nice one. Bye.