These are the top 5 Month of June key insights! For number 5, a brief summary of all articles and newsletters produced and to close it off, my Twitter stats.
1. Co-founder partnership struggles.
Have you ever worked for several years straight with one co-worker or co-founder and you had shared responsibilities and capability?
That’s my relationship with my co-founder, we’re both IT software engineers, developer, and architect. The only difference is a slight focus shift:
- I’m into DevOps, Public Cloud and specifically AWS next to some software engineering.
- My Co-founder can built User Interfaces with VueJS, Mobile Apps, and does general software architecting and development.
With that overlap comes arguments, and sometimes they escalate. This happens when you work for a long time with someone that has similar experiences.
When you’re dealing with the development of a complex product that is Eezze.io, a backend low code development platform. Arguments are a near certainty. In June that hit a high to the point things escalated to near closure of our business!
Luckily we both have the capacity to balance our thinking and level our emotions over time to come to a sensible conclusion.
Key insight
Make a firm agreement about who is responsible for what, and who leads and ultimately decides. This will accomplish:
- If there is disagreement, someone has the power to move forward by veto.
- avoids a stalemate in discussions and prevents further escalation.
- respect responsibilities and leadership of your partner.
- clearly defined operational boundaries.
2. AI Chat bots
AI Chat-bots are a hot topic these days, so last month I decided to really take strides into learning how to build an AI chat bot.
There are many websites already that allow you to quickly create chat bots, so there’s essentially no need to “deploy your own”. LangFlow follows this model, no programming is required.
The screenshot below illustrates my point, it’s “drag and drop” and “configure”, then “run and test”. I’ve written in detail about how I’ve set this up here.
To take my learning to the next level, I decided to create an actual SAAS product myself. InsightProse.
That website is still placeholder and a test, coming week the actual insightprose.com will be developed and deployed online..
The idea is to create insights from your own articles that are on brand, SEO optimized, shareable and actionable.
There will be exports/integrations available for Twitter (integrated), LinkedIn and any Blog that you may have.
This will enhance your online exposure and keyword relevancy. The blogs output is created such that it’s also optimized for natural language search. Typically people ask questions on Google, and not statements, these insights cater exactly to this behavior.
I’ll release a demo next week that will show you how the app actually functions and it provides example outputs so you see the benefits tangibly.
Key insight
Use LangFlow to quickly create a chat-bot that can answer questions on the content of your choice. Read more here.
Check out Huggingface spaces for a variety of AI generative applications such as image generation with Stable diffusion or Midjourney, and GPT4o chat.
3. Website reorganization
I made some major reorganizations to my rolfstreefkerk.com website this month. All with the goal to improve knowledge sharing.
It still is not finished! As you may, or may not have noticed. Some area’s still have underdeveloped texts or no proper links. The biggest missing of them all, content and articles!
The idea is that it becomes a full knowledge hub where articles link to topics, and topics have sub-topics that then lead to related content. It’s a web of knowledge and concepts that hopefully improve the insights you can take away from them.
It’s also one of the reasons I’ve created the InsightProse product. Attention spans these days are crumbling, short articles and insights seem to be the way to bridge the gap between. “Oh this is interested, I didn’t know that” towards “okay, now I really want to know more details”
Key insight
You can achieve topic awareness and changing that awareness level from;
- unknown
- to familiar
- towards, “I know what that is, and I understand it".
By slowly introducing a concept in a concise manner, then point to the detail if they’re interested to read more.
This introduction can happen on Twitter via; a simple tweet, a twitter thread or a very concise article. That then leads into your detail article for the detail answers.
4. Day organization and work scheduling
Over the course of June I’ve revised my daily routine to hopefully get more structure in the tasks that I need to perform.
To get an idea about the tasks I’m juggling, this is what I’m currently working on:
- Sales for eezze.io, a low code development platform that I use to develop B2B solutions for clients. Typically for Workflow, Integration and API’s that need to be custom.
- InsightProse, which is full time solo development. Website, Marketing, Backend development, DevOps and AI.
- Content writing. articles and newsletter on Sunday.
How I schedule this during the weekday generally is like this:
07:15 - 07:30: 15 minute walk outside 07:30 - 11:30: Complicated work such as learning, and writing evergreen notes (see here for more details) 11-:30 - 12:00: Social media interaction
12:00 - 13:00: Break and Lunch & Dinner (One Meal A Day, more details here) and a 15 minute walk.
13:00 - 16:00: Content production: This is where I do medium to low difficulty tasks which is usually programming, meetings etc. 16:00 - 16:30: Planning for the next day and possibly further ahead, depending on what happened that day.
16:30 - 16:45: 15 minute walk OR Fitness routine 2 times per week ~45 minutes.
The time-slots are general guidelines, I’m not sitting there looking at my watch to make it exact. It does provide structure to the work day and the time before and after are my time to do whatever I need to do to relax and sleep etc.
Key insight
Create a schedule that encompasses your goals, and makes an ordering of that schedule that takes into account when your mind is the most fresh.
For example, I plan difficult activities in the morning when I’m most mentally prime and fit. That tapers off as the day goes on. That’s why I do my planning at the end of the work day.
Fitness is at the end of the day because, again, that works best for my situation and I feel the most “power” come out at that time of day. More about my fitness routine here.
5. My “performance” in June
What did I produce in the month of June and how did I do on Twitter?
- I created 3 full sized articles.
- 4 Newsletters.
- 23.5K impressions and +113 followers on Twitter
1. Articles
The essence of the article was, apply a holistic health approach that tracks multiple facets and don’t rely on calorie tracking.
Start with these 3 steps:
This article provides a concise summary and walk through how to get started with LangFlow creating your own AI Chat bot. As discussed in our number 2 for this month.
This article covered way more than just setting up a dev environment, I’m also discussing how to use Apache as a reverse proxy and I implemented it in this article using Laravel as an example of a typical PHP backend server.
Docker and Docker compose are also discussed and demonstrated with hands-on coding examples.
Then as last note, how to develop with VSCode seamlessly. Find out more here, it will walk you through how to set it up in no time.
2. Newsletters
Very much related to the article; Beyond the Numbers - A Holistic Approach to Health and Weight Tracking. Here I discuss my fat loss progress over the course of 12 months I lost 16kg weight with just dietary changes. I go in-depth on what that diet entails and why it’s healthy.
How I got started with my journey on rolfstreefkerk.com and twitter, plus a bit about knowledge sharing and my passion for it.
This is my training routine explained and why I do this kind of training, it’s short and effective.
The introduction to InsightProse and a bit about Evergreen note taking, if you haven’t heard about this and you’re interested in learning? Check it out.
3. Twitter
The more you engage online, respond to threads, interact with people through DM’s, and provide good content tweets. The follower count will grow over time.
Concluding
There was a ton more to cover, that I did not. I’m still working through fitting in my scheduled to-do's and increasing the quality of my output. I want to inform you properly and I want to provide value in the best way I can. Hopefully the topics discussed today demonstrated that value to you.
If not, please let me know by replying to this newsletter. For any other comments, discussions, questions, feel free to reply and let’s chat!
I want to thank you for your time reading and see you in the next issue!
