Something new! Inspired by someone else’s weeknotes, I decided to try writing my own each week. I already do a weekly review for myself so this will just be another (public) tool to get my thoughts out of my head and into the world.

My weeknotes will be a space to cover the highlights of each week of my life: what I’m working on, what I’m thinking, rabbit holes I go down, etc. It will also hold the small musings that don’t really have a place to go. These are the things where a full written post isn’t justified but I still want to make it public. Public here does not mean polished. Notes here will be a snapshot of what I am thinking at the time of writing, written as rough as the idea currently is in my mind.

I’m writing my weeknotes for future me to read and follow what was important to past me at any given point in time. If someone else reads them and gets something out of it, that’s even better.

I went back and forth on what format I should do. I’m a man of structure so “just write” doesn’t really work for me. I got some inspiration from #weeknotes on Mastodon and settled on giving big themes of the week their own headings and writing paragraphs underneath. This structure fits my brain well and gives each a “scope” so I don’t try and write down my entire life while also giving me enough flexibility to expand on each topic as I see fit.

The title convention is the ISO8601 week date for the week I’m reviewing. This means I will post weeknotes for YYYYWWW on the week YYYYWWW+1. For example, I’m writing and posting these in 2024W29 but I’m writing about 2024W28 so the document is titled 2024W28.

Without further ado, here are my weeknotes for 2024W28!

A gift to staj 102

I stumbled across a post on LinkedIn where a whole team was let go from a project. This person had written the story, let his connections know that he was looking for a job, and also let them know that his team members were also looking. That’s not too far off of what is going to happen to my Peace Corps group in a few months. The idea came into my mind of self-hosting LinkStack and letting staj 102 sign up. That way everyone could have their own customizable profile page at a custom domain.

The documentation for Linkstack is horrendous but it looks like a mature product. After trying it out, it needs some work. As an admin, I can’t even delete users. It also got me thinking: besides having a unique looking link, why wouldn’t people just sign up for a Linktree account? What new thing does this offer?

I’m still brainstorming and trying to come up with something that a group of people looking for opportunities might need. It’s a really great group of people and I want to help them if I can. It would also give me an excuse to learn Ruby on Rails.

heyjohn: A nascent community

Since launching heyjohn, it’s been a slow start trying to onboard people. This week, I got John onboarded! That brings us to three total users.

Jacob also suggested adding some RSS capabilities so that he could get updates from important feeds right alongside his heyjohn updates. I dug around and found Rob Knight’s RSS cross poster, Echo. I made some mods such that each feed is associated with a user and a bot (named paperboy) would direct mention that user when the RSS feed got an update. I like how clean and well documented Echo is and it was pretty easy to set up. I might try and add a settings page for users to add their feeds but for now, users can just message me with the feeds they want to add.

Training videos

I sent in a full working draft for a training video my committee and I were tasked with completing. The topic of this video was 40 Developmental Assets for youth. I did the slides in Excalidraw and recorded the voice-over with my phone. Unfortunately, the video editing options for Linux are pretty bad so I couldn’t easily splice the two files together. Luckily, one of my best friends does this kind of stuff for a living. I sent the files to Jacob who slapped them together and sent it back. The feedback on the draft was good and so we will continue with two more videos.¹

Documenting PC Morocco

Another summer project the multimedia committee was asked to do is organize all the resources generated by Peace Corps and volunteers in Morocco. There is a lot of knowledge out there that needs to be wrangled. We have an existing Google Drive folder system but it is outdated and not very organized so we are working on refreshing it.¹

I’ve stumbled on a documentation system built for software projects before called diataxis. It posits that every piece of documentation can fall into four categories based on user needs: tutorials, how-to guides, explanation, and reference. It might work for our use case as well. The only problem I foresee is that most of our documentation is either a how-to or reference material. So, we would need more organization under those two categories which kind of defeats the purpose.

Media

• Reading: Since building online communities is my current fixation, I’m reading How to Handle a Crowd by Anika Gupta. The book contains stories of online communities and the moderators that keep them running smoothly (usually). Really good so far.
• Reading: I finally decided to give up on the second book of the Three-Body Problem trilogy, for now. It was just too boring for me compared to the first one. To replace it, I started The Women by Kristin Hannah. I liked her other book, The Great Alone and I heard really good things about this new one.
• Listening: Chappell Roan has been on repeat ever since discovering her. She is so good.
• Watching: My girlfriend and I watched all of the Hunger Games movies minus the first one. I enjoyed them!

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