Remember to Take Time Off
This past week I celebrated my second lockdown birthday. I was lucky enough to be given many gifts from friends and family which focused on my love of tv, film, games and electronic music of the last 30 years. Basically anything that can be enjoyed whilst sat in a single place for extended periods of time.
Lockdown has eased once again here in Wales and it's the Easter Holidays. We can travel further afield but my faint developer skin needs to be properly prepped (covered) before I can enjoy the lovely sunny weather outside.
Here's a gentle reminder to everyone who is building and shipping solo: You need to take time off from working. Your body and mind need time to recuperate. You aren't productive when operating 24-7. Your friends and family have needs too. I need to hear this as much as anyone else making this journey. So this Easter weekend I urge you not to ship, but to relax a little, enjoy some time off and maybe eat a bit of chocolate.
As always, if you have any comments or content suggestions for future issues, please feel free to reply to this email and let me know.
Until next time, enjoy your time off and have a wonderful Easter holiday!
Ian
Stories
The Writing Well Handbook
"Writing is a laxative for the mind" is one standout quote from this handbook from Julian Shapiro. It describes why writing is one of the most powerful moves you can make without any money.
From 4,000 to 140,000 YouTube subscribers in one year
Jessica Chan writes about how she's gained over 136,000 subscribers in a year to her channel 'Coder Coder' on web development. No magic formula here - Jessica focuses on creating interesting, well made tutorials on a regular basis.
Why I'm unreachable and you should be too
Pieter Levels is a very successful indie bootstrapper with multiple businesses totalling about $600k a year. Peter doesn't publish any contact details on any of his websites - in this post he explains why.
Code
Heroicons v1.0
The success of Tailwind is the stuff of legend amongst developers. They've just released the first version of heroicons - a beautiful set of 450+ icons for react and vue.
Baserow - An Open source online database
Baserow is a self hosted airtable alternative, which makes collaborating on databases simple. Their hosted version is also free for the moment, so you can test it out without installing anything.
Supabase UI
You'll know I'm a fan of Supabase (an open source firebase alternative) from previous issues. Their team has pushed out a crazy amount of updates and new features this past week. As well as adding storage features and a domain change, they also released their open-source UI component library.
From My Blog
YouTube Videos as Small Experiments
I wrote up some thoughts on my blog about using YouTube as a platform for small experiments. I'm still finding my feet on my own channel, but I'm really enjoying learning and getting feedback from my viewers.
My Favourite Video
A Day in the Life of an Open Source Developer
This cheeky spoof from Ben Awad of at what it takes to be a successful open source developer had me chuckling quite a lot. Hope you enjoy it.