Lessons Learned and News in October and November 2022

Because of important family projects, this article covers my lessons learned in both October and November.

This is what I learned in October and November 2022:

Obsidian is great. I actually wrote this article with Obsidian on my mobile phone. My personal vault now contains not only my calendar but also huge parts of my self-management system like run books, project kanban boards, task lists, inboxes and journals. I love the flexibility the simple Markdown files give me, enriched with the simple but powerful navigation features of Obsidian. I’m definitely using Obsidian for my software development projects as well and will buy the professional license next year.
Using Obsidian and writing a lot of Markdown, I learned that the Markdown syntax is not unambiguous. Different Markdown renderers produce different results using the same Markdown documents. I noticed that when writing Markdown in IntelliJ IDEA and uploading them to GitHub, where they look different. The CommonMark project defines “A strongly defined, highly compatible specification of Markdown”.
I learned a lot about Mastodon by moving my main Twitter account @stevenschwenke to @stevenschwenke@digitalcourage.social. I documented my first week on Mastodon in this article.

Books I read:

Preparing one of my Developer on the Stage workshops, I reviewed the book “Presentation Zen” and remembered great principles like CRAP, which describes the most important design concepts contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity, and the 1-7-7 rule that states to only describe one concept per slide with at most 7 lines of text that each have at most 7 words. Because I learned a lot by remembering old knowledge, I let the review count as “having read the book”. :)

This is what I’m working on right now / planning to do in the near future / other stuff:

As mentioned in the last lessons learned article, I’m not going to start bigger projects soon.