Pascal Laliberté, from Ottawa, Canada
Find me on Bluesky, LinkedIn, Twitter, ruby.social, and Github.
Or send me an email.
Everyone Wants Progress
A weekly post for software creatives. Every Saturday AM.
everyonewantsprogress.com
Minimum Viable Meetup Ottawa
I run a local meetup in Ottawa, and our main event is called “Projects Night: Bring Your Laptop, Work on Your Idea”, inviting creatives of all types. Every other week, on Tuesday nights, at MBO CoWorking.
It usually attracts between 12 to 24 participants, varying from software developers, freelancers working on their website, designers, sometimes an industrial designer, a physical project creator, coaches. It’s diverse, and it’s great to see people working on their thing. Come hang out if you’re in Ottawa.
Building
ReadWith (readwith.club) — A novel way to capture reading note, lead reading groups.
Books I’ve been reading
I’ve been recording my reading notes in ReadWith for these books.
- The Practice by Seth Godin.
- Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows
- New Rules for the New Economy by Kevin Kelly
- Million Dollar Consulting by Alan Weiss
- Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
- 140 SaaS Marketing Ideas by Corey Haines
- This is Marketing by Seth Godin
- The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen
- The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
- Deploy Empathy by Michele Hansen
If you could read 3 books, if only you knew a friend who wanted to read it too, what would you read? Give me a shout with your answer.
Retired Projects
A few specialized service offerings, and a couple products from over the years.
- Hotwire Migration Service
hotwiremigration.pascal.works - Freelance Bullet Train Developer
bullettrain.pascal.works - Chart Descriptions
chartdescriptions.com - Transmission Theme
transmissiontheme.com - Custom Charts Developer
customcharts.dev - Supercharts
supercharts.dev - Stimulus JS Freelancer
stimulus.pascal.works - Modest JS Works Ebook
modestjs.works - Breather Planner
breatherplanner.com - Custom WordPress Component Developer
wp-developer.pascallaliberte - The Change Anything Kit
pascallaliberte.me/change-anything - The Language of Objectives
pascallaliberte.me/language-of-objectives - Hotwire Office Hours
https://hotwiresupport.pascal.works
Ideas
- Design is best when done in tandem with the implementation. Knowing the limits of the material you work with makes for a better design.
- There’s a particular urgency to surpass ourselves and to part with our ego, so that we know how to construct things rather than just react to things.
- Most times when we hit an either/or mindset, there’s usually a third way.
- We’re complicated people, and we’re full of paradoxes. Learning to bridge those paradoxes helps us be better with others.
- There’s a way to achieve multiple things at once, so long as you ruthlessly put things in the right order. That way, the first thing will feed into the second one and into the third, and all the way down, letting you achieve them all.
- To-do lists are only a little helpful, because they’re usually written as wish-for lists. I found that writing have-done lists to be the most helpful kind of list to write.
- Constraints are something to welcome. Annoyed? That points to something important. Afraid? That’s an even better sign you’re on the right track.
What I value most
- I value being intentional and thorough, getting to the bottom of things and doing the right thing. Going deep brings joy.
- I value starting small, iterating, doing what matters, betting on the long-haul and respecting the natural rhythm of things. Instead of taking a big ambitious bite out of life, why not bet on what will always be true, like the power of compound interest and doing stuff that’s a little scary but at your level?
- In relationships, I value authenticity, complicity, openness and truth. Open up. It’s scary but it matters.
- And I value improving myself and making a good environment for others to grow in. Stepping on some toes? Better to step on your own first.
In closing, two questions I think are helpful
These questions help me stay true, and they help me make good choices. I hope they’re useful to you too:
- What am I so convinced of? Any time I feel conflicted, agitated, or that my options are limited, I inspect and identify my mental models, those invisible lenses through which we distort how we see reality. I make it a habit to put my finger on my mental models, so I drive them and they don’t drive me. Every time I did this, I was able to solve the right problem, build the right thing, and help people in the way they needed the help. And the second question is:
- What will I be celebrating? Instead of writing lists of things to do, or of things I want to achieve, I write lists of things I’ll have achieved in a future place in time. I call these have-done lists. That subtle change of position helps me visualize what’s essential, what’s central and what to ship first, and also what’s a distraction and what to ignore until after that date. To write these lists, I use Taskpaper for Mac with a custom stylesheet.
Hope they help.
Thanks for reading
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