Issue 05: Focusing and building a roadmap

Hi there friend 👋

After a quiet second half of August and a couple of days off work, I’m ready to jump back into content creation! However, with everything moving ever so fast in the tech world, it’s sometimes hard to simply focus and not get distracted by all those hype cycles happening at the same time (especially if, like me, you spend some of your free time on Twitter 😅).

With everyone talking more and more about Web 3, decentralization, NFTs on top of the ever-changing landscape of frontend tooling, spending time trying OpenAI, and my ongoing projects, it’s been hard for me, and perhaps for some of you too, to not succumb to FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). So yeah, I got especially distracted these past couple of weeks and was looking for ways to snap out of it and lay out a roadmap to myself where I could:

• track what I’m learning

• track what I’m building

• help me connect the dots on seemingly independent work streams that may eventually converge

• help me produce the best, most relevant, and interesting content possible control the amount of work I commit to doing to avoid burnout — slow and steady wins the race! 🐢

In the spirit of learning/building in public, I wanted to use this newsletter to share this roadmap and showcase where my areas of focus have been lately, and where they will head in the future.

SPOILER: there’s also a few hints at future content ideas 🤫

Roadmap

If you’re curious about what I plan to build/focus on for the upcoming months, here’s my plan!

I created this little Figjam as a way to keep track, organize and link together ideas, tasks, and projects. I like it because it’s visual, infinitely scalable, and also very flexible. This will act as the “permanent Learning in Public section” I mentioned in the third issue of my newsletter as I could not find a better way to build this.

I gathered in this flow chart all the things I want to learn and projects I want to build. These will potentially inspire me to write new content so do not hesitate to reach out if there’s one theme in the list that interests you more than the others. I like to gauge interest before jumping into a write-up 😄. Among those themes you’ll find:

• Web3

• DeFi

• Design Systems

• OpenAI

• ThreeJS and more!

Note: Some of the items listed are already marked as done, so I made sure to include the links to the corresponding content or notes from Notion. In case you missed some of my older blog posts, you’ll find some there!

Coming soon

So now that I have a plan the big question is: what’s coming next?

Before my little break, I got lucky to get access to OpenAI so there’s quite a lot to talk about there, and some potential widgets to build to let you test it out directly from the blog post! Or at least I hope so, I still need to contact the team to ask for permission to do that 😅. If everything goes well, you can expect a great blog post to come to you by end of this month 🚀!

On the side, I just started learning Solidity the language behind Ethereum smart contracts 🦄, so you can be sure to see a little intro about that at some point this year as well.

On top of all that, I’m also building my own set of components, and Design System. It was long due as I’m trying to have a unique, ever-improving user experience on my projects and blog. I hope to reuse this in pretty much everything else I planned to build on the roadmap. (and I will of course write a few words about that). If you want to take a peek at it while I’m building it 👀 you can head to the design system page of my blog, this is where I’ll put anything design system related for now.

I hope this little behind-the-scenes look at what I plan for the next few months will interest you, or even better, inspire you in your own learning endeavors! Is there a specific theme from that list you’re passionate about right now? Or a resource you’d want to recommend to me? As always, I’m listening, so do not hesitate to reply to this email for feedback or a follow-up discussion!

– @MaximeHeckel

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Want to check out other topics I wrote about? There’s a lot of great content waiting for you on my blog 👉 blog.maximeheckel.com