magic is not enough - you need robust magic

Remember the weekly link newsletter that I started here a few months ago? I do! "Florian's Filter" is not dead, but it stopped... because I had created magic, but did not make it robust.

It is a story I see all around, and just as much in corporate environments. So at least I consider myself in good company.

The Citizen Developer Innovation Cycle in times of rapid technological advancements

1. Have a real pain/ a real problem to solve
2. Consider possible solutions
3. Be lured into building a solution yourself to suit your specific needs
4. Put it together in a weekend using new tools with low barrier of entry and incredible capability
5. It works! You are the hero of your own story
6. It wobbles - pioneers live dangerously...
7. It breaks
8. All stages of grief
9. Decide that it was a PoC anyways and never meant for production
10. Start over with a different topic

The core mistake? Focusing on the magic, and failing to make it robust.

Without bothering you with all the details, here's my progression along the cycle with "Florian's Filter".

1. I get so much interesting stuff in my own content filter bubble, and find myself sharing much of it with colleagues, customers, friends - this could be a worthwhile newsletter! But it must be as easy as a few clicks to generate, otherwise I will never do it.
2. There are commercial solutions - do I want yet another subscription and a third party service which gets all my content? And none would be a seamless fit for my way of working. Stupid!
3. Links are just text, I could collect those links in a text file... add a thought or a comment at the time when I save the link... then I just need to automatically grab the links, get some metadata like the title from the source website... maybe categorize it automatically so I don't have to add that manually every time... and for the formatting and title image I can use a local LLM... then push it to the blog somehow...
4. OK, I got the shortcuts app on my phone, tablet and laptop. Markdown text file lives in my obsidian vault. To create a weekly post I can use automation with n8n in a local docker container on the laptop, I can mount the folder with the text file there. A cron job can run at the end of the week. n8n can pull the latest entries, enrich the metadata, draft a blog post with the help of a local LLM model running in LM Studio, push the draft to my website via the API, put the links I just "used" into an archive text file. The Pushover app can even notify me that this is done.
5. Holy smokes, it works! Collecting links is as easy as sharing one directly to another person. The weekly automation runs. A draft is created. In a short amount of time, I can create the intro, refine the text, hit send. Awesome!!!
6. Oh, some weird formatting bug caused the ingest of links to stop. I just need to delete that one link manually and trigger the workflow again. Oh, my machine was not relaunching Docker after a restart, and I did not even notice that no new post was created. I'll do that next weekend!
7. It has been WEEKS now. I changed how the Obsidian vault is synced, links end up in Nirvana, Pushover sends me an error message every week. This is the part of the chain that still... "works". Damn!
8. I go to my own website, scold myself for being so ballsy as to promise everyone a weekly newsletter, and consider burning it all to the ground (the website, relax)
9. Remind myself that I am, after all, not a software developer or SysAdmin or Automation Expert or Blogger by vocation and that this was really quite a useful learning experience
10. This commercial meeting transcription service is just a few tidbits stacked together and bundled with a pricey subscription - and it lacks features I need to use it with a team. How hard can it be these days to put something like it together by yourself?!

In conclusion: I have not given up on the newsletter. Also: The magic is real, but making it robust - that's what you need for the gift to actually keep on giving.