Building a Personal Knowledge Base with Cloud Code 🛠️

Yeah, so I had some people ask me about how I've put together this kind of personal knowledge base thing, within cloud code.

and I thought I'd just kind of COVID this really quickly.

This won't be like a deep dive or anything like that, but, if you're interested in kind of bettering all the things, this might be of interest to you.

So I want to start really quickly by talking about the inspiration of this.

So, a big fan of a tool called ferndesk and what ferndesk does is it integrates with my help, scout, my company, Discord, GitHub and Linear, along with others, other stuff too.

and basically the idea is it like pulls in all this data continuously and it helps you proactively write help, docs for, for your support portal or whatever else.

So I've been really enjoying this because I can talk to it.

I can say like, you know, hey, we just shipped an integration for N charge and it'll look at my code commits, it'll look at all the help, scout tickets I've had with people asking about it and like asking how it would work and so on, and it'll rate the thing automatically.

And I'm really into this, I really like it.

But the problem is this only does stuff within like your your help center.

Right.

So I wanted something a bit bigger than that.

So what I ended up doing here is I built a system that primarily is meant to manage my day.

So under the hood it uses something called beads, which is a JSON L formatted, kind of like sqlite database.

Think of it like that.

And what it's doing is it's using BEADS to manage epics, which are sprints, tasks which are.

Or epics, which are components within a sprint, tasks which are things I do day to day.

And it correlates all of that with a lot of like, more human LLM, designed markdown files.

So think of this as like if Obsidian merged with Furnesk, merged with like linear or something.

That's kind of what I'm trying to build.

So there's two methods of using this.

the first method is with a number of different slash commands that I've set up.

So I have the ability to run like you know, if I've got a call coming up I can say call prep.

This will eventually be automated, the call prep thing, but at the minute it's not.

I can have it do things like come help me come up with content ideas Plan Plan, a newsletter plan, a YouTube video or whatever else.

And more importantly, I have Daily Plan, which I run in the morning, and Daily Review, which I run at the end of the day.

And what Daily Plan and Daily Review do is they primarily focus on this.

So I have this daily folder.

If you look here, this is what it thinks I should be doing today.

Breaks everything down into must dos and then should dos.

you can see I'm doing right now, Alex Hillman was the person who I was talking to you about this video.

But I think I might send this to a few people.

So.

Hey Alex, you can see here it pulls this from emails that I've done.

So it's tracking all of my email correspondence, my personal inbox, it's tracking help scout tickets, it's looking at calls that I do.

So if I have a meeting with somebody and then I mentioned like, yeah, I'll send this to you or whatever else that gets fed into this also.

and the end goal here is, let me go into one that's actually complete is to do things like, you know, it helps me kind of plan out every day.

It helps me stay on top of what I'm doing.

It correlates it to our, my, the Sprint I'm working towards right now.

So you can see here, like here are the different tasks associated with the Sprint.

So we're doing like Soc 2 stuff, a better sales demo system and so on and so forth.

And yeah, so each day this gets generated at the beginning of the day and then it gets updated at the end of the day.

And you can see here it's just a running log of like everything I do every day.

And again, all of this is backed by all these mainframe vaults are bead ticket IDs or bead task IDs, I should say.

and it tracks like if I went to the gym, how my sleep was, all that kind of stuff, family stuff, what my velocity is like what I'm planning to do the next day, and so on and so forth.

so from a task management point of view, I'm really liking this because it's basically, it's what I've wanted, which is a to do list that's aware of like the email exchanges I'm having or what I talk about on phone calls and everything else.

I, have the ability over here to run check in which will just do like a check in throughout the day.

I can say like, check in, just sent the Alex Hillman video or whatever.

Else, I can run status, which will kind of summarize where I'm at.

It'll surface any emails that are urgent.

So I don't actually need to look at like help scout or anything or my inbox.

I use this because this is aware of the emails coming to me, what needs replying, which ones are urgent and all that stuff.

And I just run status.

It does take a few seconds, but what it's doing is it's looking now at, you know, the current Sprint, it's looking at my day, it's looking at all the different email stuff right now with JQ and, and so on and so forth.

And it's just going to give me in a second a summary of like where I'm at for the day, what I should be focused on and so on.

So I'll let this pull up in a second.

I do wish this was a bit faster, but it is what it is.

while that's working though, I'll show you some of the stuff it does around calls.

So you know, when I do a, when I have a meeting or in this case a demo call, what's really cool about this is it, it basically it's like what Otter AI does, which is I use Otter for transcription and AI analysis but it has full context of my company.

So it's it's seeing like what went well about it.

It's looking at like things I could improve.

It's talking, it's kind of creating this overall framework, this scorecard if you will, of each call.

And then in my coaching log I can see like how I'm doing like week over week progress of like how my calls are improving or not improving or whatever else.

It's tracking every call and it's like crunching the results of that call, continuously, which is really, really cool.

okay, so I want to show you really quickly over here what this is looking at.

So you can see here, I knocked out like our N Charge integration today.

I shipped a newsletter I kicked off for migrating to manage MySQL and I did a hotfix, that was unplanned for write message.

here's some of the other stuff I want to do today.

And then you can see Here how I'm 38 days left in the Sprint.

The theme is growth infrastructure build systems that compound with that, grinding different things in my inbox that need attention, things that are blocked and so on.

you're four days into a six week sprint And I already shipped this, this, this, and this.

Sprint is about growth.

Blah, blah, blah.

One left must.

Then you're free to dock out.

Should.

Should, items or call it a win.

Be present at dinner.

No phone fully there.

Yeah.

So it's like, this is.

This is what I want, right?

Like, I need a manager, and this is my manager.

This tells me what I need to be doing.

It helps me not go down little shiny object rabbit holes and so on.

I want to show you, too, the.

Where is this?

so let's say I'm on a podcast, or somebody writes a newsletter about Right Message, or somebody just talks about Right Message on a.

On a podcast or whatever else.

I built a system where I can basically forward newsletters.

So, you know, my friend Chris writes a lot about Right Message to his newsletter.

So what I can do is I can just.

When I get that email, I can just forward it to a, a inbox that I've set up that brings everything into this vault.

And you can see here, like, there's different, like, quotes and stuff that it'll pull out, like, really good, marketable quotes from this newsletter.

Let me find one that actually talks more about Write Message.

yeah, so, like this one, you know, here's a newsletter that was sent on, the 22nd of December.

Chris, in the newsletter, articulates blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, some big takeaways, some of the things he's doing when it comes to copywriting in this newsletter.

different quotable things.

Like you just plug Right Message in your business and you can start increasing your conversions via the magic of blah, blah, blah, connection.

So it's referencing other articles, like Obsidian style.

it'll kind of create references to whatever else.

and then the actual, like, full newsletter is down here too.

same with, like, videos and YouTube videos.

So, like, let me find this one.

So Chris was also on a, the Social Media examiner podcast, and he was talking up Right Message, which I love that.

And thank you, Chris.

and so, you know, here's some of the, like, main takeaways from the interview.

Here are some really good quotes from the interview.

what else?

Here's some, like, content ideas I should write about.

So it'll, you know, help me, like, come up with.

From this interview from one of our customers who was talking of Right Message.

It's coming up with content ideas that I could create based on his discussion.

And then all of that, no surprise, is put into this content ideas kind of growth list.

Which is continuously being augmented and managed.

So like as stuff comes through as interesting things are talked about over email or through like newsletters that I'm forwarding in or podcasts that I go on or people go on, it populates this kind of like massive master list of content that we should be creating.

so yeah, that's kind of the system.

I mean, you know, I'm really happy with this so far.

You know, I can plug in all of my goals, like my personal goals, what I'm working on, what I'm reading.

it'll have all my raw stuff, like here's all my raw calls, emails, financial metrics, all that kind of stuff.

and then it kind of files, its all nicely into like these different markdown files even, even as far as things like where is that?

There we go.

So here's all of our like help docs and stuff which are synced here too.

So you can see this is automatically pulling in our help docs and our marketing site and everything.

This has just total context about everything knows about the product because it references the code base of the product, which is one level up.

it has all the calls, all the emails, all the podcast stuff, all the website stuff, everything.

and one thing I'm doing to help me do this is I've got a bunch of workflows in nan.

So this is running on my home laptop or what you see here.

This is my home laptop.

I'm recording in the basement.

I have a homelab server that is running this same vault git repository and I have the laptop in the home server pushing and pulling it up to GitHub every five minutes.

So they're always in sync or every five minutes they're in sync.

and then I'm doing stuff like here, you know, this automatically, whenever I think this is running every five minutes or so it just grabs my emails, it syncs it all in.

It AI analyzes the emails, see if they need like a reply or whatever else gets rid of junk stuff and then it writes it to this emails JSON L file.

Or if I go into here you can see it's just like all my emails are getting logged into here, which is what then cloud code is using to extract all the stuff out.

so I'm using N8N as like the thing that is ingesting emails or when it finds like a YouTube video or triggered stuff like every night grab the metrics for how many people went to the site what's our mrr?

and it can just crunch and analyze that stuff and see how it tracks with our Sprint goal and all that kind of stuff.

So, yeah, I'm quickly realizing this is becoming, like, my little operating system for running Right Message and running my life.

Zero idea about how this would work collaboratively.

at the minute, it's really just me.

But, you know, I don't know how this would work if, if I was, expanding this.

But that being said, actually, I did create a.

We have a company or like, a right Message Discord now, which I got shamelessly from my friend Jesse from Bento.

And I've got a private channel which has this Discord Vault bot thing that I've created.

And, it allows, like, my wife to ask the bot and it's private channel and discord, like, what's Brennan working on today?

And it'll show, like, what I've done today, what's left to do?

And she can add stuff to my plate.

She can say, like, he needs to pay this bill or do this or whatever, and it'll add it to my system.

So, yeah, I'm really happy with how this stuff's turned out.

If you're curious about how the N8N stuff works, what I'm doing extensively here is I am using Claude code headlessly.

So if you pass P, you can run it non, interactively.

So I think this is where I'm doing.

Yeah, so what I'm basically doing is like, I'm calling Claude with a command that I've called ingest, which takes, an argument like ingest a recording.

It takes the timestamp so that it can find it from my JSON L database, if you will, of recordings.

and then if you look at ingest over here.

I got a word.

There we go.

So ingest is just like a.

It's.

It's a command that just says, like, here's how to do it, here's what to do.

So N8N is kind of dumb in the sense that I just say, like, yeah, like, do the thing.

Like, transcribe the video from YouTube.

And it uses Assembly AI to do that.

It gets a transcript, and then it writes it to a file or it appends it to that list, the JSON L list.

And then it just calls Claude headlessly to ingest that file.

And that's like the function call or the program call that does all this stuff.

So, yeah, that's the system I have no idea how I could package and share this with anyone, but, I'm only three days into this.

I'm sure it'll evolve and stuff like that, but if you've done anything like this and want, to share more about what you've done and give me ideas, I'd love to hear it.

But anyway, hopefully this was helpful.

And yeah, I'm excited.

This has again so far been pretty game changing.

For me at least.

Thanks.