WEBVTT 00:00:00.001 --> 00:00:04.740 Are you a fan of developer and technical books? Have you ever wondered what went into the writing 00:00:04.740 --> 00:00:10.080 of your favorite Python book? This week we'll peek inside the world of book authorship with 00:00:10.080 --> 00:00:15.200 a panel of renowned developer-focused authors. You'll meet Katherine Jarmul, Bruce Eccle, 00:00:15.200 --> 00:00:21.780 Luciano Romalo, Dan Vader, and Brian Okken. This is Talk Python To Me, episode 148, recorded 00:00:21.780 --> 00:00:24.140 January 26, 2018. 00:00:24.140 --> 00:00:43.280 Welcome to Talk Python To Me, a weekly podcast on Python, the language, the libraries, the 00:00:43.280 --> 00:00:47.880 ecosystem, and the personalities. This is your host, Michael Kennedy. Follow me on Twitter 00:00:47.880 --> 00:00:52.800 where I'm @mkennedy. Keep up with the show and listen to past episodes at talkpython.fm 00:00:52.800 --> 00:00:55.400 and follow the show on Twitter via at talkpython. 00:00:55.400 --> 00:01:01.340 Hey everyone, before we get to the panel discussion, I want to tell you really quickly about a new 00:01:01.340 --> 00:01:07.120 course we just launched, Mastering PyCharm. If you've worked with some of these IDEs like 00:01:07.120 --> 00:01:12.100 PyCharm, you know there's so much going on. There are so many features and those can actually 00:01:12.100 --> 00:01:17.540 be a little bit hard to discover and use. So I created this eight-hour course to give you 00:01:17.540 --> 00:01:24.140 a grand tour of PyCharm. And it turns out it's also a grand tour of software development. We cover 00:01:24.140 --> 00:01:29.900 things like source control, refactoring, working with databases, client-side web apps, Python packages, 00:01:29.900 --> 00:01:35.080 unit testing, data science tools, working with projects, being super productive with the editor, 00:01:35.080 --> 00:01:41.100 and lots more. So if that sounds appealing to you, just visit training.talkpython.fm and find the 00:01:41.100 --> 00:01:47.900 Mastering PyCharm course. Now let's meet our panel. Hello everyone. Welcome to Talk Python. We have 00:01:47.900 --> 00:01:54.680 Luciano Romalo, Brian Aachen, Bruce Eccle, Dan Bader, Catherine Jarmul, and me of course, Michael, 00:01:54.680 --> 00:02:00.960 your host. And we're going to do a pretty large tech book author panel, which I'm really excited to 00:02:00.960 --> 00:02:06.160 share this, all of your thoughts with everybody. It's going to be so fun. Let's do a quick round of 00:02:06.160 --> 00:02:10.420 introductions. Some of you have been guests on the show before. Some of you are my co-hosts, 00:02:10.420 --> 00:02:15.520 right, Brian? And people know you well, but we'll go around the table real quick. Start with you, 00:02:15.520 --> 00:02:20.480 Catherine. Maybe just quickly tell people who you are and what you do day to day. 00:02:20.480 --> 00:02:28.000 Hi, yeah. Thanks. I'm Catherine. You might know me by Kjam, and I run a data science company here in 00:02:28.000 --> 00:02:34.700 Berlin, Germany called Kjamistem. And I mainly work on data science and machine learning, but I also have 00:02:34.700 --> 00:02:42.440 kind of a focus on in production and deployment and systems. So I've been doing more security work 00:02:42.440 --> 00:02:48.600 recently, but those are the things I'm passionate about. Yeah, very cool. Luciano, how about yourself? 00:02:48.600 --> 00:02:54.960 I'm the author of Fluid Python, and I currently work for ThoughtWorks, this global consulting company. 00:02:55.480 --> 00:03:01.880 I'm sometimes in projects with clients, but more recently, I'm also in our global capability team, 00:03:01.880 --> 00:03:07.060 which is a team that aims to develop the capabilities of our consultants around the world. 00:03:07.060 --> 00:03:14.660 And I've been diving into the wonderful world of e-learning and books and those kinds of systems 00:03:14.660 --> 00:03:19.800 to pick one for us to use. Yeah, that sounds really, really fun. Bruce, how about yourself? 00:03:19.800 --> 00:03:26.160 So I'm Bruce Eccle. Apparently, what I do is study programming languages in hindsight, 00:03:26.160 --> 00:03:33.880 because I look back on my career and I see that seems to be what I do. Right now, I tried to start 00:03:33.880 --> 00:03:43.640 working on a book on concurrent Python, and that as concurrency always has been deeper, whole than I 00:03:43.640 --> 00:03:49.780 expected. And there's all kinds of interesting other possibilities. And in the meantime, I got sucked 00:03:49.780 --> 00:03:59.860 into a project which we've been working on for almost a year now called Atomic Kotlin. So I'm mostly 00:03:59.860 --> 00:04:05.780 immersed in Kotlin right now. The other thing that I've done for the last almost 10 years is study 00:04:05.780 --> 00:04:14.040 alternative organizational structures to try and come up with ways of organizing groups and companies that 00:04:14.040 --> 00:04:19.760 doesn't suck. Because there's plenty that do, right? Mostly they do, which is why I realized 00:04:19.760 --> 00:04:28.400 that I went off on my own like 30 years ago because I didn't want to play in that sandbox. And now I'm 00:04:28.400 --> 00:04:32.460 realizing I should have created a better sandbox. But oh well, hindsight. 00:04:32.460 --> 00:04:37.360 Yeah, well, there's a lot of stuff you can see in hindsight. That's right. Brian, people know you, 00:04:37.360 --> 00:04:39.720 I'm sure, but go ahead and introduce yourself for those who don't. 00:04:39.780 --> 00:05:00.960 Yeah, my name is Brian Okken. I wrote Python testing with pytest. And my day job, I guess I do coast a couple podcasts. And then also, I'm a lead engineer for lead engineer slash software manager, test manager for a small team as part of a communication test system for Roden Schwartz. 00:05:01.140 --> 00:05:04.140 Okay, excellent. And Dan, how are you? 00:05:04.140 --> 00:05:30.680 Hey, I'm good. Thanks for inviting me back on your awesome show. And I feel like I'm in amazing company this time. So yeah, my name is Dan Bader. I recently published a book called Python Tricks, a buffet of awesome Python features. And I also do some Python consulting and then also run a couple of Python related websites, realpython.com, nerdlettering.com and my own personal website at debater.org. 00:05:30.680 --> 00:05:35.840 So it's almost like 100% Python that I spend my time with every day. 00:05:35.840 --> 00:06:00.660 That's really awesome. All right. Well, thanks for that, everyone. Now people kind of know where we're all coming from. So a couple of you have mentioned the books that you've written. I'll just make some quick comments on that and others haven't. So for example, Dan, you have the Python Tricks book, which we actually did an episode on 141 on Talk Python on that. That's great. Luciano, you have Fluent Python, which we had an episode on that on Talk Python. 00:06:00.660 --> 00:06:08.480 Python as well. Brian, you have pytest, which we talk about a lot on the podcast. Catherine, tell us a bit about some of your authorship. 00:06:08.480 --> 00:06:31.780 Yeah, so I co-authored Data Wrangling with Python, which is an introduction to Python for people that perhaps are starting to want to work with data. And then I have a few O'Reilly video trainings. And I also helped create the second edition of Web Scraping with Python or Python Web Scraping, migrating into Python 3 last year. 00:06:31.780 --> 00:06:53.640 Yeah, that's really interesting. I feel like there's a lot of people coming into Python through the data science angle. And while it feels like it's pretty similar, it's not really exactly the same type of Python that you write. I feel like when I read data science code, it actually feels like I'm reading a slightly different flavor or variant of Python. Let's say if I'm reading like web code or something. 00:06:53.780 --> 00:07:03.640 Yes. When we start thinking about the popular data science libraries, they're often heavily complemented with either Cython, for example, if we're using NumPy. 00:07:04.180 --> 00:07:32.180 Or, you know, Wes, creator of Pandas, he was an R person first and then wrote Pandas. So there's some things in Pandas that are much more idiomatic of R than they are of Python. Of course, that's changing over time. But we find these interesting influences from other places. And like, for example, if you're working with Spark, or the JVM or anything that's JVM backed, then you might also see some things that look more similar to Java. 00:07:32.180 --> 00:07:43.060 So it's this weird world where there's a lot of people working on libraries, and they may not be Python first. And for that reason, it has some different quirks, if you will. 00:07:43.060 --> 00:07:44.080 Can I jump in? 00:07:44.080 --> 00:07:45.160 Yeah, please go ahead. 00:07:45.160 --> 00:07:59.860 I totally agree with what Karen just said. But I just want to add another thing, which is, for instance, in Fluent Python and most of our intermediate books, we emphasize a lot the use of iterators and generators, those kinds of structures in the language. 00:08:00.180 --> 00:08:08.860 But then, when you go to use NumPy, that's just wrong most of the time, because you want to use the vectorized operations, right? 00:08:09.240 --> 00:08:22.060 And so this is kind of a fundamental shift in thinking. And I won't remember the name of the book now, but I have a really good reference, a book by a French author, but it's Creative Commons. 00:08:22.060 --> 00:08:31.500 And it's written in English about changing your mindset from iterative code to vectorized code for NumPy. I will share with you the link later. 00:08:31.700 --> 00:08:40.240 Yeah, that'd be great. I'll put it in the show notes. Very cool. Bruce, you've written quite a few books. I've known about your books for a really long time. You want to talk about some of them that are notable? 00:08:40.240 --> 00:08:55.320 Well, probably most people know me for thinking in C++ and thinking in Java. But yes, I've written a bunch more. And then there have been a number of attempts that haven't worked out. 00:08:55.600 --> 00:09:04.780 And I seem to also do a lot of co-authoring, even though I keep saying I'm not going to do that anymore, because it can be very hard. 00:09:04.780 --> 00:09:12.280 But yeah, I started out actually in hardware in my first book, which I self-published. 00:09:13.060 --> 00:09:22.240 And sometimes think, gee, I should have just kept doing that. It was a long time ago, and self-publishing was a little more challenging at the time. 00:09:22.240 --> 00:09:23.680 You were a real rebel doing that. 00:09:23.680 --> 00:09:33.920 A little bit, yeah. It was called Computer Interfacing with Pascal and C. And then I got involved in C++, and I was on the Standards Committee for its first eight years. 00:09:33.920 --> 00:09:37.840 Although I can't tell you anything about C++ now. It's changed so much. 00:09:37.840 --> 00:09:38.860 It's really different, yeah. 00:09:38.860 --> 00:09:47.580 It is. I wrote several books on C++ and then kind of moved over to Java. And then I've, let's see, I co-authored a book on Flex. 00:09:47.580 --> 00:10:00.460 I tried co-authoring one a couple of times on C#. And then Atomic Scala. And now I'm working on Atomic Kotlin. 00:10:00.460 --> 00:10:11.100 And I keep trying to write a book on Python. And yeah, I mean, like people ask, well, are you ever going to write a book like Thinking in Java for Python? 00:10:11.100 --> 00:10:18.380 But I would say Luciano's book would be that book. So that's not, it makes no sense for me to try and do that. 00:10:18.380 --> 00:10:31.820 But this concurrency project is, I don't know if anybody has like looked at Julia, but that's kind of thrown me because I'm going, well, maybe the answer is not to use Python. 00:10:32.940 --> 00:10:39.640 So anyway, it's, it's, concurrency is, it's probably been my biggest struggle in my career. 00:10:39.640 --> 00:10:40.800 Okay. 00:10:40.800 --> 00:10:46.320 Yeah. So thank you. So that's, there's a lot of interesting stuff happening around Python concurrency right now. 00:10:46.320 --> 00:10:48.640 You know, the whole async and await stuff is showing up. 00:10:48.640 --> 00:10:52.440 There's a lot of web frameworks that are sort of async only or async first. 00:10:52.440 --> 00:10:56.160 I think it's a good time for covering that topic. So yeah, very cool. 00:10:56.160 --> 00:11:10.420 It is, but I'm just starting to wonder if the answer isn't to kind of step outside of, of the mainstream Python world and, and connect to Python rather than try and do it in Python. I don't know yet. 00:11:10.420 --> 00:11:16.780 I think it somewhat depends on whether it's computational or it's IO bound, like you're waiting on web services and databases. 00:11:16.780 --> 00:11:19.660 Sure. Parallel versus async. Yeah. 00:11:19.780 --> 00:11:28.000 Yes, exactly. So, but that sounds interesting to explore in a book. So I'm looking forward to checking that out when, when you finally wrangle that topic. 00:11:28.000 --> 00:11:33.480 All right. So let's dig into this concept that you touched on there a little bit about co-authoring. 00:11:33.480 --> 00:11:45.460 Co-authoring to me sounds both fun and really hard. And I guess it depends how you do it. If you write different chapters and stuff, I've certainly co-authored online courses, but no books. 00:11:45.460 --> 00:11:52.460 So who out there has, I know Bruce, you said you've done it some, anyone else done any co-authoring or considered it and why, why not? 00:11:52.460 --> 00:11:56.060 I have only co-authored books at this point in time. 00:11:56.060 --> 00:11:56.680 So. 00:11:56.680 --> 00:12:00.920 Oh, how interesting. How was your experience? So why did you go down that path? 00:12:01.020 --> 00:12:15.380 The initial book that I wrote with Jackie Kazel, she actually was writing it on her own first and then reached out to me because, yeah, the deadline, you know, she wanted to reach deadlines and two heads are better than one sometimes for that. 00:12:15.620 --> 00:12:31.020 And I think that if you're not really organized about exactly what is expected, I mean, it's the same thing as like, for example, if you were building a project with a friend on, on the side, let's say you're moonlighting or something. 00:12:31.480 --> 00:12:36.440 You're usually doing it with someone, you know, or perhaps somebody who knows somebody who you know. 00:12:36.440 --> 00:12:38.780 So there's some element of personal connection. 00:12:38.780 --> 00:12:50.720 You need to be really clear about, you know, deadlines, who's doing what, make sure it's absolutely clear and that you have some knowledge sharing in terms of who's going to cover what parts in what sequential order. 00:12:51.120 --> 00:12:56.100 And this is extremely hard to do, even with bright folks by your side. 00:12:56.100 --> 00:13:11.060 But, yeah, I would say organization and really trying to use something as if you would almost do an issue tracker to really say, OK, are you going to be doing the introduction to generators here or should I do it in a later chapter and so forth? 00:13:11.060 --> 00:13:15.300 Yeah, I use an organic process, which is much harder. 00:13:15.800 --> 00:13:28.160 I guess it's not harder if it's working, but I mean, it's interesting because I see this division between when people talk about book authoring and there's the OK, you have to have a lot of structure. 00:13:28.160 --> 00:13:34.260 Some people say you have to write from X hours to X hours every single day. 00:13:34.260 --> 00:13:40.780 And then I guess for me, I look at that and I go, I understand that that works for some people. 00:13:40.780 --> 00:13:44.560 But for me, I need to be inspired to write. 00:13:44.980 --> 00:13:46.980 And so I don't write when I'm not inspired. 00:13:46.980 --> 00:13:52.960 And if I'm working with somebody, I can't manage them. 00:13:52.960 --> 00:13:57.480 I can't like say you have to do this or that. 00:13:57.480 --> 00:14:07.300 But I will say one of the things after doing this a while and then I asked Gerald Weinberg about it and he's written and co-authored most of his books. 00:14:07.560 --> 00:14:11.860 And he had several guidelines for co-authoring. 00:14:11.860 --> 00:14:16.540 And the first one was everybody works on every chapter. 00:14:16.540 --> 00:14:22.960 The second, I think, was you never sign a contract until the book is done. 00:14:23.540 --> 00:14:28.800 And the third thing, and there might have been a fourth one that I can't remember right now. 00:14:28.800 --> 00:14:34.300 But the third thing is if the book fails, you walk away from it. 00:14:34.300 --> 00:14:36.920 Nobody owns anything about it. 00:14:37.600 --> 00:14:41.380 And I've never been able to successfully do that. 00:14:41.380 --> 00:14:47.700 But I feel like that is a way to keep you out of trouble. 00:14:47.700 --> 00:14:52.900 Because the times that I've gotten into trouble is when, for example, you do a contract first. 00:14:52.900 --> 00:15:00.060 And then the other person might or might not feel like, well, you know, it's almost like working in a lab. 00:15:00.300 --> 00:15:07.920 When one of the lab partners punts and then you go, well, we're committed, so I have to take over. 00:15:07.920 --> 00:15:09.300 That's all I wanted to say. 00:15:09.300 --> 00:15:10.180 I'm kind of like you. 00:15:10.180 --> 00:15:14.140 I know some authors, they have really strict guidelines. 00:15:14.140 --> 00:15:22.940 I'm going to sit down and work from 8 a.m. to noon every day and just do that until I'm done. 00:15:23.680 --> 00:15:32.120 I'm one of these people who, if I get inspired, I can be like five times more efficient and effective in producing stuff than if I'm not. 00:15:32.120 --> 00:15:34.760 I just kind of stare at the screen and get distracted and whatnot. 00:15:34.760 --> 00:15:39.580 I don't know if I'm particularly productive or just particularly unproductive other times. 00:15:39.580 --> 00:15:42.820 But capturing that inspiration is really important to me. 00:15:42.820 --> 00:15:45.840 And I can see how it's a tough balance with a co-author. 00:15:45.840 --> 00:15:54.220 Well, the one thing I wanted to point out was that I often see the people who say, oh, you have to do, you know, you have to work from 8 until noon every day. 00:15:54.220 --> 00:15:57.020 They're the ones who talk about it. 00:15:57.020 --> 00:16:01.840 But the people who go, well, I have this organic process, they tend not to talk about it. 00:16:01.840 --> 00:16:06.900 So people who are wanting to write books think that the first way is the only way to do it. 00:16:06.900 --> 00:16:07.360 Right, right. 00:16:07.360 --> 00:16:08.420 Makes sense. 00:16:08.420 --> 00:16:12.180 Brian, did you consider trying to co-author yours? 00:16:12.180 --> 00:16:14.420 How long did your book take you to write? 00:16:14.420 --> 00:16:16.940 Like about twice as long as I thought it would take. 00:16:16.940 --> 00:16:21.880 But no, I worked on it for probably almost a year. 00:16:21.880 --> 00:16:31.160 But with my lifestyle and a busy work schedule, I guess like everybody else, I don't think I could have co-authored with somebody because I think they would have been frustrated. 00:16:31.160 --> 00:16:37.560 However, that being said, I did work with a development editor that was, she was reviewing it. 00:16:37.560 --> 00:16:41.560 We talked about the book content on a regular basis. 00:16:41.560 --> 00:16:48.100 And she isn't a co-author, but may as well have been very much appreciated input. 00:16:48.100 --> 00:16:51.940 And then also, you know, getting feedback from other people. 00:16:51.940 --> 00:16:59.040 I did get some ideas from some of the core pytest people of things to add that I had forgotten. 00:16:59.420 --> 00:17:06.160 So even though I didn't co-author at all or consider it, I did pull an input from lots of places. 00:17:06.160 --> 00:17:06.860 Yeah, that's great. 00:17:08.380 --> 00:17:11.300 This portion of Talk Python To Me is brought to you by Linode. 00:17:11.300 --> 00:17:15.220 Are you looking for bulletproof hosting that's fast, simple, and incredibly affordable? 00:17:15.220 --> 00:17:20.160 Look past that bookstore and check out Linode at talkpython.fm/Linode. 00:17:20.160 --> 00:17:22.080 That's L-I-N-O-D-E. 00:17:22.080 --> 00:17:26.560 Plans start at just $5 a month for a dedicated server with a gig of RAM. 00:17:26.840 --> 00:17:29.080 They have 10 data centers across the globe. 00:17:29.080 --> 00:17:31.600 So no matter where you are, there's a data center near you. 00:17:31.600 --> 00:17:36.820 Whether you want to run your Python web app, host a private Git server, or file server, 00:17:36.820 --> 00:17:43.920 you'll get native SSDs on all the machines, a newly upgraded 200 gigabit network, 24-7 friendly 00:17:43.920 --> 00:17:46.920 support, even on holidays, and a seven-day money-back guarantee. 00:17:46.920 --> 00:17:49.280 Do you need a little help with your infrastructure? 00:17:49.280 --> 00:17:55.000 They even offer professional services to help you get started with architecture, migrations, 00:17:55.000 --> 00:17:55.500 and more. 00:17:56.060 --> 00:17:58.600 Get a dedicated server for free for the next four months. 00:17:58.600 --> 00:18:01.440 Just visit talkpython.fm/Linode. 00:18:01.440 --> 00:18:03.320 Dan, how about you? 00:18:03.320 --> 00:18:05.220 So I didn't work with a co-author. 00:18:05.220 --> 00:18:11.920 I think just in terms of how I like to work, I just preferred doing this on my own also because 00:18:11.920 --> 00:18:14.440 I really wanted to know if I had it in me. 00:18:14.440 --> 00:18:17.880 Could I actually finish this project and then publish that? 00:18:17.880 --> 00:18:24.500 I think I might reconsider that for future book projects, but pretty much like everyone else 00:18:24.500 --> 00:18:27.000 mentioned there's some downsides around that. 00:18:27.000 --> 00:18:31.220 If you're in any kind of partnership, then as always, it can be really awesome, but it can 00:18:31.220 --> 00:18:35.560 also be like your downfall where maybe one person is less committed than the other one, 00:18:35.560 --> 00:18:39.540 and then it becomes tricky to actually ship the final product. 00:18:39.540 --> 00:18:45.480 So yeah, didn't do it for my book, but I was very happy that I got Marietta Waiya's input 00:18:45.480 --> 00:18:49.600 on the book and also she wrote the foreword for the book. 00:18:49.600 --> 00:18:51.360 So that was great support for me. 00:18:51.360 --> 00:18:52.080 Yeah, that's nice. 00:18:52.200 --> 00:18:53.740 Luciano, have you co-authored any books? 00:18:53.740 --> 00:18:54.480 No, I haven't. 00:18:54.480 --> 00:18:59.880 But I liked that Dan just mentioned the fact that he wanted to write the book on his own 00:18:59.880 --> 00:19:04.560 to see if he was capable of doing that because for me, that was totally the point as well. 00:19:04.560 --> 00:19:11.540 Actually, I started actually three other books in the last 20 years that I never finished, 00:19:11.540 --> 00:19:14.620 and Fluid Pattern was the only one that I managed to finish. 00:19:14.860 --> 00:19:18.760 I never had a co-author in the other projects either, so I didn't let anyone down. 00:19:18.760 --> 00:19:26.620 But in this case, I had a contract with O'Reilly, which is a publisher that I really admire, 00:19:26.620 --> 00:19:29.120 and I was self-employed at the time. 00:19:29.120 --> 00:19:35.300 So I decided to, you know, just that in this case, failure was not going to be an option. 00:19:35.300 --> 00:19:41.100 And I did it, I wrote about part-time for about nine months. 00:19:41.420 --> 00:19:46.540 And then my editor at O'Reilly, Megan Blanchett, who is just completely awesome, 00:19:46.540 --> 00:19:49.840 and she's now working for Pragmatic Programmers. 00:19:49.840 --> 00:19:53.400 I really recommend, if you want to work with a publisher, 00:19:53.400 --> 00:19:58.440 one of the greatest benefits is having a great editor, and she is one great editor. 00:19:58.440 --> 00:20:03.180 Anyway, Megan started talking to me that, you know, 00:20:03.180 --> 00:20:07.040 it was likely that I wasn't going to make the deadline and so on. 00:20:07.040 --> 00:20:09.980 The rhythm wasn't as fast as she expected. 00:20:10.300 --> 00:20:13.460 And then I just had a serious conversation with my wife and said, 00:20:13.460 --> 00:20:17.480 you know what, I need to write this book and I'm not going to do anything else. 00:20:17.480 --> 00:20:24.000 So I just quit my other part-time work and worked full-time on the book for the next nine months. 00:20:24.000 --> 00:20:26.460 So in about a year and a half, I finished it. 00:20:26.460 --> 00:20:28.260 And I'm really glad I did it. 00:20:28.260 --> 00:20:34.620 But I know, I feel very privileged that I was able to stop everything for nine months to work on the book. 00:20:34.620 --> 00:20:40.680 Yeah, I was going to say, that's a real commitment to taking that much time effectively off work. 00:20:40.680 --> 00:20:46.120 I mean, obviously you're working, but you don't get paid very much as you complete chapters, right? 00:20:46.120 --> 00:20:49.620 It's not until the book is done that you actually, you see the benefit. 00:20:49.860 --> 00:20:51.140 I ate into my savings. 00:20:51.140 --> 00:20:52.340 I can tether that. 00:20:52.340 --> 00:20:52.960 Yeah. 00:20:52.960 --> 00:20:53.460 Yeah. 00:20:53.460 --> 00:20:54.420 That's pretty intense. 00:20:54.420 --> 00:20:55.660 And this is a big bet, right? 00:20:55.660 --> 00:20:57.480 Every one of you has written the book. 00:20:57.480 --> 00:20:58.720 You know, you said nine months. 00:20:58.720 --> 00:21:00.380 Brian said a year. 00:21:00.540 --> 00:21:02.660 Like, that is a big project. 00:21:02.660 --> 00:21:06.360 And you don't really get that much feedback until you ship it. 00:21:06.360 --> 00:21:08.300 Catherine, you want to speak to that? 00:21:08.300 --> 00:21:10.840 Like, how did you think about that and handle it? 00:21:10.840 --> 00:21:19.780 For me, you know, both of the times that I was co-authoring a book, I was also consulting and usually working on projects. 00:21:20.100 --> 00:21:24.600 So books were kind of like a mornings, nights, weekends. 00:21:24.600 --> 00:21:29.940 I have a very compassionate partner who would refill my coffee. 00:21:29.940 --> 00:21:36.800 And yeah, it was definitely something that was more of like a passion time. 00:21:36.800 --> 00:21:46.620 I mean, it hasn't been said here yet, but like, don't expect, even if your book is popular, to make any decent amount of living wage off of a book. 00:21:46.980 --> 00:22:06.360 So this really needs to be not something that you see necessarily as a job that will make you money to feed yourself and so forth, but more as something that you do because you enjoy the other things that you might get from a book writing or you enjoy contributing back to the overall knowledge of the community and so forth. 00:22:06.360 --> 00:22:19.920 I pretty much time boxed my writing in a sense of saying, if this particular chapter took longer than one weekend, then just turn it in as it was and work with my editor. 00:22:19.920 --> 00:22:25.540 And for me, this worked well in terms of not having it take over my entire life. 00:22:26.360 --> 00:22:29.280 Yeah, I'm sure that helps manage the stress of it as well. 00:22:29.280 --> 00:22:34.940 Let's touch on this sort of benefits revenue thing for a little bit. 00:22:34.940 --> 00:22:46.040 And one of the first areas I wanted to ask you all about is self-publishing versus working with a traditional publisher, O'Reilly, Pragmatic, whoever. 00:22:47.500 --> 00:23:01.080 So just to kind of put this in perspective for the listeners who maybe haven't thought a whole lot about it, there's a book that I read quite a while ago from the guys who created Ruby actually, Ruby on Rails rather, called Getting Real from 37 Signals. 00:23:01.300 --> 00:23:08.180 And I think you can get it for free now, but at the time you could read it on the web or you could buy a digital version and they self-published it. 00:23:08.180 --> 00:23:14.620 And then they wrote some kind of retrospective blog post a year or two later and said, we did really well with this book. 00:23:14.620 --> 00:23:21.780 We made a half a million dollars off of this book that we wrote and put online and sold the PDF and Mubi and stuff for. 00:23:21.780 --> 00:23:27.040 But if we'd worked with a traditional publisher, we would have gotten like 10%, $50,000. 00:23:27.360 --> 00:23:31.020 And the difference between half a million and $50,000 seems to me really, really significant. 00:23:31.020 --> 00:23:48.100 But all the benefits of you, you are all talking about of, say, having an editor, having the support, this whole success story that they had was predicated upon them having a very large following on their blog and around their sort of company or anyway. 00:23:48.100 --> 00:23:53.580 So I know some of you have self-published and some of you have gone through the traditional route. 00:23:53.580 --> 00:23:56.640 Maybe, Brian, do you want to take that first? 00:23:57.180 --> 00:23:58.440 Did you think about self-publishing? 00:23:58.440 --> 00:23:59.760 What are your thoughts on that? 00:23:59.760 --> 00:24:11.620 I wanted to write a book in the first place because I had an e-book that I self-published that was essentially a collection of blog posts and tutorials that I just put together. 00:24:11.620 --> 00:24:12.640 Yeah, I remember that. 00:24:12.640 --> 00:24:14.740 It sold for like five bucks a piece. 00:24:14.740 --> 00:24:21.220 And since a lot of people were buying it, they could get the content for free anyway. 00:24:21.600 --> 00:24:26.000 That's what made me want to pursue working with a publisher. 00:24:26.000 --> 00:24:31.140 But I had heard all of these stories about people not making very much. 00:24:31.140 --> 00:24:43.140 And so I did hold, after talking with a few different publishers, settled with Pragmatic because I think they're extremely fair with their revenue split. 00:24:43.340 --> 00:24:48.400 So the, it still isn't something, I mean, it's only been out since September. 00:24:48.400 --> 00:24:54.580 It's not something I'm getting rich off of, but I don't worry about whether or not I can afford Starbucks anymore. 00:24:54.800 --> 00:24:58.220 I guess that's the perspective I have on that. 00:24:58.220 --> 00:25:00.740 But the, I would definitely go again. 00:25:00.740 --> 00:25:01.760 I'd probably do both. 00:25:01.760 --> 00:25:06.580 I'm looking forward to do both self-publishing and working with a publisher. 00:25:06.580 --> 00:25:16.860 The benefit of working with a development editor, I think, is enough to offset some of the differences in revenue that you get, by our perspective. 00:25:16.860 --> 00:25:22.600 Yeah, and it also depends on how big your audience is that you can connect with to get the book, right? 00:25:22.600 --> 00:25:27.260 Like if, Stephen King could probably really easily self-publish a book and be fine. 00:25:27.260 --> 00:25:32.900 But if you've never written a book and you don't run a bunch of podcasts or something like this, it can be a challenge, right? 00:25:32.900 --> 00:25:40.600 Yeah, and then also to put in perspective the 37 Signals book, I mean, they had a huge following when they were publishing that. 00:25:40.600 --> 00:25:43.620 Signals versus noise was very large. 00:25:43.620 --> 00:25:44.660 And so. 00:25:44.660 --> 00:25:45.440 Yep, yep. 00:25:45.440 --> 00:25:48.260 I've had a lot of experience with this. 00:25:48.260 --> 00:25:53.540 And, I mean, first of all, it's important to understand how the publishing industry works. 00:25:54.040 --> 00:26:03.000 And there's about 10% of the books published kind of break even or make some profit. 00:26:03.000 --> 00:26:07.680 And about 1% of the books published are actual successes. 00:26:08.080 --> 00:26:17.980 So when you get involved with that, if you have a book that's a success, it's got to pay for the 90% of failures. 00:26:17.980 --> 00:26:27.880 So, and the publishing industry looks at these numbers and they tend to say, well, to get our numbers up, we just have to publish more books. 00:26:27.880 --> 00:26:32.660 They don't consider, should we try and make better books? 00:26:32.660 --> 00:26:37.920 And there are, of course, special cases and things like that where that's not the case. 00:26:37.920 --> 00:26:40.720 But in general, that's kind of how their numbers work. 00:26:40.720 --> 00:26:46.920 And so the other thing that you have to look at is, you know, what kind of commitment are they going to have? 00:26:46.920 --> 00:26:51.920 For the longest time, I wouldn't take, I wouldn't worry about the advance. 00:26:52.180 --> 00:27:03.100 And then, you know, after talking to people, I realized, actually, you want to push for the largest advance you can get because you want to put the publisher in financial jeopardy. 00:27:03.100 --> 00:27:08.520 Because that's what's going to stimulate them to go out and promote your book. 00:27:08.520 --> 00:27:13.220 And some publishers will try and promote a book for a few months. 00:27:13.220 --> 00:27:18.900 And then if it doesn't, you know, go gold, then they sort of drop it and they stop. 00:27:19.340 --> 00:27:22.100 There's all these pitfalls that you can get into. 00:27:22.100 --> 00:27:31.760 And you don't have control of your book anymore once you sign that contract unless you rewrite the contract, which they'll tell you that we know we don't do. 00:27:31.760 --> 00:27:33.300 But you can. 00:27:33.300 --> 00:27:36.520 You can always line through the contract and everything. 00:27:37.460 --> 00:27:45.640 So if you self-publish, you are then responsible for, as people have been saying, promoting your own books. 00:27:45.640 --> 00:27:48.540 And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. 00:27:48.540 --> 00:27:57.700 But even when it doesn't work, you'll often get maybe more money than you would have just by taking in advance. 00:27:57.700 --> 00:27:58.080 Right. 00:27:58.120 --> 00:28:04.200 It's got to be basically like 10 times less good to do your self-publishing or something on that scale, right? 00:28:04.200 --> 00:28:05.800 Something on that scale. 00:28:05.800 --> 00:28:08.520 There's also the satisfaction of doing it yourself. 00:28:08.520 --> 00:28:16.560 And I'll point out one more thing, which is that now if you start talking to a publisher, even one that you've published with before, 00:28:16.720 --> 00:28:23.360 the first thing they'll do is send you this form that's asking you, how are you going to promote your book? 00:28:23.360 --> 00:28:24.360 Do you have a blog? 00:28:24.360 --> 00:28:25.640 Do you have a podcast? 00:28:25.640 --> 00:28:26.420 Do you have all these things? 00:28:26.420 --> 00:28:33.060 And when you look at that and you go, well, why am I working with you if I'm going to be promoting my book? 00:28:33.060 --> 00:28:35.320 You know, what are you bringing to the table? 00:28:35.620 --> 00:28:43.500 And these days, if they can't promote it, then you can pretty much do all the rest of the stuff yourself. 00:28:43.500 --> 00:28:52.260 And so unless they're wonderful promoters, you should really think seriously about what are you getting from the publisher. 00:28:52.260 --> 00:28:53.580 Yeah, that's really great advice. 00:28:53.580 --> 00:28:56.080 Luciano, yours was through O'Reilly. 00:28:56.080 --> 00:28:57.660 You said that's your only book. 00:28:57.660 --> 00:29:00.040 Did you consider self-publishing or would you in the future? 00:29:00.040 --> 00:29:01.340 Oh, yeah, I would. 00:29:01.420 --> 00:29:10.380 But really, for me, it's pretty clear that it was since I don't have a big following and I'm not really good at marketing, 00:29:10.380 --> 00:29:15.300 it was important for me to author a book with a well-regarded publisher. 00:29:15.300 --> 00:29:17.440 And I also learned a lot from them. 00:29:17.440 --> 00:29:21.720 So I don't regret at all the fact that I worked with O'Reilly. 00:29:21.720 --> 00:29:26.080 On the contrary, I think I was very lucky to be able to work with them. 00:29:26.080 --> 00:29:33.940 But in the future, yes, I totally consider self-publishing or a different publisher or whatever, but mostly self-publishing. 00:29:33.940 --> 00:29:35.600 Yeah, your book was really popular. 00:29:35.600 --> 00:29:38.480 So I definitely think it put you on the map after that. 00:29:38.480 --> 00:29:39.400 So that's really cool. 00:29:39.400 --> 00:29:42.420 Catherine, yours was through a traditional publisher, right? 00:29:42.420 --> 00:29:43.160 Yeah. 00:29:43.160 --> 00:29:46.680 So I have a book with O'Reilly and a book with Pact. 00:29:47.480 --> 00:29:51.640 And, yeah, have been approached from some other folks as well. 00:29:51.640 --> 00:29:59.300 But knowing how much time and energy goes into a book, I'm actually really curious to hear from some of the others that have self-published. 00:29:59.300 --> 00:30:05.320 How did you go about through the editing process and what platforms did you use? 00:30:05.320 --> 00:30:10.820 Did you determine pricing beforehand or was this something you figured out after? 00:30:10.820 --> 00:30:12.880 This is something I'm very curious about. 00:30:12.880 --> 00:30:13.680 Go ahead, Luciana. 00:30:13.880 --> 00:30:17.580 No, just to add, I really like the questions that she was asking. 00:30:17.580 --> 00:30:26.440 But just to add, like, for instance, tech reviewers, that was something that was awesome that already – well, I could have gone after people to do that. 00:30:26.440 --> 00:30:28.820 But anyway, tech reviewers. 00:30:28.820 --> 00:30:29.280 Yeah. 00:30:29.280 --> 00:30:34.320 Dan, I'm saving you for last in this round because I know that you did self-publish yours, right? 00:30:34.320 --> 00:30:38.140 Yeah, I went 100% with the self-published route. 00:30:38.140 --> 00:30:39.340 What was that experience like? 00:30:39.340 --> 00:30:41.540 Maybe speak to some of Catherine's questions. 00:30:41.660 --> 00:30:43.900 I mean, for me, I think it worked out really well. 00:30:43.900 --> 00:30:48.960 But I can totally see, you know, there's just different tradeoffs involved, right? 00:30:48.960 --> 00:30:52.740 So where I was starting from – well, one reason was completely personal. 00:30:52.740 --> 00:31:01.700 Where I – the reason I went, you know, into self-employment was because I wanted to have 100% control over the projects that I work on and sort of, you know, who I work with. 00:31:01.860 --> 00:31:04.620 I just wanted to have that control over my life. 00:31:04.620 --> 00:31:12.900 And so I wasn't going to hand it off, you know, to a publisher and just be like, okay, you know, now I have all these deadlines and all this stuff in my life that I really enjoyed not having. 00:31:12.900 --> 00:31:14.960 So that was one personal reason. 00:31:15.100 --> 00:31:29.260 And then the other one was, I think, Bruce, you mentioned that with how publishers today, especially for a first-time author, they're not really going to go out there and, like, put on a big, like, roadshow and promote your book and, you know, pay for ads and whatnot. 00:31:29.480 --> 00:31:31.520 It's pretty much like you're on your own anyway. 00:31:31.520 --> 00:31:37.420 You just get a chance to kind of maybe have some of the prestige of that publisher color off on your book. 00:31:37.420 --> 00:31:39.320 And so I looked at my situation. 00:31:39.320 --> 00:31:41.800 I was like, okay, well, I have this programming blog. 00:31:41.800 --> 00:31:42.860 I have this Twitter following. 00:31:42.860 --> 00:31:46.640 And I have a bit of an audience that I can work with here, right? 00:31:46.640 --> 00:31:49.220 And so I decided to go the self-publishing route. 00:31:49.220 --> 00:31:51.600 And I think it worked out pretty well. 00:31:51.600 --> 00:31:54.700 I mean, I'm still working on that first half million or whatever. 00:31:54.700 --> 00:31:58.960 But, you know, in the end, it was worthwhile doing it that way for sure. 00:31:59.240 --> 00:31:59.620 Yeah, that's cool. 00:31:59.620 --> 00:32:03.280 Maybe tell us what some of the tools you used and things like that. 00:32:03.280 --> 00:32:06.460 Oh, yeah, in terms of just making it happen from a technical perspective. 00:32:06.460 --> 00:32:07.000 Yeah, yeah. 00:32:07.000 --> 00:32:08.420 Like, how did you actually build it? 00:32:08.420 --> 00:32:18.520 I think I'll ask software developers, for anyone who's listening, I think you're in a uniquely great situation right now for self-publishing your book. 00:32:18.520 --> 00:32:21.420 Because, I mean, all of the tools are out there. 00:32:21.420 --> 00:32:22.600 A lot of them are open source. 00:32:22.600 --> 00:32:29.060 And you can just, you know, compile all of the e-book formats that you're going to need or a print-ready PDF that you can hand off to, 00:32:29.060 --> 00:32:31.180 an on-demand printer like CreateSpace. 00:32:31.180 --> 00:32:33.820 And you can all find all of that stuff online. 00:32:33.820 --> 00:32:35.220 It's not super easy to use. 00:32:35.220 --> 00:32:39.580 But, you know, if you can work with Python or C compiler, you can definitely make that work. 00:32:39.580 --> 00:32:41.260 And so that's what I did. 00:32:41.360 --> 00:32:47.120 So I pretty much had, like, a full, like, build pipeline for my Python tricks book. 00:32:47.120 --> 00:32:48.320 So I used a tool. 00:32:48.320 --> 00:32:57.600 Well, first of all, I wrote everything in Markdown, which, for those of you who don't know, it's like a plain text format that typically compiles to HTML. 00:32:57.600 --> 00:33:03.400 And it's just a little bit nicer, you know, for you to insert bold text and headlines and stuff like that. 00:33:03.400 --> 00:33:05.740 But there's a really great tool called Pandoc. 00:33:06.220 --> 00:33:09.980 And it's a document compiler or conversion tool. 00:33:09.980 --> 00:33:14.680 So you can feed all kinds of formats into it, including Markdown, which is what I did. 00:33:14.680 --> 00:33:18.380 And then on the other hand, you can output HTML. 00:33:18.380 --> 00:33:22.080 You can output LaTeX and then compile that to a PDF. 00:33:22.460 --> 00:33:30.180 So that was, like, a central tool that I used where I could feed in my source files and then have all the different output formats that I needed generated. 00:33:30.180 --> 00:33:35.500 And I could adjust sort of the typography and, you know, page sizes and all of that. 00:33:35.500 --> 00:33:41.620 And the great thing is because, well, you're just feeding in, like, a bunch of plain text files into this tool. 00:33:41.620 --> 00:33:48.740 And then what comes out in this sort of LaTeX intermediate stuff or code, it's all plain text, right? 00:33:48.740 --> 00:34:01.620 So you can really understand how this all works and you can use other tools like, for example, a C preprocessor to actually have little macros and stuff in your input text that I can now use. 00:34:01.620 --> 00:34:05.540 And I can generate, you know, five different versions of the book with one little build script. 00:34:05.540 --> 00:34:08.460 So I just hit return and it will generate the Kindle file. 00:34:08.460 --> 00:34:11.960 It will generate the print file for Amazon CreateSpace. 00:34:11.960 --> 00:34:15.220 It will generate the e-book file and all these different formats. 00:34:15.720 --> 00:34:20.860 And once you've got that set up, like, hopefully I'm going to be able to carry that over for my next book project. 00:34:20.860 --> 00:34:22.280 Wow, that sounds really, really cool. 00:34:22.280 --> 00:34:25.480 Could you also maybe tell people, like, how you sold it? 00:34:25.480 --> 00:34:26.880 I know some people use Gumroad. 00:34:26.880 --> 00:34:28.740 You can self-publish on Amazon. 00:34:28.740 --> 00:34:34.520 You could just put a PDF in a Stripe checkout JavaScript thing on your website. 00:34:34.520 --> 00:34:37.300 Like, how did you actually get it out to the world? 00:34:37.300 --> 00:34:40.360 Yeah, so for the first version, I actually used Gumroad. 00:34:40.360 --> 00:34:46.320 And I just set up a page on my site that had a Gumroad button. 00:34:46.320 --> 00:34:51.860 You can embed it and people can enter their credit card information and buy your book and download it right away. 00:34:51.860 --> 00:34:55.140 And that worked okay. 00:34:55.140 --> 00:34:58.060 And initially, I released it at, you know, a really low price. 00:34:58.200 --> 00:35:04.120 I think the first iteration of the book, it was, I don't know, it had maybe like 20 or 30 pages. 00:35:04.120 --> 00:35:10.440 And I think I started selling it at $3.99 or $4.99 or something. 00:35:10.440 --> 00:35:13.360 A relatively low price for a book like that. 00:35:13.360 --> 00:35:18.460 And then just over time, as it grew, I got more serious about the delivery mechanism. 00:35:18.460 --> 00:35:18.540 Awesome. 00:35:18.540 --> 00:35:20.560 And now it's actually on Amazon. 00:35:20.560 --> 00:35:23.000 And it's published on Amazon Kindle. 00:35:23.000 --> 00:35:28.820 And it's available as print copies through the Amazon CreateSpace on-demand printing thing. 00:35:28.820 --> 00:35:32.480 And then I'm also using a company called BookBaby. 00:35:32.480 --> 00:35:34.680 And they're like an e-book publisher. 00:35:34.680 --> 00:35:37.660 But they're not really like a publisher in a traditional sense. 00:35:37.660 --> 00:35:38.640 But you just send them a file. 00:35:38.900 --> 00:35:42.180 And they will make sure it gets on all the different e-book stores that are out there. 00:35:42.180 --> 00:35:46.200 Like the iBook store for iPhones and iPads. 00:35:46.200 --> 00:35:48.720 And also Amazon and Barnes & Noble. 00:35:48.720 --> 00:35:51.800 And they're kind of like a multiplexer for that. 00:35:51.800 --> 00:35:53.840 You know, you sent them one file and paid them $300. 00:35:53.840 --> 00:35:55.400 And they put it everywhere. 00:35:55.400 --> 00:35:57.540 So curious to see how that will play out. 00:35:57.540 --> 00:35:58.280 That's really interesting. 00:35:58.280 --> 00:36:03.260 And one other thing is, you know, Bruce really made a great point about you go to the publisher. 00:36:03.260 --> 00:36:05.380 And they're like, how are you going to promote your book? 00:36:05.380 --> 00:36:05.820 Right? 00:36:05.820 --> 00:36:07.900 Like, I'm sure people are thinking, wait a minute. 00:36:07.980 --> 00:36:09.320 That's why I'm here talking to you. 00:36:09.320 --> 00:36:11.220 Because you have the audience and the reach. 00:36:11.220 --> 00:36:15.420 But you managed to get your book, like, number one in Python on Amazon. 00:36:15.420 --> 00:36:17.660 Even though you had no publisher, right? 00:36:17.660 --> 00:36:18.740 Yeah, that was pretty crazy. 00:36:18.740 --> 00:36:22.020 And it made the whole thing, like, very real all of a sudden. 00:36:22.020 --> 00:36:23.400 So, yeah, that was great. 00:36:23.400 --> 00:36:24.220 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. 00:36:24.220 --> 00:36:26.420 The reason, you know, you can... 00:36:26.420 --> 00:36:30.280 Like, I was able to do that because I had worked on building that following. 00:36:30.280 --> 00:36:32.900 And building, like, I started a Python newsletter. 00:36:32.900 --> 00:36:37.960 And started just sharing articles and sharing tips and stuff on my blog. 00:36:37.960 --> 00:36:39.720 And on my Twitter. 00:36:39.720 --> 00:36:46.660 And that gained enough momentum that I was able to say, look, like, I'm going to be launching this book now. 00:36:46.660 --> 00:36:49.300 You can get it on Amazon and kind of have this... 00:36:49.300 --> 00:36:52.580 Yeah, just have this big launch and send... 00:36:52.580 --> 00:36:55.680 You know, make a couple of, like, thousand sales on the first day. 00:36:55.680 --> 00:36:56.700 And that really bumped it up. 00:36:56.700 --> 00:36:58.320 And then you can kind of ride out that wave. 00:36:59.020 --> 00:37:00.180 But obviously, that's... 00:37:00.180 --> 00:37:03.820 You know, you can only do that if you worked on building up that audience first. 00:37:03.820 --> 00:37:05.200 And I can totally understand that. 00:37:05.200 --> 00:37:06.680 You know, that takes a lot of time. 00:37:06.680 --> 00:37:10.020 Like, that actually probably took a lot more time than writing the book itself. 00:37:10.020 --> 00:37:12.560 And so, I think that's... 00:37:12.560 --> 00:37:15.880 You know, it's not like a magic bullet where you can just go like, oh, you tweeted a bunch of times. 00:37:15.880 --> 00:37:17.800 And then it'll do really well. 00:37:17.800 --> 00:37:18.700 It'll be fine. 00:37:18.700 --> 00:37:20.460 It's just a whole nother project that you'd be working on. 00:37:20.460 --> 00:37:20.680 Yeah. 00:37:20.680 --> 00:37:21.300 Tweet a lot. 00:37:21.380 --> 00:37:21.560 Yeah. 00:37:21.560 --> 00:37:29.760 So, another topic that I wanted to touch on with you all is there's probably a lot of people out there who would like to write a book. 00:37:29.760 --> 00:37:37.980 They'd like to put something that they're really passionate and expert about out there in some sort of written form. 00:37:37.980 --> 00:37:41.040 But maybe they've never considered themselves a good writer. 00:37:41.040 --> 00:37:45.500 Like, they got a B in literature and they didn't really enjoy essays and things like that. 00:37:45.500 --> 00:37:47.440 So, like, maybe we'll start with you, Brian. 00:37:47.520 --> 00:37:53.900 Like, what would you give people advice for, like, improving their technical writing or, you know, sort of getting started like that? 00:37:53.900 --> 00:37:54.560 Blog. 00:37:54.560 --> 00:37:55.540 Start blogging. 00:37:55.540 --> 00:37:56.840 Just write. 00:37:56.840 --> 00:37:59.740 I mean, the best way to get better at something is to practice. 00:37:59.740 --> 00:38:01.040 So, do it. 00:38:01.040 --> 00:38:02.880 I was... 00:38:02.880 --> 00:38:08.500 I've been blogging for maybe five years or more before I started writing. 00:38:08.500 --> 00:38:10.980 And I don't do it very consistently. 00:38:10.980 --> 00:38:15.400 And I definitely don't do it very much now because, like, you know, two podcasts and all. 00:38:15.400 --> 00:38:16.680 But the... 00:38:16.680 --> 00:38:17.460 You audio blog. 00:38:17.460 --> 00:38:18.280 Well, yeah. 00:38:18.280 --> 00:38:22.580 And I started podcasting because I thought it would be easier than writing blog posts. 00:38:22.580 --> 00:38:24.300 And, yeah, that's a mistake. 00:38:24.300 --> 00:38:31.620 That's my advice is just do it and get feedback and be humble about the feedback and listen to it. 00:38:31.620 --> 00:38:37.000 You know, I mentioned that in the entrance of the introduction to the book of Luciano. 00:38:37.000 --> 00:38:42.880 He was one of the reviewers of my book and was very honest about the direction it was going. 00:38:42.880 --> 00:38:45.140 And I took it to heart and it made it better. 00:38:45.140 --> 00:38:46.240 So, listen to feedback. 00:38:46.240 --> 00:38:46.540 Yeah. 00:38:46.540 --> 00:38:47.320 It sounds really good. 00:38:47.320 --> 00:38:47.840 Luciano? 00:38:47.840 --> 00:38:48.280 Yeah. 00:38:48.280 --> 00:38:49.360 Blogging, totally. 00:38:49.360 --> 00:38:51.100 I just recently... 00:38:51.100 --> 00:38:53.280 I never have been very disciplined with blogs. 00:38:53.280 --> 00:39:01.500 So, recently, I just launched a wiki based on DocuWiki, the PHP wiki engine, which is really nice because it's simple. 00:39:01.500 --> 00:39:04.100 And it's called Stand Up Dev. 00:39:04.380 --> 00:39:05.680 I'm writing slowly there. 00:39:05.680 --> 00:39:17.400 One of the advantages for me of having a wiki instead of a blog is that I like to be able to link across and also not having this time-based scheme of publishing. 00:39:17.500 --> 00:39:22.560 But I wanted to say one thing that I actually tweeted some time ago. 00:39:22.560 --> 00:39:31.160 David M. Geary is the author of some famous Java graphics books and, more recently, an HTML5 canvas book. 00:39:31.160 --> 00:39:37.540 And he wrote, I think, in one of his prefaces, a recipe for writing a programming book. 00:39:37.540 --> 00:39:41.140 It also applies to blog, but it's really good. 00:39:41.140 --> 00:39:46.360 The recipe is, code is an interesting example illustrating an idea. 00:39:46.940 --> 00:39:48.480 And I think this is the key, right? 00:39:48.480 --> 00:39:51.960 I call this the example-driven approach of writing. 00:39:51.960 --> 00:39:55.520 So, you think of an interesting example that demonstrates an idea. 00:39:55.520 --> 00:39:57.120 Then you explain it. 00:39:57.120 --> 00:40:00.200 So, the text flows from the example. 00:40:00.200 --> 00:40:02.840 The text is there to explain the example. 00:40:02.840 --> 00:40:06.720 And the example is there, of course, to convey some ideas, some concepts. 00:40:06.720 --> 00:40:08.560 And then you just repeat. 00:40:08.560 --> 00:40:11.320 And I took this idea to heart. 00:40:11.320 --> 00:40:16.600 And I think one of the things that I'm proud of in Flint Python is I think it has interesting examples. 00:40:17.060 --> 00:40:18.060 Short but interesting. 00:40:18.060 --> 00:40:22.040 I don't like books that have a lot of full-bar examples, for instance. 00:40:22.040 --> 00:40:26.540 Flint Python has a few full-bar examples, but most of them are not full-bar examples. 00:40:26.540 --> 00:40:29.860 And it's hard, actually, to come up with good examples. 00:40:29.860 --> 00:40:33.300 But I think it's totally worth it to make the book interesting. 00:40:33.300 --> 00:40:34.720 And, of course, you can do that. 00:40:34.720 --> 00:40:35.400 Yeah, I agree. 00:40:35.400 --> 00:40:37.400 I don't like those fake examples either. 00:40:37.400 --> 00:40:39.080 I always feel like they're kind of a cop-out. 00:40:39.140 --> 00:40:43.340 I think it's good to be able to build from something into the book. 00:40:43.340 --> 00:40:50.800 So, in my case, I built on lots of presentations because I've been using Python and I've been evangelizing Python since 1998. 00:40:51.300 --> 00:40:57.800 So, I had a lot of presentations and a lot of course material over the years that were just slides and examples. 00:40:57.800 --> 00:41:00.320 So, a lot of that went into the book. 00:41:00.320 --> 00:41:14.740 So, I really think the idea of having some prior motivation to develop examples and write, like a blog or courses or podcasts or whatever, is a very good way of building up material to then launch into a book. 00:41:14.860 --> 00:41:15.440 Great advice. 00:41:15.440 --> 00:41:22.220 And you brought up the example of sort of almost a pattern for writing, a recipe for writing blogs and books. 00:41:22.220 --> 00:41:25.900 I interviewed a Jesse Giroudavis from MongoDB. 00:41:25.900 --> 00:41:28.200 He wrote a really great article. 00:41:28.200 --> 00:41:30.820 I think actually he gave a talk on it and then also wrote an article. 00:41:30.820 --> 00:41:36.120 He basically classified five different design patterns for blogging. 00:41:36.120 --> 00:41:44.600 And if you know what pattern you're aiming for, it's really much easier to write because you're like, oh, well, that means it goes like this, this, this, and there's some of that, and then it finishes like that. 00:41:44.600 --> 00:41:45.320 That's nice. 00:41:45.320 --> 00:41:46.420 Yeah, it was really, really nice. 00:41:46.420 --> 00:41:49.260 Actually, that was episode 69 of Talk Python. 00:41:49.260 --> 00:41:54.720 Catherine, what advice for people who maybe don't write a lot but want to? 00:41:54.720 --> 00:42:04.020 Yeah, I mean, this is a little bit hard for me because, yeah, I had a degree in journalism right before I started doing Python. 00:42:04.020 --> 00:42:07.660 So, trouble with writing is not a problem? 00:42:07.660 --> 00:42:09.560 Writing kind of was a job. 00:42:09.560 --> 00:42:10.940 Yeah, exactly. 00:42:10.940 --> 00:42:26.020 Well, when you, so when you go to journalism school or for those of you that might have had writing degrees, you kind of learn to separate writing from the type of writing that most people think and experiment with. 00:42:26.020 --> 00:42:30.620 So, like this whole concept of, like, you have to be in the mood to write and this, that. 00:42:30.620 --> 00:42:35.360 Like, if it's your job, you just can't just be like, oh, editor, I don't really feel like writing today. 00:42:35.360 --> 00:42:36.920 I think I'll go home. 00:42:37.180 --> 00:42:39.740 So, you kind of have to produce. 00:42:39.740 --> 00:42:45.380 So, I compare it to some days, like, you don't want to write code, but you need to write a few lines at least. 00:42:45.380 --> 00:42:51.680 And once you write a few lines, maybe writing a few lines more will feel easier and the day moves forward. 00:42:52.400 --> 00:42:58.800 And I think that in J school, for me, at least, there was quite a lot of very intense deadline writing. 00:42:58.800 --> 00:43:03.260 And you would have to write whether you wanted to or not if you were going to pass that course. 00:43:03.260 --> 00:43:08.380 So, I think this put me in the mind space of, like, okay, I'm going to sit down. 00:43:08.380 --> 00:43:16.880 I'm going to, you know, maybe brainstorm, make a small outline, do whatever tiny little steps, putting one or two words together until I have sentences. 00:43:16.880 --> 00:43:19.480 And then sentences turn into paragraphs and so forth. 00:43:19.480 --> 00:43:20.300 That's really interesting. 00:43:20.300 --> 00:43:25.800 Did you come into programming through this sort of, like, data-driven journalism side of things? 00:43:25.800 --> 00:43:29.800 Well, I was actually supposed to be in computer science from far earlier. 00:43:29.800 --> 00:43:38.440 So, I was, you know, writing C++ when I was in high school and I was packing and running my own website when I was young. 00:43:38.440 --> 00:43:50.580 But I dropped out of computer science because I felt really uncomfortable when I went to university because I was one of the, one of very, very small, small number of women in my program. 00:43:50.580 --> 00:43:57.320 And so, then I went into statistics and after that into journalism and then found my way back to computers. 00:43:57.320 --> 00:43:58.780 Yeah, how interesting. 00:43:58.780 --> 00:44:08.380 And I do find it really surprising that journalism and Python and programming actually intersect non-trivially these days compared to how it used to be, at least. 00:44:08.380 --> 00:44:15.920 There's more and more resources on just how do we combine this data journalism and storytelling all together. 00:44:16.080 --> 00:44:30.580 And I feel like data science is a very interesting intersection there because even as a data scientist, you also have to think about how you tell the story in the sense of how you report it to somebody that might be able to make some sort of actionable choices based on the data that you find. 00:44:30.920 --> 00:44:34.140 I also started in journalism in college. 00:44:34.140 --> 00:44:40.940 My first year, I was a journalism major and one of the best courses I had was taught by an editor from the LA Times. 00:44:40.940 --> 00:44:43.980 And he had us compose at the typewriter. 00:44:43.980 --> 00:44:46.160 That was his, that was the whole thing. 00:44:46.220 --> 00:44:51.560 And we started with, you know, a set of facts and I don't know, an hour and a half. 00:44:51.560 --> 00:44:58.820 And then he kept changing the time and reducing it, reducing it until it was like, I don't know, 15 or 20 minutes to write the story. 00:44:58.820 --> 00:45:01.460 And it was, it was super useful. 00:45:01.460 --> 00:45:03.420 Oh, that sounds really interesting. 00:45:03.420 --> 00:45:07.020 Bruce, go ahead and give us your thoughts on also getting into writing. 00:45:07.020 --> 00:45:12.620 Although being a journalism major, maybe you also have not so much of that experience. 00:45:12.620 --> 00:45:14.320 Well, I did it in high school. 00:45:14.320 --> 00:45:21.120 I was involved in journalism and studied in the first year and kind of realized it was just going to be more of the same thing. 00:45:21.120 --> 00:45:30.180 And so I changed to physics and got into physics and engineering and eventually computer engineering for my master's degree. 00:45:30.180 --> 00:45:37.480 But I kept being like, I kept showing up at the college newspaper and getting involved with there. 00:45:37.480 --> 00:45:41.220 So I guess I always had this impulse to do it. 00:45:41.220 --> 00:45:50.220 But I would say for people, in fact, at the last PyCon, I held a little open spaces for people who are interested in writing. 00:45:50.220 --> 00:45:57.860 And I'd say the, like a couple of the most important things that came out of that, I think I blogged about it. 00:45:57.860 --> 00:46:14.240 So the details are in the, in my blog, but probably the most important things that I think people like don't get taught are something called active voice, which a lot of people don't know what that means. 00:46:14.240 --> 00:46:19.260 It means more or less you're talking in the immediate tense. 00:46:19.260 --> 00:46:26.140 And it makes your sentences shorter and more direct and more connected to the reader. 00:46:26.140 --> 00:46:38.460 And the other thing, which was huge, someone told me this years ago, is once you think you're done with whatever it is, you know, your blog post or your chapter or whatever, is go back and read it aloud. 00:46:39.180 --> 00:46:47.520 And by reading it aloud, and that's every single word, and it takes a long time, but things will jump out at you. 00:46:47.520 --> 00:46:53.620 And it makes you realize that when you're reading quietly, you skip over stuff and you don't notice things. 00:46:54.140 --> 00:47:03.980 And by reading it aloud, it forces you to pay attention to every single word and the amount of rewriting that you will do when you do that process is kind of amazing. 00:47:04.620 --> 00:47:17.460 So most of my work now, I end up editing myself or like when I'm co-authoring the Kotlin book with a woman who's originally Russian and she speaks. 00:47:17.460 --> 00:47:20.480 Her English is good, but she has a hard time writing. 00:47:20.740 --> 00:47:26.180 And so originally, I was just going to kind of be the editor and publisher of this book. 00:47:26.180 --> 00:47:33.200 But now I'm kind of actively writing and rewriting and doing a lot of pretty heavy editing because of that. 00:47:33.200 --> 00:47:35.880 But, you know, that's just the way projects are. 00:47:35.880 --> 00:47:36.640 They change. 00:47:36.640 --> 00:47:38.120 They evolve. 00:47:38.120 --> 00:47:39.520 Yeah, that's really great advice. 00:47:39.520 --> 00:47:42.540 I like the active voice. 00:47:42.540 --> 00:47:44.540 Definitely a fan of that style of writing. 00:47:44.540 --> 00:47:47.180 That is the hardest thing to learn. 00:47:47.520 --> 00:47:53.180 And even when you know what it is, you will fall back to writing in passive voice and then you'll recover. 00:47:53.180 --> 00:48:03.460 The hardest thing in the world, I think, is just to understand what it is and to constantly be looking for places where you can change passive to active. 00:48:03.460 --> 00:48:04.060 Yeah, nice. 00:48:04.060 --> 00:48:12.760 Before we move on, I'm just going to give a quick shout out to something I saw on GitHub this week that's related to what Catherine brought up and used well, Bruce, a little bit. 00:48:12.760 --> 00:48:14.820 You're probably familiar with 538. 00:48:14.820 --> 00:48:17.420 They write a bunch of sort of data-driven articles in journalism. 00:48:17.420 --> 00:48:24.480 They have a place where they have every bit of data for every article that they write all in one GitHub repository. 00:48:24.480 --> 00:48:31.880 So if people are looking to do like data-driven writing, there's just this amazing place at github.com/538. 00:48:31.880 --> 00:48:33.580 Words, not numbers. 00:48:33.580 --> 00:48:34.500 Slash data. 00:48:34.500 --> 00:48:35.540 Very, very cool out there. 00:48:35.540 --> 00:48:37.560 So, Dan, how about you? 00:48:37.560 --> 00:48:38.480 What are your thoughts on this? 00:48:38.480 --> 00:48:41.220 Like, I'm not much of a writer, but I want to write a book. 00:48:41.220 --> 00:48:42.080 How do I do that? 00:48:42.320 --> 00:48:43.240 Man, that's a tough question. 00:48:43.240 --> 00:48:45.660 You know, I can only speak from personal experience. 00:48:45.660 --> 00:48:56.560 And what it came down to for me was at some point in my life, I actually considered going to, you know, getting a journalism degree, which is funny because that came up a couple of times, you know, from everyone else here in the show. 00:48:56.800 --> 00:48:58.600 So maybe there's some weird connection there. 00:48:58.600 --> 00:49:02.760 I'm sort of glad that I didn't go down that road and went with computer science. 00:49:02.760 --> 00:49:10.380 But I just, you know, I really enjoyed working on things like research papers and then, you know, the thesis that I wrote. 00:49:10.380 --> 00:49:20.700 And just I actually got a kick out of the writing and just that habit of, you know, getting up in the morning, sitting down and putting something in writing and having the ability to go back and like refine it. 00:49:20.700 --> 00:49:22.600 And it wouldn't just disappear. 00:49:22.600 --> 00:49:22.940 Right. 00:49:22.940 --> 00:49:31.800 Like, it's not like I'm explaining some idea or something and I'm just talking to someone, but I can put it down and then tweak it and see how it resonates with people and go back. 00:49:31.800 --> 00:49:33.540 And I always found that fascinating. 00:49:33.540 --> 00:49:33.860 Right. 00:49:33.900 --> 00:49:41.000 So I feel like there was some core, like some passion just on the written word, I guess. 00:49:41.000 --> 00:49:42.820 And I'm not a native English speaker. 00:49:42.820 --> 00:49:46.220 So, you know, I was always looking for ways to improve. 00:49:46.220 --> 00:49:48.480 And eventually I just realized, OK, you just got to do it. 00:49:48.480 --> 00:49:48.640 Right. 00:49:48.640 --> 00:49:51.680 You got to sit down and try and write as much as you can. 00:49:51.680 --> 00:49:59.840 So I set a goal for myself writing at least in the beginning, it was 500 words and a thousand and then like 1500 to 2000. 00:49:59.840 --> 00:50:01.800 And it was really hard. 00:50:01.800 --> 00:50:04.760 You know, in the beginning, it was like really, really draining me. 00:50:04.760 --> 00:50:06.800 And it was very exhausting. 00:50:06.800 --> 00:50:11.280 And I just couldn't I felt I could never get even close to writing 2000 words a day. 00:50:11.280 --> 00:50:13.040 That that made a little bit of sense. 00:50:13.040 --> 00:50:15.460 And, you know, actually being able to physically do it. 00:50:15.460 --> 00:50:18.000 But the funny thing is, if you if you keep at it. 00:50:18.000 --> 00:50:24.660 And so, you know, I made a habit out of getting up in the morning, brushing my teeth, getting a cup of coffee and sitting down for an hour and just writing. 00:50:24.660 --> 00:50:29.000 And I mean, I wrote a lot of crap in those days. 00:50:29.000 --> 00:50:40.160 But what I also realized that over the course of a week, just sort of magically by the end of that week, I would have a new draft chapter for it was a different project at the time. 00:50:40.160 --> 00:50:41.180 But, you know, for that project. 00:50:41.180 --> 00:50:50.000 And I think there's something powerful about that where you just you know, you've got to believe in that process and just also be OK with that daily grind and just sit down and do it. 00:50:50.000 --> 00:50:54.200 And whether that's just, you know, free writing, like journaling in the morning or something like that. 00:50:54.200 --> 00:50:58.080 Like if you can build that habit, eventually you will get better at it. 00:50:58.080 --> 00:51:00.780 And eventually great things will happen from that. 00:51:00.880 --> 00:51:01.440 That's great advice. 00:51:01.440 --> 00:51:02.400 Really, really like it. 00:51:02.400 --> 00:51:03.460 All right, everyone. 00:51:03.460 --> 00:51:05.840 We're pretty much out of time for our episode. 00:51:05.840 --> 00:51:09.380 So I think we're going to wrap it up and I'm going to change the questions just a little bit. 00:51:09.380 --> 00:51:15.260 The two questions I ask everyone and keep it short just because there's a lot of us and we are kind of getting low on time. 00:51:15.260 --> 00:51:21.840 So instead of asking you what your favorite Python editor is, I'm going to ask you what editor used to write your book. 00:51:21.840 --> 00:51:23.140 Catherine, let's start with you. 00:51:23.140 --> 00:51:24.320 Them. 00:51:24.320 --> 00:51:25.040 Them. 00:51:25.040 --> 00:51:25.340 Right on. 00:51:25.400 --> 00:51:27.220 And do you write in like Markdown or what? 00:51:27.220 --> 00:51:34.880 Yeah, there's a few different flavors that some of the publishers like to use where some things are mixed around. 00:51:34.880 --> 00:51:39.200 So then when you go back to a real Markdown, you're like, oh, wait, why isn't this working? 00:51:39.200 --> 00:51:42.220 But yeah, I wrote both the books in them. 00:51:42.220 --> 00:51:42.900 Oh, awesome. 00:51:42.900 --> 00:51:43.280 Brian. 00:51:43.280 --> 00:51:45.920 I wrote it all in Sublime and it was in Markdown. 00:51:45.920 --> 00:51:50.840 And some of the pragmatic stuff was almost like Markdown. 00:51:50.840 --> 00:51:55.840 So I had a converter to convert Markdown to the format that they needed. 00:51:55.840 --> 00:51:57.600 Beautiful. 00:51:57.600 --> 00:51:58.740 Luciano. 00:51:58.740 --> 00:52:07.140 I also use Sublime and I used ASCII doc on a recommendation by O'Reilly because they have this tool chain that uses ASCII doc. 00:52:07.140 --> 00:52:12.300 And I used to be a big proponent of restructured texts in the past. 00:52:12.300 --> 00:52:14.580 But ASCII doc is much better. 00:52:14.700 --> 00:52:18.960 And I also find it better than Markdown because it's more expressive for book writing. 00:52:18.960 --> 00:52:26.860 For instance, I'm the kind of author that likes to write footnotes and lots of cross references and things like that. 00:52:26.860 --> 00:52:29.060 So ASCII doc is more appropriate. 00:52:29.060 --> 00:52:35.100 But now I'm curiously I'm starting this draft project that I don't want to talk about. 00:52:35.100 --> 00:52:40.380 But I'm using Latex because it's based on another book that's written in Latex. 00:52:40.380 --> 00:52:42.180 And I'm not really enjoying it. 00:52:42.820 --> 00:52:45.740 ASCII doc is my favorite option. 00:52:45.740 --> 00:52:46.260 That's cool. 00:52:46.260 --> 00:52:49.340 Back when I was working on my math PhD, I wrote a lot of Latex as well. 00:52:49.340 --> 00:52:50.340 Bruce, how about you? 00:52:50.340 --> 00:52:58.280 I've done all the camera-ready pages since Thinking and C++ for my books, even the ones that were published through publishers. 00:52:59.260 --> 00:53:06.500 And because it would do all the indexing and table of contents, I didn't use page layout. 00:53:06.500 --> 00:53:07.700 I used Word. 00:53:07.700 --> 00:53:12.860 But I have switched over to using Pandoc-flavored Markdown. 00:53:12.860 --> 00:53:19.240 And I have a whole bunch of tools sets that I produce things from with that. 00:53:20.040 --> 00:53:21.560 And I use Sublime Text. 00:53:21.560 --> 00:53:36.860 But for the camera-ready pages, I'll probably go back to Word just because, I mean, I'll convert from the Markdown source to Word and then use it for layout because it still has kind of everything in it. 00:53:36.960 --> 00:53:39.720 And a regular page layout program doesn't do that. 00:53:39.720 --> 00:53:40.140 All right. 00:53:40.140 --> 00:53:40.380 Cool. 00:53:40.380 --> 00:53:40.800 Dan? 00:53:40.920 --> 00:53:48.540 I'm using two editors because I found that switching between two different environments, it really helps me just look at the text differently. 00:53:48.540 --> 00:53:50.640 And I often use different devices too. 00:53:50.640 --> 00:53:56.780 So I'll write something on my computer and then, you know, read it again by emailing it to myself on my phone, for example. 00:53:56.780 --> 00:53:59.940 And I just found that other things will jump out at me. 00:53:59.940 --> 00:54:04.140 But for the actual writing, I use a tool called Ulysses. 00:54:04.140 --> 00:54:06.760 I think it's macOS only. 00:54:06.760 --> 00:54:08.020 But it's really great. 00:54:08.020 --> 00:54:10.080 It's like a fancy Markdown editor. 00:54:10.860 --> 00:54:13.780 And I use that to do all of my writing for the newsletter and for the web. 00:54:13.780 --> 00:54:19.400 And then I do all of my editing in Sublime Text and then, yeah, publish from there. 00:54:19.400 --> 00:54:20.360 So I use these two. 00:54:20.360 --> 00:54:20.940 Very cool. 00:54:20.940 --> 00:54:21.360 Very cool. 00:54:21.360 --> 00:54:24.720 For my Markdown, I use IA Writer, which is a Mac thing as well. 00:54:24.720 --> 00:54:25.520 But I don't write any books. 00:54:25.520 --> 00:54:26.700 So, all right. 00:54:26.700 --> 00:54:28.420 So let's go ahead and wrap this up, you guys. 00:54:28.420 --> 00:54:31.240 And I will give you each a chance for a final call to action. 00:54:31.240 --> 00:54:33.000 Say, Dan, how about you? 00:54:33.000 --> 00:54:33.620 Final call to action. 00:54:33.620 --> 00:54:34.400 People are interested. 00:54:34.400 --> 00:54:35.180 What do they do? 00:54:35.180 --> 00:54:35.940 Buy my book. 00:54:35.940 --> 00:54:38.140 No, I feel like that's too easy. 00:54:40.800 --> 00:54:42.260 But seriously, please do. 00:54:42.260 --> 00:54:44.820 They should buy and study your book. 00:54:44.820 --> 00:54:46.800 And then they want to write their own. 00:54:46.800 --> 00:54:49.040 Yeah. 00:54:49.040 --> 00:54:50.280 No, like I feel like the. 00:54:50.280 --> 00:54:50.940 Okay. 00:54:50.940 --> 00:54:54.260 So what would I would love the most besides people buying my book? 00:54:54.260 --> 00:54:55.660 No, I got to stop this. 00:54:55.660 --> 00:55:00.460 I think it would be great if more people went out there and just shared their experience. 00:55:00.460 --> 00:55:06.720 And, you know, please, for everyone listening, like don't feel bad about putting something out there that's not perfect. 00:55:06.720 --> 00:55:11.880 I mean, of course, you're going to get crappy comments and sometimes a little bit snarky feedback. 00:55:12.660 --> 00:55:13.780 But who cares? 00:55:13.780 --> 00:55:18.100 You know, it's that this is the first step and it can only get better from there. 00:55:18.100 --> 00:55:24.780 And you'll be glad when you look back at that, you know, a couple of months or years later and also what this can do for your software development career. 00:55:24.780 --> 00:55:30.240 So I encourage everyone just to go out there, you know, just put like a two or three hundred word program example. 00:55:30.240 --> 00:55:32.080 Put it on your blog or somewhere. 00:55:32.080 --> 00:55:34.240 It will be a great experience. 00:55:34.240 --> 00:55:34.580 Yeah. 00:55:34.580 --> 00:55:34.920 Nice. 00:55:34.920 --> 00:55:35.460 Bruce. 00:55:35.660 --> 00:55:38.020 And a lot of this is my experience with co-authors. 00:55:38.020 --> 00:55:50.200 I would say if you're thinking of writing a book or co-authoring a book, really do some deep, you know, soul searching and try and figure out why you want to do it. 00:55:50.200 --> 00:55:57.480 Because often in the process of writing the book or co-authoring the book, you'll find out what it really is. 00:55:57.480 --> 00:56:14.960 And if it isn't actually in alignment with finishing the book or if you're hoping to be famous or, you know, make a lot of money or and it doesn't mean that like you might want to write a book that promotes your consulting business around a certain topic. 00:56:14.960 --> 00:56:16.180 And that makes sense. 00:56:16.180 --> 00:56:31.740 But know that that's what you're doing before you dive into this project, because if you don't really understand it, what what it is that you want, you might be thinking, oh, well, if I write this book, then I will get what I want. 00:56:31.740 --> 00:56:37.840 And the book probably won't let you do that. 00:56:37.840 --> 00:56:42.040 You may not finish if if it's if it's not really in line with what you want. 00:56:42.040 --> 00:56:42.300 Yeah. 00:56:42.300 --> 00:56:42.720 Good advice. 00:56:42.720 --> 00:56:43.200 Luciano. 00:56:43.200 --> 00:56:55.580 Well, I agree that force yourself or make yourself write or produce content, maybe not in writing, but like maybe slides for talks at a local meetup and teach stuff to people. 00:56:55.580 --> 00:56:57.880 There's always people willing to learn. 00:56:58.180 --> 00:57:15.540 So if you can connect, for instance, to a local hackerspace or makerspace or a similar place, a community place where you can go and teach courses for free, that's going to improve a lot your communication skills and also give you motivation to develop material. 00:57:16.000 --> 00:57:27.320 And the other thing I want to say is if you're going to publish something on the internet, please don't do it on Medium or Facebook or, you know, any of those big platforms that are eating the web. 00:57:27.320 --> 00:57:28.960 Have your own site. 00:57:28.960 --> 00:57:35.780 If it's too expensive for you to have your own domain, share it with a few friends, you know, and just put a simple tool. 00:57:35.920 --> 00:57:38.980 I love DocuWiki, for instance, it's super simple to install. 00:57:38.980 --> 00:57:43.240 And I'm really happy with my two websites that I created with that. 00:57:43.240 --> 00:57:48.620 So do it, but do it on your own site and not, you know, feeding one of those monsters. 00:57:48.620 --> 00:57:50.240 That's really interesting advice. 00:57:50.240 --> 00:57:52.120 And I generally agree with you for sure. 00:57:52.120 --> 00:57:53.360 Catherine? 00:57:53.780 --> 00:57:56.120 I think there's been a lot of great advice shared. 00:57:56.120 --> 00:58:09.180 I think particularly like if you're a junior person or you're starting to learn, let's say you're self-taught, or if you have some imposter syndrome, you come from an underrepresented group in tech. 00:58:09.180 --> 00:58:17.140 I think writing can really help reaffirm that you do actually have quite a large grasp on quite a lot of topics. 00:58:17.920 --> 00:58:24.040 And I recently read an article, I'll share it so you can put it in the links, about how I hacked my imposter syndrome. 00:58:24.040 --> 00:58:24.820 That's awesome. 00:58:24.820 --> 00:58:34.560 And the person went through and essentially every day they would write, you know, some sort of problem they were having debugging with, I believe they work in data science or machine learning. 00:58:34.560 --> 00:58:38.920 And they would end up writing through their mental process and then what they learned. 00:58:38.920 --> 00:58:41.980 And I think these types of things would be great blog posts. 00:58:41.980 --> 00:58:45.660 They show that you're learning and growing as a data scientist. 00:58:46.300 --> 00:58:53.960 And this is something that, you know, you can look back on your body of work after a long period of time, whether you want to post it publicly or have it privately. 00:58:53.960 --> 00:58:57.860 And really just show, wow, I have learned so much. 00:58:57.860 --> 00:59:01.220 And my grasp is so large now after so much time. 00:59:01.220 --> 00:59:06.080 I think this is a really good practice even just to do outside of the publishing realm. 00:59:06.080 --> 00:59:06.800 Yeah, very nice. 00:59:06.800 --> 00:59:07.520 Brian? 00:59:07.520 --> 00:59:10.740 There's a lot of different styles of writing, and I think that's great. 00:59:11.140 --> 00:59:16.780 And people think that just practice is going to make you better, but you also have to learn. 00:59:17.020 --> 00:59:32.220 So like other art forms like drawing, take a blog post or an author that you like their writing style and try to teach something that you know in the style of somebody you admire and just try out different styles and see what fits for you. 00:59:32.220 --> 00:59:33.840 I think that's a good way to start. 00:59:33.840 --> 00:59:35.000 Yeah, that's great advice. 00:59:35.440 --> 00:59:40.020 So I'll leave everyone with one book recommendation that kind of ties some of this stuff together. 00:59:40.020 --> 00:59:45.000 There's this really interesting book called Hustle, the Life-Changing Effects of Constant Motion. 00:59:45.640 --> 00:59:54.140 And it's this book by Jesse Tevilove, who wrote this book about just like always seizing the moment and always just be working on something. 00:59:54.140 --> 00:59:57.460 And the reason this is relevant is he is writing a book. 00:59:57.460 --> 00:59:59.060 Writing a book was taking him years. 00:59:59.060 --> 01:00:00.300 Like, I need some money to survive. 01:00:00.300 --> 01:00:02.600 I'm going to try to write a book the opposite of a year. 01:00:02.600 --> 01:00:12.840 And so he wrote a 192-page book that is pretty well done in, I think, three days and published it from the time he opened the editor till the time it was on Amazon was seven days. 01:00:12.840 --> 01:00:19.580 And it's really inspiring, even if you don't care about authoring a book, just like, oh, my gosh, what can you do if you really like powered through a project? 01:00:19.580 --> 01:00:20.300 It's pretty cool. 01:00:20.300 --> 01:00:21.740 So people check that out. 01:00:21.740 --> 01:00:24.960 If you're inspired, you want to create something around text, I guess. 01:00:24.960 --> 01:00:26.780 All right, everyone. 01:00:26.780 --> 01:00:29.700 Thank you so much for being on the podcast and sharing your experience. 01:00:29.700 --> 01:00:31.360 This was really interesting to have you all. 01:00:31.360 --> 01:00:32.700 And I'll talk to you all later. 01:00:32.700 --> 01:00:33.360 All right. 01:00:33.360 --> 01:00:33.640 Bye. 01:00:33.640 --> 01:00:34.300 Thanks, Mike. 01:00:34.300 --> 01:00:34.980 Bye-bye. 01:00:34.980 --> 01:00:35.760 Thanks. 01:00:35.760 --> 01:00:39.420 This has been another episode of Talk Python To Me. 01:00:39.420 --> 01:00:46.000 Our panelists have been Catherine Jarmul, Bruce Eccle, Luciano Romalo, Dan Bader, and Brian Okken. 01:00:46.000 --> 01:00:48.560 And this episode has been brought to you by Linode. 01:00:48.560 --> 01:00:52.220 Linode is bulletproof hosting for whatever you're building with Python. 01:00:52.220 --> 01:00:56.600 Get four months free at talkpython.fm/linode. 01:00:56.600 --> 01:00:58.360 That's L-I-N-O-D-E. 01:00:59.020 --> 01:01:01.020 Are you or a colleague trying to learn Python? 01:01:01.020 --> 01:01:05.700 Have you tried books and videos that just left you bored by covering topics point by point? 01:01:05.700 --> 01:01:11.700 Well, check out my online course, Python Jumpstart, by building 10 apps at talkpython.fm/course 01:01:11.700 --> 01:01:14.320 to experience a more engaging way to learn Python. 01:01:14.320 --> 01:01:19.100 And if you're looking for something a little more advanced, try my Write Pythonic Code course 01:01:19.100 --> 01:01:21.620 at talkpython.fm/pythonic. 01:01:22.660 --> 01:01:24.380 Be sure to subscribe to the show. 01:01:24.380 --> 01:01:26.580 Open your favorite podcatcher and search for Python. 01:01:26.580 --> 01:01:27.820 We should be right at the top. 01:01:27.820 --> 01:01:33.220 You can also find the iTunes feed at /itunes, Google Play feed at /play, 01:01:33.220 --> 01:01:37.100 and direct RSS feed at /rss on talkpython.fm. 01:01:37.100 --> 01:01:39.000 This is your host, Michael Kennedy. 01:01:39.000 --> 01:01:40.360 Thanks so much for listening. 01:01:40.360 --> 01:01:41.420 I really appreciate it. 01:01:41.420 --> 01:01:43.380 Now get out there and write some Python code. 01:01:43.380 --> 01:02:04.180 I really appreciate it.