101–110 of 299 posts
Martin deserves every penny of his hard-work on Designing Data Intensive Applications. Experienced engineers can easily use the book as a reference and you can give the book to smart junior engineers to give them a great foundation. Honestly, the best technical book I’ve ever owned.
He kind of touches upon it, but there is a lot of value in being able to go into an interview and literally being able to say about a topic "I wrote the book on it." It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it. I used to have several guys on my team that had published books- and they were great, and were constantly getting contact…
I'm pretty sure if I showed up to a performance engineering job interview and said "I wrote the book on performance," as though that was what mattered most, I'd be shown the door. In my opinion it would be horrendously arrogant. In fact, I interviewed at Google while I was writing Systems Performance for Prentice Hall, and I never mentioned it in the interviews for that reason. In such interviews I'm focused on what…
When the above doesn't apply you still need them to know you wrote the book because sometimes they will look up the book and a good book will overcome your bad interview.
The exception to the above is when you are bored of the topic and are interviewing for something completely different. In that case you hide it because they might assume you will leave for a better job in your field latter - after all you wrote the book in something else so you must be valuable.
My favorite line in the post, and one that inspires my own efforts lately: > How to be a 10x engineer: help ten other engineers be twice as good. Producing high-quality educational materials enables you to be a 300x engineer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A prototypical Hacker News reply.
I don’t think you realize who the author of that reply is. There’s nothing HN typical about him :)
He kind of touches upon it, but there is a lot of value in being able to go into an interview and literally being able to say about a topic "I wrote the book on it." It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it. I used to have several guys on my team that had published books- and they were great, and were constantly getting contact…
I'm pretty sure if I showed up to a performance engineering job interview and said "I wrote the book on performance," as though that was what mattered most, I'd be shown the door. In my opinion it would be horrendously arrogant. In fact, I interviewed at Google while I was writing Systems Performance for Prentice Hall, and I never mentioned it in the interviews for that reason. In such interviews I'm focused on what…
This is a real problem. People writing some really bad quality tech books from certain publishers. I'm not going to trash the publishers because some of the authors care about writing good books (rather than being able to say they wrote something) and do it with little editorial help. They produce something which would have been better in other circumstances.
I'm a software engineer and the author of four books, but none are about software. (Three are pop-sci and one is pop-stats.) First book (2013) did extremely well and continues to sell well. Lots of good press, translated into multiple languages, excerpts in a national magazine, promotion on a network TV show. Second book (2014) tanked hard. Third book (2019) looked like it would suffer the same fate as the second, bu…
> solid platforms Can you expand on that? Very interesting comment, thank you!
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another good way to become a little bit "internet famous" is to create and maintain a useful open-source project. IMHO, this is more future proof in the technology space since you can gradually evolve a project but a book can become obsolete if it focuses on a specific technology rather than fundamentals.
Obligatory: https://mobile.twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?la...
Martin deserves every penny of his hard-work on Designing Data Intensive Applications. Experienced engineers can easily use the book as a reference and you can give the book to smart junior engineers to give them a great foundation. Honestly, the best technical book I’ve ever owned.
Can someone expand on why the book is so good? I found it very unremarkable but it's recommended so much around here that I suspect that I've missed something important.
I'm a software engineer and the author of four books, but none are about software. (Three are pop-sci and one is pop-stats.) First book (2013) did extremely well and continues to sell well. Lots of good press, translated into multiple languages, excerpts in a national magazine, promotion on a network TV show. Second book (2014) tanked hard. Third book (2019) looked like it would suffer the same fate as the second, bu…
> solid platforms Can you expand on that? Very interesting comment, thank you!
Paid advertising is effective, but extremely expensive.
Getting press coverage is great, and less expensive than advertising, but you've got to pay a publicist who knows what they're doing, and even then, there are no guarantees.
But if an author has a strong platform, such as an email newsletter with tens of thousands of subscribers, or a popular website or YouTube channel with tons of views, then it's an incredibly effective and inexpensive way to market the book. The author has already established an audience who has shown interest in their previous content, so chances are good that they will show interest in the book as well.
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Writing a book does not add value to your employer, enabling engineers in the world is one thing but it does not affect your day to day job or people arround you.
yes, why would an employer want employees who have the capability to write a book on the payroll? That's time that could be spent heads-down coding!