191–200 of 299 posts
Just finished my first novel (in French); will be sending it to publishers next week. If they reject it IDK what I'll do (dump it or auto-publish). But, I'm super happy to have done it. I wrote poems and novellas when I was younger. A complete novel is something else entirely. Even if it doesn't go anywhere, the feeling of having done it is really great.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think you realize who the author of that reply is. There’s nothing HN typical about him :)
I don't know either. His history shows some extensive knowledge about the types of things I'd expect readers of hacker news to know. Or course there are a lot of beginners, but the goal is to discuss things people like him are interested in. I aspire to write posts as helpful and detailed as his comment history shows.
I've long ago accepted I'd never make that list. If it ever happened I'd probably commit myself to an asylum immediately because it'd be 1000x more likely I had actually finally cracked and started hallucinating things.
Actually let's be real. Being a famous programmer is probably within my reach. I lack the discipline, focus, and dedication to spend the right amount of time on the right parts of the right projects. If this is possible for me to fundamentally address and within my capacity (still questionable) than doing things of deep impact is probably feasible. Even if it isn't, I should do it anyway.
I avoided children and marriage so I'd never have to choose safety over taking risks. So, take, more, risks. Now is the only time there ever will be.
I should print out those last 2 paragraphs and read it aloud in front of my bathroom mirror every day.
I have spent probably thousands of hours writing random responses helping people on forums, just because its the thing that I do to procrastinate. For example, this year I wrote more than 4000 posts on https://users.rust-lang.org/ and 19000 messages on the help channels in a few Discord servers. I'm probably the world expert at spotting the mistake in small snippets of Rust code at this point. I honestly wish I was a…
I think you're fighting activation energy. I'd find a way to make it cheap for you (in time and energy) to iterate such that the one-off content that you're providing can be used as stepping stones to a paragraph, and then a chapter, and then a book. As an example, I've written thousands (!) of customer support messages, via email, chat, or reddit, to help my PhotoStructure beta users. I've found that the second or t…
I have a total cheat for book writing: find a project where you can contribute a single chapter. It's an order of magnitude less work then writing a full book, and you get to add "author of a book on X" to your resume. It's pretty much the other end of the scale in terms of overall benefit from what Martin is describing here, but it's worth remembering that it could be a much less stressful and time consuming opportu…
> because the income that this work has generated is in the same ballpark as the Silicon Valley software engineering salary (including stock and benefits) I could have received in the same time if I hadn’t quit LinkedIn in 2014 to work on the book I think he’s underestimating his salary and stock value. Most Silicon Valley engineers at his level would make more than $200,000 a year with stock and salary.
I have spent probably thousands of hours writing random responses helping people on forums, just because its the thing that I do to procrastinate. For example, this year I wrote more than 4000 posts on https://users.rust-lang.org/ and 19000 messages on the help channels in a few Discord servers. I'm probably the world expert at spotting the mistake in small snippets of Rust code at this point. I honestly wish I was a…
Take the essence of the question asked, or the non-working sample code given, take your response on the forum post, verbatim, and post that on your blog. Your blog is a marketing vehicle, you aren't necessarily doing it to rank high in google or get lots of traffic for ads. You're doing it so you have a single source of content you can direct someone towards and also identify yourself as a source of knowledge and exp…
I will certainly try to see if I can repurpose some of my better responses to common questions as blog posts.
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…
Miracles happen and sometimes a book, like this one, takes off. For the most part, it's not worth your time and energy. I've made far more money as an author of articles and as an expert witness than I ever did from my books, even though one did with quite well and was translated into Greek and German. I'll also add that he must have one heck of a deal with ORA to get those kind of royalties because the standard ORA…
I have spent probably thousands of hours writing random responses helping people on forums, just because its the thing that I do to procrastinate. For example, this year I wrote more than 4000 posts on https://users.rust-lang.org/ and 19000 messages on the help channels in a few Discord servers. I'm probably the world expert at spotting the mistake in small snippets of Rust code at this point. I honestly wish I was a…
There's a model in the way Randall Munro turned a bunch of XKCD comics into the best-selling books "What If" and "How To." It's a little more complicated than gluing together all of your posts, but with the right editor, it can all come together. https://xkcd.com/how-to/
Compiling your answers into semantically sensible standalone posts- that's something that some specific people do very well, very easily, as easily as you respond.
Whether it is economically advantageous for you to hire someone is a different question- answer is probably not- but if you knew someone in the Rust space who was an editor rather than an author, they could, in 2-3 hours a week, scan your posts, distil the useful elements, and write something for you to approve and post. Very common workflow in the publishing space.
Ghostwriters are this at book-scale- interviewing the named author, which, like forum posts spurs answers, which get aggregated into subject areas and distilled using a common voice.
You definitely don't have to beat yourself up about it, or try to solve it with "activation energy" processes- which to be fair sometimes work. Some people are just good at some stuff and other people good at other stuff.
Cheers, good luck.