261–270 of 299 posts
Even if you earned $0 from your book, I'd say being able to tell people you wrote a book at interviews and on your resume, and even at parties, would make it worth it. And you'd be able to call yourself an author, how cool is that?
> Hi, I wrote a book about X.
> Hi, I wrote a good book about X.
A the difference is abysmal.
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Math is pardon the pun, fractal in nature. Geometry skills may be reasonably common, but topology and group theory for example are rarely taught in high school or their not even part of most collages general education requirements. Go back 50 years and people may have been studying geometry but they covered significantly different areas.
How much has that fractal expanded? Is it more or less complex than 20, 50, and 100 years ago? How many subspecialisations have groups 9f 50, or 10, or5, or 1, who actually understand them? At what scale of living practice does knowledge fail to be cultural and become merely transient, lodged for a few years in a few minds, perhaps mouldering for a few decades in a fiche copy of a once-read dissertation? And, a few m…
In terms of actually useful mathematics, not much. But, that’s missing the point. 100 years ago people studied chess as hard as they could, without machine assistance they didn’t become as skilled but that doesn’t mean chess somehow became more or less complex. Lawyers are dealing with roughly equivalent legal systems, and so it goes.
Mathematicians may have discovered say more digits of pi through useful tools, but at the core mathematicians are about as intelligent and still working just as hard. We have more mathematicians today in large part because global population has increased 4x in the last hundred years. However, go back 100 years and most people didn’t understand what hyper specialized work was being done.
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.
Even if you earned $0 from your book, I'd say being able to tell people you wrote a book at interviews and on your resume, and even at parties, would make it worth it. And you'd be able to call yourself an author, how cool is that?
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If one presumes a culture with an increasing overall complexity level, then the circumstance is not one of simply obsoleting technologies and skillsets being replaced, but of competition among multiple essential skillsets. Complexity expands to meet all constraint boundaries.
Society is still largely bound by the human intellect. So, I don’t think overall complexity is actually increasing significantly. It’s more a question of how obvious the complexity is.
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…
While I love books immensely, these days I just don't buy them any more. What I do is google answers to problems, and for guidance on how to do things. There's just so much fantastic information immediately available... and there's the "constantly changing" thing that many people have mentioned. Books can't really keep up, alas.
So, I'm sorry it's not a paid position, but really, thanks so much for helping the modern programmer, particularly with rust... it's a challenging language.
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Similar experience here. We interviewed a guy who kept referring to his book on the subject, experience he gained during writing the book, and so on. We took the bait. > He would tell people they couldn't do things they'd already done and then back-peddle that it wasn't possible when he'd written his book This was the core problem: Modern technologies and frameworks move fast. His book was about the state of the art…
A former co-worker of mine recounted an experience with a person hired by his previous company who had written a book on software development methodology, Scrum or something. Evidently the way the author's employment worked is the company got the reputation benefit from having a famous expert on staff. In exchange he gave talks but didn't have to do any actual work for the company, and the company didn't have to foll…
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We hired this guy who wrote a book on the thing the team he was hired for managed. He was a nightmare. He was just insufferable. People would ask questions and he would suggest they read his book. He would mention his book in every meeting. He would tell people they couldn't do things they'd already done and then back-peddle that it wasn't possible when he'd written his book. It was just a huge drag. He managed to al…
At my last employer there was a similar story. The candidate mentioned he had written a book on Flask. So the dev in the interview took that as an invitation to skip the warm ups and go on a deep dive into Flask internals. The author got extremely flustered and couldn’t answer.
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I wrote a book, too (career advice for new devs). I had previously written a technical ebook (about Cordova) and wanted to write something that had a longer lifespan, but was still focused on developers. Writing a technical book was great, but, like you said, it became outdated very easily. That said, if you want to anchor yourself as an expert in a space, I can't think of a better way to do it than to write a book.…
Teaching the topic to students is the best way to learn it thoroughly because it closes the loop and you are challenged from many different angles. Something you understand weakly will be something you explain poorly, and be a big sticking point you'll need to revisit repeatedly. The blog approach might get a similar benefit if you can get a lot of feedback and discussion for each one. But it seems like it would have…
But, having taught some in-person and synchronous online classes, the different points of view from students definitely force me to understand the topic at many levels.
One issue teaching might have that blogging doesn't is that it may be hard to find your audience, if it is a niche topic. For instance, I doubt that anyone would have signed up for a Cordova automation course (the topic of my ebook). But perhaps in a world of Udacity I'm incorrect.