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Writing a book: is it worth it?

martin.kleppmann.com

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Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#281

Post by milancurcic »

eicossa wrote: post #258
milancurcic wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding Con 5), it's generally true with some exceptions. I wrote a Fortran book ( https://www.manning.com/books/modern-fortran ) and expect it to stay fresh for at least several years thanks to the slow pace and the unusually high maturity of the technology. On the downside, it's a relatively narrow niche so I don't expect high total number of sales. For instance, about 800 copies have been pre-ordered in the firs…

I am one of the benfactors of your book. I heavily relied on it while trying to parallelize an ancient geophysical inversion code. Didn't think i'd actually be responding to an author whose book I have spent multiple hours with. Thanks for the great book!

Thank you for your support! I'm happy that it was helpful for you. If you have any questions or get stuck at any point feel free to email me at milancurcic@hey.com. I'll be happy to help.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#282

Post by nicbou »

codazoda wrote: post #225
aliceryhl wrote: post #118

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 don't know if this will help, but an idea. Take your posts, copy them, and paste them on your blog. Add a little bit of background to make it understandable outside of the context of a message thread. Still feel like a ton of work? I created my own blog as a "note to self" type work. I would write down anything I was working on so that I could reproduce it in the future. I now have hundreds of personal documents an…

I write down solutions to problems I encountered. It's pretty useful if you encounter the same problems again. I ended up on my own website through Google a few times.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#283

Post by HeavyStorm »

lentinjoseph wrote: post #113

I'm an author of 8 books in Robotics. Here are some of the lessons I have learned from this. Pros 1) Great visibility in the robotics community 2) Started getting good consulting projects 3) Started getting Royalties(Passive income) 4) People start identifying me in conferences 5) Got the invitation to do research in good universities 6) Got good patience which is very useful while working with the robots 7) Knowledg…

Is it really a full-time job? I know a few people who have written books part time, do you think that's a bad idea?

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#284

Post by dang »

yroc92 wrote: post #76
brendangregg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A prototypical Hacker News reply.

Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#285

Post by muffinman26 »

jnurmine wrote: post #160

Recently I've been playing with the idea of writing a sci-fi book. ...and that's mostly it. I don't know what could be the next step, except actually writing the thing. Are there websites/communities? I don't follow nor know of any relevant ones myself. Start with short stories? Or something longer? Self-publish whatever I write? Or start spamming "real publishers"? When I was younger I read a monthly science fiction…

Good places to start for writing fiction:

- Writer's Digest publishes large yearly lists of places to submit books and short stories.

- The Writing Excuses podcast covers all steps of the writing process, from research and planning to publishing with an agent or going the self-publishing route. The speakers cover a wide range of strategies on each topic.

- writing.stackexchange.com is a relatively useful resource on a range of writing and publishing topics

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#286

Post by libraryofbabel »

sdevonoes wrote: post #260
libraryofbabel wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you find it unremarkable because you already know the material, or because the material isn't relevant to what you do? Anyway, some reasons: * Draws together a wealth of material on databases and distributed systems that wasn't explained in a systematic, accessible way anywhere else. It provides a map to someone coming to this hard-to-navigate area for the first time. * Great balance between being conversant with…

While I agree with all your points (I also think the book is a good one), I don't agree with the "level up" part. I don't see how, after reading carefully the book, any software engineer can "level up". If you don't have practical experience implementing (or dealing with, or maintaining) some of the scenarios the book talks about, then in no way one can "level up" just by reading the book.

Ah, yes, I should have said “first _reading_ recommendation” for how to level up! (And added: primarily for web backend or data engineers.)

Yes, of course you can’t level up just by reading a book; experience is the only way. The key thing - as you know, if you like the book - is that this book provides a coherent framework for thinking about data systems that engineers can fit their particular experience into. That “weird race condition” becomes less mysterious when it’s framed in terms of concepts like write skew or phantoms; joining two streams together becomes a problem about time and ordering. And so on. In fact the reason it’s such a great book is that you can read it with not much experience or background beyond basic database knowledge, absorb a lot of the ideas, and then keep coming back to it as your experience grows and you encounter new kinds of scenarios in your day to day work.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#287

Post by cnst »

brendangregg wrote: post #123
haswell wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I haven't written a book. > Also, you sound overly modest to me. This was my reaction as well. Absolutely no offense to the parent comment, but this sounds like a combination of being overly modest + getting bitten by dumb behaviors by bad companies. There's also a big difference between: - Strut into the interview. Drop a copy of your book on the table. "I literally wrote the book - hire me" And - "Tell…

Right; the person saying "I literally wrote the book - hire me" is saying it matters most, and I think that approach is likely to backfire. There are multiple problems with that attitude, including: 1) You probably aren't hired to write books, so what matters most is other things you'll be doing. 2) There are really good books and really bad books, so saying you wrote _a_ book doesn't carry the weight you may think.…

The main difference is the reason that a senior engineer or VP gets hired.

It is not to write code by themselves. It is to help other people do it.

For this, being a walking encyclopedia certainly helps. Of course, there's probably a correlation with being able to solve the programming puzzles in such a situation, too.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#288

Post by brendangregg »

_nrv9 wrote: post #207
brendangregg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Brendan, I attended a talk you gave at AWS Re:Invent 2019. You need some serious, serious help. No company should ever be speaking to you like that. You should be showing companies the door, not the other way around. Early on in my career I learned most tech companies are absolute garbage and are not worth working for. You're worth a lot more than they are, brother.

Thanks for attending my talk and the comment! I hope you've had a chance to run some BPF tools and get some performance wins. :)

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#289

Post by swyx »

ghaff wrote: post #153
swyx wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

15k is pretty good for no marketing! i feel that self published book authors should all have a "marketing partner" since they all seem so shy about marketing

>should all have a "marketing partner" The problem is that it's relatively easy to hire a marketing partner (does PR, etc.). But it will probably cost quite a bit more than your book advance. And most publishers these days aren't setting up book signings, sending out review copies, etc. When I get pings to see if I want to review a book it's usually from a PR agency.

as a developer-who-can-market i often wonder if itd be worth my time taking a 50% cut to be a marketing partner heheh. not sure i can do it repeatedly for people i dont already know.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#290

Post by swyx »

Murkin wrote: post #161
swyx wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

15k is pretty good for no marketing! i feel that self published book authors should all have a "marketing partner" since they all seem so shy about marketing

If we knew any good partner, would happily split revenue for their work. Not sure what is the best place to find such companies/individuals

you'd basically be hiring a "cofounder" with equity - i assume its similar but with lower stakes. good practice tbh
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