ryanbigg

I was made redundant in August and despite being a 20 year career vet who has done many different langs, I still can’t find a new job.

My skills as a developer are no longer required because the all knowing robot can (apparently) do what I need to do. I’ve heard multiple companies now using it to ship stuff all the way into production without any human intervention at all. This feels to me like driving the car without holding onto the wheel.

The side hustle I had of writing books to teach people development is over — they can just ask the robot instead. I was writing a new book about how developers can train up others, but have put that on hold (due to losing my job which was that thing, and because of AI)

I honestly don’t know what I’m supposed to do here to provide for my family.

The company charged for each of these payments, netting them something around 0.5-1% per payment. You do the math.

I’ve been lightly enforcing a rule of my own too: “no agenda, no attenda”

After copy editing multiple chapters, they sent it back to me with all the content on a single line. I was so incredibly upset that they ditched all my painstaking format that I almost abandoned the project there + then.

It sounds like from your experience that it has barely changed. I ended up moving to self-publishing so I have a greater control over the whole process. I wrote it up long-form here: https://ryanbigg.com/2015/08/my-self-publishing-success-stor...

Yes, it's worth optimising for your productivity. It's not the be all and end all. I've written at my desk with the comfiest chair (A Mirra) I have, and the most ergonomic keyboard for my needs (Ergodox EZ). I write at cafes with just the laptop. I write on the couch at odd but comfortable angles. I write on public transport squished against strangers.

I love using AsciiDoc as the tooling (asciidoctor + friends) give me output that looks decent, and the way I _input_ into that is not mind-breaking like Docbook is. Asciidoctor gives me a PDF which I then style how I like with CSS and then can put on leanpub.com and sell for real dollars.

The way I would put the writing section for tech books is this:

Start with the _topics_ you want to cover. Make these the chapters. Then dive into each topic and figure out what you want to say about the topic. Usually 3-4 main points per chapter. These come out to be your subheadings. Order the chapters from beginner-to-advanced concepts or in a way that makes sense for the book you're writing. For the books I've written it's usually start with a simple base app and then incrementally build things on top of that.

https://ryanbigg.com/books

Off these, I’ve made $65,000USD. That’s over 13 years. None of these books have sold anywhere near as close to the Unicorn Project! (Which imo is fanfic for the tech-inclined)

The money is nice, but hearing from people who’ve read the books (especially those who ask questions!) is the best part.

Huh, maybe it is the friends we make along the way after all.

We've tried building email templates for notifications for our apps where I work, and it has typically been a pain. We have since swapped to using mjml (https://mjml.io/) to build the templates, and it's working wonders. The output seems the be the most compatible with all different devices that we've tested on.

The other tool we enjoy using is Litmus (https://litmus.com), which allows you to throw in an email template and see what it looks like on all kinds of apps and devices. Other thread here mentions https://testi.at/ as well, which we've also had success with.

All of these have been really invaluable to designing emails for our apps.

(Also, that would be a good domain name for myself ;)

(Action web service was an attempt to make Rails generate SOAP APIs as that was the style du jour at the time. Fortunately, JSON came along!)

Definitely not writing them for the money — that’s about $300 a month usually. Enough to buy a few knick knacks and some meals.

It’s more the notoriety of being a “subject matter expert” that counts.

I work full time and then put what I learn from the job into the books to share it with the world. No point hanging onto the knowledge and hoarding it all dragon-like.

https://github.com/radar/mtg

I view it as a wide project full of little interlinked code katas.

I’ve thought about the card parsing stuff but that’s beyond my ability.

I usually write posts about code, but this post about culture and values really resonated with a lot of people:

https://ryanbigg.com/2021/12/culture-and-values

For example:

   bundle exec rspec <Ctrl+T>

I also wrote quite a few programming books (https://ryanbigg.com/books) and some of the Ruby on Rails guides. These have gone on to teach thousands of people around the world. I really love hearing from those who’ve read my work.

I just use the right tool for the job, and in this place I do not think strong parameters is the right tool for the job.

It’s fun to work out the different card / game mechanics and how they all interact. It’s a good different project from the typical web-dev-y stuff I do every day.

It’s fun trying to work out the different card / game mechanics and how they all interact.

Thank you for taking the time to write this up Jeff.