SubSonic

Yes, I know, you're sick of the term. The idea is interesting... but is it realistic? In this blog series we'll find out.

I want to love this process... I ... want to ...

I really enjoyed writing The Imposter's Handbook, as well as making the videos. I can say that now because it's done with and the human mind has an amazing ability to cull things negative. So, naturally, I'm doing it again. I have a fun idea for my ... [More] next little project. Once again it will be a book/video thing, but this time I'm going to let my creative side run free. It's the only way I can deal with the subject matter: Node and ES6. Yes, I know. There a quite a few books out there, but none like what I have in mind. I'll write a bit more about it at another time (when the idea is a bit more shaped), for now I can tell you that it involves my fictional aerospace company (Red:4), the August 2017 eclipse, lasers and the moon. I have a newsletter signup thingy at the bottom of the post if you want to sign up. I promise I won't spam you :). A number of people have asked if there will be a "volume 2" to the Imposter's Handbook and yes, indeed, I am actively researching it. The first one took me 18 months to "finish", this one will likely be the same. There are a few things I want to do in the interim however... Goldilocks And The Three EBook Formats Here's the thing: formatting an ebook is like trying to give five cats a bath (that's seriously the closest analogy I can come up with). Trying to have parity between formats is a pointless, wet, cold, and scratchy exercise... and no one is ever happy. Especially your cats. There are three main formats you have to provide if you want to make anyone happy: epub. An open standard used by quite a few ereaders. It's based on HTML, CSS and some XML and, just like the web technologies its built on, there are multiple "standards" you can build to (versions 2 or 3 are significantly different). You can create a book with pixel-perfect placement, or you can do a traditional "reflowable" book that is basically easier to read. PDF. You know what PDF is. Read it anywhere on pretty much anything. You lose some of the bells and whistles that an ereader provides, but you can do fun things like "stamping" which imprints the name of the buyer on the book. It's the most usable and versatile format, which is likely why no one wants to use it for books. mobi. This is the proprietary Kindle format and it makes me want to scream every time I have to deal with it. There are quite a few different Kindle formats out there, so when you build your ebook file for the Kindle (using Kindlegen from Amazon) it will create a version for every Kindle out there. The mobi size for The Imposter's Handbook was 1.5G. Exciting times. I have spent months and months trying to figure this out. I've used all kinds of writing and conversion tools (which I'll describe below), but the closest I've come to parity between formats is... Create the best epub book you can, formatted as you like. Use Calibre to convert from epub to PDF/mobi. Give it the time it needs as you'll be twiddling all kinds of settings to get your margins just so. Set your mobi output to the Kindle Paperwhite (in Calibre). This (for me) covered most of my Kindle customers well enough, and the ones who had a different reader (the Fire, for instance) could use the PDF Use images for code samples. That last point there? Number 4? That's a big deal. You see - no matter what you do, the fonts you choose will be obliterated by the ereader. These things want to show books the way they want to show them and your formatting be damned. If you really care about the way the code reads, snap a screenshot. The downside is the book gets rather large... I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's talk about... The Actual Writing Process I've been through every editor and writing tool you can think of. Please trust me on this, as I know you're gearing up to "have you tried X" and yes, I swear to you I have. Yes, them too. YES THAT ONE TOO. It's quite sad how many editors I've tried... and given up on. Let's go through a small subset of my choices - the rest you can assume simply sucked for writing a book. It's hard! Books need a bit more than just regular old long-form writing tools. Yes you can get by with Word, but seriously it's a major pain in the ass to structure that many words and keep track of everything properly. Anyway, here's what I've been using. iBooks Author It's what I finally settled on and what I'm using for the next book. Overall it's giving me what I want: a great looking book, a nice writing experience and a reasonable structure. Pros The first is easy! It's free, but you have to have a Mac. You can create two kinds of epubs: standard reflowable and pixel-perfect "picture book" style. If you choose the reflowable option you can export your work in epub format, if you choose the pixel-perfect style you get PDF or .ibooks format. Styling, layout, etc work like most editors you've probably used and the built in templates make it incredibly easy to get off the ground quickly. If you have code examples, you can copy and "Paste and Retain Style" easily. With some small formatting tweaks you can have your code look almost exact, which is great. It comes with a built in glossary, so if you need a quick reference for words and terms you got it. It also has a number of "widgets", like picture galleries and popups - you can even embed HTML! This is neat, but only people with iPads and sophisticated epub readers will be able to take advantage. Cons The format you write in is dictated by the export you need. If you choose the regular epub format, that's all you can export to, there is no PDF export for some stupid reason. If you choose to have a pretty, well-formatted epub 3 book, you can export to PDF but without any TOC or navigatable outline. This makes the PDF basically unusable. The whole epub 3 thing is kind of a joke as other readers can read these epub 3 books just fine, but you can't export to them and Calibre won't convert them the way you want. Fonts. There easy to use and set up, and you will be tempted to use all kinds of funky ones that will get blown away in the conversion process, or just scrubbed over completely when the reader loads your file. This is especially true for code! The best way around this is to use screenshots, but that inflates the size of your book dramatically and can also change the way your book reads. They also look crappy in "night mode". Scrivener I love this tool, it's the best one I've found for writing. I've gotten to know it very, very well and messed with the compiler settings well into the night on multiple occasions. Pros There is no tool out there that helps you organize your thoughts, do research and sketch scenes/chapters like Scrivener. It is quite simply the best. Tons of helpful utilities, like a scratchpad, research folder, breaking big pages into little sections. Easy to use to get up to speed. Will export to PDF, mobi, reflowable epub, manuscript (for paper books) and a few other formats. Cons Formatting. My GOD this is so FRUSTRATING! Scrivener splits the writing process into two buckets: text and formatting. Which you would think would work well, but it doesn't because you get the choice to format your text during the writing process and during the compilation process, when all of your lovely text is assembled into whatever format you want to use. Twiddling. So. Much. Twiddling! All kinds of settings and tweaking this, nudging that to get the layout to look reasonable. Not stellar, mind you, just reasonable. You can setup the compiler for each different format you need: epub, PDF or mobi. I put this as a "con" because you need to spend time with each setting to get it to show the way you want. And it's never right. Styles. There are style presets you can use, "blockquote" for example. If you set some block quotes and then continue writing, but on page 200 decide "you know these look horrible let's change them", changing the style setting does nothing. You have to go back and tweak each one by hand. I have no idea why this decision was made. Overall frustration. I want to love this writing tool. I've used it for years, but mostly for smaller things so formatting and other things didn't really bother me. It's so well done and the utilities you're given are incredibly well thought-out... but the rest of it makes me want to scream (and I have, on many occasions). Adobe InDesign I gave this thing three solid days on two different occasions. Each time I kept thinking "wow this is amazingly great/horrible". Pros You can export to any format, reliably, and it looks great. There are tons of resources out there that show you how to create some interesting books, too. epub 2, 3, mobi, PDF - it's easy to use. Drawing tools built in! That's pretty neat, especially if you're doing an epub 3 book and want things to look nice. Take a look at this book and you'll see what I mean. Sunni Brown (the author) used InDesign for it and was able to weave some interesting fonts together with her drawings and generated line sets - it works really well. It's affordable. If you have an Adobe license you can add it in there (or maybe you already have it); if not it's only $24/month. Cons It's Adobe. You have to install their crappy crapware tool and deal with their emails. If you have Adobe stuff already this isn't going to ruin your day... I don't and I didn't enjoy the experience. It's Adobe. Buttons, knobs, settings buried in settings within boxes on top of panels within other boxes and panels. The icons were indecipherable to me, but if you're an Adobe person already maybe you'll get it. Seriously: you can't use this thing without taking a class first. Not hyperbolic here, it's the main reason I keep a Lynda sub - learning tools like this one. It's Adobe. Usability is out the window in terms of the act of writing. That's not what you do with InDesign, you design a book. Which is fine! Unless you're writing a book. Leanpub, Softcover, Gitbook, Static Sites (like Middleman) and Every Other Service You're Going To Suggest... I used both Gitbook and Softcover for The Imposter's Handbook and they worked OK. For the most part it was nice to work in a text editor with Markdown. Pros Markdown is very simple to use, and Softcover and Leanpub have their own flavors of it so you can do some extra things. Softcover, for example, allows you to use LaTeX for math equations right in the markdown, which I did a lot. Structure. It's nice the way these tools apply structure to your writing. Figures have numbers as do your chapters. Additional Services. If you want to publish and sell your book through them, these services will let you! This is a nice addon if you're doing this as a side thing. Leanpub is especially good at this. Formatting. I used Softcover for the latest versions of The Imposter's Handbook and tweaking the CSS was pretty easy to do. I was also able to add my own formatting blocks. It wasn't easy, but it was doable. Cons Yak Shaving. Setting up Softcover involves Ruby, the Softcover gem and some additional programs. Softcover helps you with this by checking to see if you have what's required: $ softcover check Checking Softcover dependencies... Checking for LaTeX... Found Checking for ImageMagick... Found Checking for Node.js... Found Checking for PhantomJS... Found Checking for Inkscape... Found Checking for Calibre... Found Checking for KindleGen... Found Checking for Java... Found Checking for EpubCheck... Found All dependencies satisfied. These aren't small additions to your system. LaTeX is gigantic and there's a bug in the latest release of Inkscape which doesn't work with Softcover... and you only discover that when your math equations aren't showing up in PDF format. Buggy. All of these tools work for the most part, until they don't. It could be for a number of reasons, but when you're using node and ruby to "build" a book, there will be problems because you're not using a unified toolset, rather a collection of smaller tools that will have dependencies that don't work right. I've come to a bit of a detente with Softcover: it works, so I don't touch it. This is after spending quite a few nights trying to figure out why equations weren't showing up at all in certain formats of the book. The PDF version still has problems and to fix it, I need to debug Softcover. This is a pain in the ass. Formatting. These toolsets were built by developers to create technical books, which is fine. If this is all you're creating then they might work fine for you. I like to make things look pretty and it's kind of hard. I got close with Middleman and the Elixir book I wrote, but just like Softcover I've had to deal with formatting issues. Ulysses, Bear, Ai Writer, And Every Other Writing App You'll Suggest These things look GREAT, but once again fall completely short when it comes to structuring and formatting your book the way you want. I keep coming back to this: these tools are great for certain things, but not everything I need. Yes, Goldilocks. That's me! And I'm OK with that. I want things to look and read a very certain way because technical books can be disastrously boring slogs; I want to create something more. For example: Ulysses allows you to embed code using their weird code block markdown syntax... but there's no highlighting. Which means it's pointless. Same with Bear and Ai. You also can't "Paste and Retain Style" because you're using markdown... frustration! Onward! Let's Write This Thing... So that was the last 2 years of my life :). Figuring out how to write the book I want, realizing I probably want just a bit too much. For now, I'll stick with iBooks Author and hope for the best. I'll share what I'm doing as I go, and I'll send out email updates if you're interested. You can sign up here, if you want, and I promise I won't spam you: [Less]

I really enjoyed writing The Imposter’s Handbook, as well as making the videos. I can say that now because it’s done with and the human mind has an amazing ability to cull things negative. So, naturally, I’m doing it again. I have a fun idea for my ... [More] next little project. Once again it will be a book/video thing, but this time I’m going to let my creative side run free. It’s the only way I can deal with the subject matter: Node and ES6. Yes, I know. There a quite a few books out there, but none like what I have in mind. I’ll write a bit more about it at another time (when the idea is a bit more shaped), for now I can tell you that it involves my fictional aerospace company (Red:4), the August 2017 eclipse, lasers and the moon. I have a newsletter signup thingy at the bottom of the post if you want to sign up. I promise I won’t spam you :). A number of people have asked if there will be a “volume 2” to the Imposter’s Handbook and yes, indeed, I am actively researching it. The first one took me 18 months to “finish”, this one will likely be the same. There are a few things I want to do in the interim however… Goldilocks And The Three EBook Formats Here’s the thing: formatting an ebook is like trying to give five cats a bath (that’s seriously the closest analogy I can come up with). Trying to have parity between formats is a pointless, wet, cold, and scratchy exercise… and no one is ever happy. Especially your cats. There are three main formats you have to provide if you want to make anyone happy: epub. An open standard used by quite a few ereaders. It’s based on HTML, CSS and some XML and, just like the web technologies its built on, there are multiple “standards” you can build to (versions 2 or 3 are significantly different). You can create a book with pixel-perfect placement, or you can do a traditional “reflowable” book that is basically easier to read. PDF. You know what PDF is. Read it anywhere on pretty much anything. You lose some of the bells and whistles that an ereader provides, but you can do fun things like “stamping” which imprints the name of the buyer on the book. It’s the most usable and versatile format, which is likely why no one wants to use it for books. mobi. This is the proprietary Kindle format and it makes me want to scream every time I have to deal with it. There are quite a few different Kindle formats out there, so when you build your ebook file for the Kindle (using Kindlegen from Amazon) it will create a version for every Kindle out there. The mobi size for The Imposter’s Handbook was 1.5G. Exciting times. I have spent months and months trying to figure this out. I’ve used all kinds of writing and conversion tools (which I’ll describe below), but the closest I’ve come to parity between formats is… Create the best epub book you can, formatted as you like. Use Calibre to convert from epub to PDF/mobi. Give it the time it needs as you’ll be twiddling all kinds of settings to get your margins just so. Set your mobi output to the Kindle Paperwhite (in Calibre). This (for me) covered most of my Kindle customers well enough, and the ones who had a different reader (the Fire, for instance) could use the PDF Use images for code samples. That last point there? Number 4? That’s a big deal. You see - no matter what you do, the fonts you choose will be obliterated by the ereader. These things want to show books the way they want to show them and your formatting be damned. If you really care about the way the code reads, snap a screenshot. The downside is the book gets rather large… I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s talk about… The Actual Writing Process I’ve been through every editor and writing tool you can think of. Please trust me on this, as I know you’re gearing up to “have you tried X” and yes, I swear to you I have. Yes, them too. YES THAT ONE TOO. It’s quite sad how many editors I’ve tried… and given up on. Let’s go through a small subset of my choices - the rest you can assume simply sucked for writing a book. It’s hard! Books need a bit more than just regular old long-form writing tools. Yes you can get by with Word, but seriously it’s a major pain in the ass to structure that many words and keep track of everything properly. Anyway, here’s what I’ve been using. iBooks Author It’s what I finally settled on and what I’m using for the next book. Overall it’s giving me what I want: a great looking book, a nice writing experience and a reasonable structure. Pros The first is easy! It’s free, but you have to have a Mac. You can create two kinds of epubs: standard reflowable and pixel-perfect “picture book” style. If you choose the reflowable option you can export your work in epub format, if you choose the pixel-perfect style you get PDF or .ibooks format. Styling, layout, etc work like most editors you’ve probably used and the built in templates make it incredibly easy to get off the ground quickly. If you have code examples, you can copy and “Paste and Retain Style” easily. With some small formatting tweaks you can have your code look almost exact, which is great. It comes with a built in glossary, so if you need a quick reference for words and terms you got it. It also has a number of “widgets”, like picture galleries and popups - you can even embed HTML! This is neat, but only people with iPads and sophisticated epub readers will be able to take advantage. Cons The format you write in is dictated by the export you need. If you choose the regular epub format, that’s all you can export to, there is no PDF export for some stupid reason. If you choose to have a pretty, well-formatted epub 3 book, you can export to PDF but without any TOC or navigatable outline. This makes the PDF basically unusable. The whole epub 3 thing is kind of a joke as other readers can read these epub 3 books just fine, but you can’t export to them and Calibre won’t convert them the way you want. Fonts. There easy to use and set up, and you will be tempted to use all kinds of funky ones that will get blown away in the conversion process, or just scrubbed over completely when the reader loads your file. This is especially true for code! The best way around this is to use screenshots, but that inflates the size of your book dramatically and can also change the way your book reads. They also look crappy in “night mode”. Scrivener I love this tool, it’s the best one I’ve found for writing. I’ve gotten to know it very, very well and messed with the compiler settings well into the night on multiple occasions. Pros There is no tool out there that helps you organize your thoughts, do research and sketch scenes/chapters like Scrivener. It is quite simply the best. Tons of helpful utilities, like a scratchpad, research folder, breaking big pages into little sections. Easy to use to get up to speed. Will export to PDF, mobi, reflowable epub, manuscript (for paper books) and a few other formats. Cons Formatting. My GOD this is so FRUSTRATING! Scrivener splits the writing process into two buckets: text and formatting. Which you would think would work well, but it doesn’t because you get the choice to format your text during the writing process and during the compilation process, when all of your lovely text is assembled into whatever format you want to use. Twiddling. So. Much. Twiddling! All kinds of settings and tweaking this, nudging that to get the layout to look reasonable. Not stellar, mind you, just reasonable. You can setup the compiler for each different format you need: epub, PDF or mobi. I put this as a “con” because you need to spend time with each setting to get it to show the way you want. And it’s never right. Styles. There are style presets you can use, “blockquote” for example. If you set some block quotes and then continue writing, but on page 200 decide “you know these look horrible let’s change them”, changing the style setting does nothing. You have to go back and tweak each one by hand. I have no idea why this decision was made. Overall frustration. I want to love this writing tool. I’ve used it for years, but mostly for smaller things so formatting and other things didn’t really bother me. It’s so well done and the utilities you’re given are incredibly well thought-out… but the rest of it makes me want to scream (and I have, on many occasions). Adobe InDesign I gave this thing three solid days on two different occasions. Each time I kept thinking “wow this is amazingly great/horrible”. Pros You can export to any format, reliably, and it looks great. There are tons of resources out there that show you how to create some interesting books, too. epub 2, 3, mobi, PDF - it’s easy to use. Drawing tools built in! That’s pretty neat, especially if you’re doing an epub 3 book and want things to look nice. Take a look at this book and you’ll see what I mean. Sunni Brown (the author) used InDesign for it and was able to weave some interesting fonts together with her drawings and generated line sets - it works really well. It’s affordable. If you have an Adobe license you can add it in there (or maybe you already have it); if not it’s only $24/month. Cons It’s Adobe. You have to install their crappy crapware tool and deal with their emails. If you have Adobe stuff already this isn’t going to ruin your day… I don’t and I didn’t enjoy the experience. It’s Adobe. Buttons, knobs, settings buried in settings within boxes on top of panels within other boxes and panels. The icons were indecipherable to me, but if you’re an Adobe person already maybe you’ll get it. Seriously: you can’t use this thing without taking a class first. Not hyperbolic here, it’s the main reason I keep a Lynda sub - learning tools like this one. It’s Adobe. Usability is out the window in terms of the act of writing. That’s not what you do with InDesign, you design a book. Which is fine! Unless you’re writing a book. Leanpub, Softcover, Gitbook, Static Sites (like Middleman) and Every Other Service You’re Going To Suggest… I used both Gitbook and Softcover for The Imposter’s Handbook and they worked OK. For the most part it was nice to work in a text editor with Markdown. Pros Markdown is very simple to use, and Softcover and Leanpub have their own flavors of it so you can do some extra things. Softcover, for example, allows you to use LaTeX for math equations right in the markdown, which I did a lot. Structure. It’s nice the way these tools apply structure to your writing. Figures have numbers as do your chapters. Additional Services. If you want to publish and sell your book through them, these services will let you! This is a nice addon if you’re doing this as a side thing. Leanpub is especially good at this. Formatting. I used Softcover for the latest versions of The Imposter’s Handbook and tweaking the CSS was pretty easy to do. I was also able to add my own formatting blocks. It wasn’t easy, but it was doable. Cons Yak Shaving. Setting up Softcover involves Ruby, the Softcover gem and some additional programs. Softcover helps you with this by checking to see if you have what’s required: $ softcover check Checking Softcover dependencies... Checking for LaTeX... Found Checking for ImageMagick... Found Checking for Node.js... Found Checking for PhantomJS... Found Checking for Inkscape... Found Checking for Calibre... Found Checking for KindleGen... Found Checking for Java... Found Checking for EpubCheck... Found All dependencies satisfied. These aren’t small additions to your system. LaTeX is gigantic and there’s a bug in the latest release of Inkscape which doesn’t work with Softcover… and you only discover that when your math equations aren’t showing up in PDF format. Buggy. All of these tools work for the most part, until they don’t. It could be for a number of reasons, but when you’re using node and ruby to “build” a book, there will be problems because you’re not using a unified toolset, rather a collection of smaller tools that will have dependencies that don’t work right. I’ve come to a bit of a detente with Softcover: it works, so I don’t touch it. This is after spending quite a few nights trying to figure out why equations weren’t showing up at all in certain formats of the book. The PDF version still has problems and to fix it, I need to debug Softcover. This is a pain in the ass. Formatting. These toolsets were built by developers to create technical books, which is fine. If this is all you’re creating then they might work fine for you. I like to make things look pretty and it’s kind of hard. I got close with Middleman and the Elixir book I wrote, but just like Softcover I’ve had to deal with formatting issues. Ulysses, Bear, Ai Writer, And Every Other Writing App You’ll Suggest These things look GREAT, but once again fall completely short when it comes to structuring and formatting your book the way you want. I keep coming back to this: these tools are great for certain things, but not everything I need. Yes, Goldilocks. That’s me! And I’m OK with that. I want things to look and read a very certain way because technical books can be disastrously boring slogs; I want to create something more. For example: Ulysses allows you to embed code using their weird code block markdown syntax… but there’s no highlighting. Which means it’s pointless. Same with Bear and Ai. You also can’t “Paste and Retain Style” because you’re using markdown… frustration! Onward! Let’s Write This Thing… So that was the last 2 years of my life :). Figuring out how to write the book I want, realizing I probably want just a bit too much. For now, I’ll stick with iBooks Author and hope for the best. I’ll share what I’m doing as I go, and I’ll send out email updates if you’re interested. You can sign up here, if you want, and I promise I won’t spam you: [Less]

I want to love this process... I ... want to ...

I'm hoping to do some small part to encourage conference diversity.

I just returned from NDC London 2017 and, as always, had a lovely time. The conference is consistently well-run and I can't recommend it enough. One of the things I particularly enjoyed was the qualititive difference in the energy this year. The NDC ... [More] team decided to do more this year in terms of addressing gender diversity, and I feel like it showed. They also adopted a very nice code of conduct that didn't mince words: NDC is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference without a refund at the discretion of the conference organizers. In addition, I found one of my favorite people, Jon Skeet, has created a list of requirements for conferences he's been asked to speak at: If conferences and user groups don’t want to make any efforts to improve diversity, that’s their choice – but I hope that they’ll find it increasingly difficult to attract good speakers, and I’m going to be a tiny part of that scarcity. I completely agree. Endorsing and Adopting These Requirements I'm completely aware that I'm no Jon Skeet, but I do get invited from time to time to speak at various conferences. Some have done well, others have been a complete mess (in terms of diversity). I want to do what I can to push conference organizers into the "done well" category. So, to that end I will join Jon in this, and if you're a speaker I would urge you to consider something similar: Code of Conduct Something must be written or published that engages diversity issues of all kinds (not only gender), including what will be done to resolve any problems that arise. The CoC must contain instructions for what to do in case of a problem, who to contact and how. In addition, the existence of this CoC needs to be made prominent. Ideally attendees should be made to agree to this in order to attend. Everyone should feel safe at a conference and if a conference CoC 1) doesn't exist or 2) isn't worded in a supportive way I won't be speaking there. Posted Reminders for Support At Øredev this year (a conference in Sweden), I saw notices posted around the venue with a simple sentence: Feeling harrassed or embarrassed? Need someone to talk to? Just send a note to [email]. For more information, see our Code of Conduct at... This is an excellent reminder during the course of the conference that 1) help is available if needed and 2) the CoC exists. I will actively encourage (and help as needed) conferences to post signs similar to this throughout the venue. White Male Panels I won't take part in panels (3 or more speakers) that are all white men, even if "just for fun". There are always ways to include diverse voices (which I'm happy to help with, see below). Active Steps To Increase Diversity Diversity issues are deep and complicated. The worst thing you can do is to ignore the problem and shrug it off. If you're a conference organizer, urge your team to reach out to as many speakers as possible. If you need help finding diverse speakers, ask for it. There are a number of experienced speakers (myself included) who are more than happy to lend a hand, offering names and giving up slots in order to support your efforts. Prior to accepting any speaking engagement, I will be asking organizers what they've done to increase diversity at their conference for both attendees and speakers. I'm more than happy to offer any help I can in this way. If I can be replaced by an under-represented speaker, I will do my best to make it happen. Helping As I Can I've had the privilege of speaking at a number of conferences over the years. In fact I'll up that and say that I'm just privileged period. All the same, I'm in a position to help. To that end, I'll follow Jon's lead: Offer to help find diverse speakers for any conference, not just the one's I'm invited to. I know a number of talented speakers (some seasoned, some just getting started) and I'm happy to refer or, better yet, to replace myself at your conference. Help prepare/fine tune abstracts, slide decks and presentations. If you feel you're under-represented and need some help, please email me and I will help you as much as I can. If you're an organizer and would like to send people my way, please do. On-site mentor/co-presenter. If we're at the same conference and you would like some help, please know the answer is "yes". If I'm speaking at your conference and you want to offer my help to an under-represented speaker, you've got it. A Thought For The Snarky As Gary Bernhardt puts it: ... I guess I can say this part directly: I'm very afraid of social justice advocates whose goals are the same as mine Dont' be that person. The one who parses/snarks/complains that someone else isn't helping the right way. I came accross this at the last conference and it's insanely annoying. Let's be supportive on this! We need to come together and snark is bullshit. If you have thoughts or objections on anything you've read here, I encourage you to reach out to me and let me know. If you're a speaker, I would strongly encourage you to adopt a similar set of requirements. As Jon points out regarding conferences with low diversity: I hope that they’ll find it increasingly difficult to attract good speakers, and I’m going to be a tiny part of that scarcity. [Less]

I just returned from NDC London 2017 and, as always, had a lovely time. The conference is consistently well-run and I can’t recommend it enough. One of the things I particularly enjoyed was the qualititive difference in the energy this year. The NDC ... [More] team decided to do more this year in terms of addressing gender diversity, and I feel like it showed. They also adopted a very nice code of conduct that didn’t mince words: NDC is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference without a refund at the discretion of the conference organizers. In addition, I found one of my favorite people, Jon Skeet, has created a list of requirements for conferences he’s been asked to speak at: If conferences and user groups don’t want to make any efforts to improve diversity, that’s their choice – but I hope that they’ll find it increasingly difficult to attract good speakers, and I’m going to be a tiny part of that scarcity. I completely agree. Endorsing and Adopting These Requirements I’m completely aware that I’m no Jon Skeet, but I do get invited from time to time to speak at various conferences. Some have done well, others have been a complete mess (in terms of diversity). I want to do what I can to push conference organizers into the “done well” category. So, to that end I will join Jon in this, and if you’re a speaker I would urge you to consider something similar: Code of Conduct Something must be written or published that engages diversity issues of all kinds (not only gender), including what will be done to resolve any problems that arise. The CoC must contain instructions for what to do in case of a problem, who to contact and how. In addition, the existence of this CoC needs to be made prominent. Ideally attendees should be made to agree to this in order to attend. Everyone should feel safe at a conference and if a conference CoC 1) doesn’t exist or 2) isn’t worded in a supportive way I won’t be speaking there. Posted Reminders for Support At Øredev this year (a conference in Sweden), I saw notices posted around the venue with a simple sentence: Feeling harrassed or embarrassed? Need someone to talk to? Just send a note to [email]. For more information, see our Code of Conduct at… This is an excellent reminder during the course of the conference that 1) help is available if needed and 2) the CoC exists. I will actively encourage (and help as needed) conferences to post signs similar to this throughout the venue. White Male Panels I won’t take part in panels (3 or more speakers) that are all white men, even if “just for fun”. There are always ways to include diverse voices (which I’m happy to help with, see below). Active Steps To Increase Diversity Diversity issues are deep and complicated. The worst thing you can do is to ignore the problem and shrug it off. If you’re a conference organizer, urge your team to reach out to as many speakers as possible. If you need help finding diverse speakers, ask for it. There are a number of experienced speakers (myself included) who are more than happy to lend a hand, offering names and giving up slots in order to support your efforts. Prior to accepting any speaking engagement, I will be asking organizers what they’ve done to increase diversity at their conference for both attendees and speakers. I’m more than happy to offer any help I can in this way. If I can be replaced by an under-represented speaker, I will do my best to make it happen. Helping As I Can I’ve had the privilege of speaking at a number of conferences over the years. In fact I’ll up that and say that I’m just privileged period. All the same, I’m in a position to help. To that end, I’ll follow Jon’s lead: Offer to help find diverse speakers for any conference, not just the one’s I’m invited to. I know a number of talented speakers (some seasoned, some just getting started) and I’m happy to refer or, better yet, to replace myself at your conference. Help prepare/fine tune abstracts, slide decks and presentations. If you feel you’re under-represented and need some help, please email me and I will help you as much as I can. If you’re an organizer and would like to send people my way, please do. On-site mentor/co-presenter. If we’re at the same conference and you would like some help, please know the answer is “yes”. If I’m speaking at your conference and you want to offer my help to an under-represented speaker, you’ve got it. A Thought For The Snarky As Gary Bernhardt puts it: … I guess I can say this part directly: I’m very afraid of social justice advocates whose goals are the same as mine Dont’ be that person. The one who parses/snarks/complains that someone else isn’t helping the right way. I came accross this at the last conference and it’s insanely annoying. Let’s be supportive on this! We need to come together and snark is bullshit. If you have thoughts or objections on anything you’ve read here, I encourage you to reach out to me and let me know. If you’re a speaker, I would strongly encourage you to adopt a similar set of requirements. As Jon points out regarding conferences with low diversity: I hope that they’ll find it increasingly difficult to attract good speakers, and I’m going to be a tiny part of that scarcity. [Less]

I'm hoping to do some small part to encourage conference diversity.

Update: The Book Is Available Now I've setup a pre-release for the book which you can buy now. You'll receive all updates as they become available! I was in the middle of a conversation with a friend the other week and we started debating some data ... [More] access nonsense. This friend (whom shall remain anonymous) asked me a simple question: So you decided to go O(N^2) instead of just O(N+1) then? I sort of laughed nervously, thinking that the definition would come. I swear it hurts to write this right now but... it's really what happened. Yes, I'm your nightmare. The truth is I've known Big-O notation for quite some time, but the fact that I couldn't just call it up right then and there was ... quite frustrating. I don't have a CS degree and the same can be said for a lot of my friends who write blog posts and get up in front of rooms of people to give talks on computer science stuff. We could sit here all day and debate whether I'm truly qualified to do such things - but rather than do that I'll just throw in the towel and say you're right: I really should know these things. My problem is that I a) don't have enought time and money to go back to school and b) I think I can dig in and figure a lot of stuff out using resources online (lectures, tutorials, etc) and books readily available for my Kindle/iPad. But that's no excuse. The Inspiration I don't know if this is nice of me, or "cool to do" in the online sense, but it's the truth so... whatever. My inspiration for this book is an anonymous comment left on Jeff Atwood's blog: For me, spreading ignorance (or bad information due to ignorance) is an issue. If you are gonna talk about subject X, make sure you know subject X, well enough to talk about it. At least, make sure that you are not making gross errors about subject X. Is it really too much to ask? I've been working as a professional programmer for years, and I've encountered many without basic scientific background. And that's FINE! Not everyone needs it, or wants it. But then these people read a blog post, and it sounds right, so they believe it. After all, they lack the knowledge to figure out which parts are true and which are don't. That's why they are reading the blog! And they learn stuff that is WRONG. And then they are going to implement this stuff, and argue about it, and generally BELIEVE that anything having to do with CS is either unpractical or is easily enough learned in 30 minutes of reading. And then I have to work with these people, and manage them! They have no grasp of how much they simply don't KNOW. And at some point, their knowledge simply ain't gonna cut it. And they are going to argue with me, or write me off as a user of fancy computer science jargon. I mean, it's just register allocation, right? How hard could it be? It's only BSP tree optimization, let's just check all the options! So I am trying to combat this ignorance for practical, selfish reasons. Programmers need to understand the problems they work on. They need to understand when they are out of their depths, and its time to hit the books, or call someone who knows. Or reject that project, or bump up the cost and time estimate. At least map out the areas of your understanding, so you'll know when you're on treacherous ground. The other reason is a matter of principle. Ignorance is pretty bad, and I reject mediocrity for its own sake. In less fancy terms, if you are writing technical posts, get the technical details RIGHT! M1116: you're absolutely right. The main issue I have is that I don't know what I don't know. I set out to change that 6 months ago, and it's what I hope to share with you in a few months from now. The Imposter's Handbook I'm 80% of the way through this effort, and it's quite literally changing my life. Every single chapter I write has completely altered my outlook on things and, most importantly: made me see all too clearly just what I do not know. Here's a list of the chapters I have so far (in no particular order): Computational Theory: Finite State, Pushdown, and Turing Machines as well as Geek Trading cards and P/NP "stuff" Algorithms: bubble sort, heap sort, quick and merge sort, selection sort and binary search. Big-O Notation: what each common asymptotic complexity means and why you should care. Linux Essentials: how to get around and do basic things Shell Scripting: How you can accomplish various tasks using the command line, including tossing Grunt/Gulp and using Make Software Design: SOLID, Gang of Four patterns, etc Programming Language Essentials: Compilers, memory usage, garbage collection, runtimes, TIOBE analysis, a quick overview of what's popular vs. what pays Data Structures: Arrays, linked lists, heaps, hash tables and binary search trees... what they are and why you should care Encryption: ciphers, encryption algorithms and basic hashing including the security/insecurity of each approach I might add some things or prune back but as I mention: I'm 80% there. Whatever Why Am I Telling You? I thought if you had any ideas or requests you could let me know (do it on Twitter: http://twitter.com/robconery). These are things that I need to know more about, and writing/presenting things like this forces me to research them. Which I think is critical: I don't take this lightly. One sure fire way that I'll learn this stuff is to have my ass on the line - and it really, really is with this effort. Is This Supposed To Replace a Degree? HELL. NO. My goal with this book is to show non-CS grads just how much they don't know. As I mention: the very act of writing this book has completely 100% no shit changed everything about how I approach programming. Absolutely everything. I hope to fire up the non-CS grads out ther to go investigate subjects that interest them. To seek out the easily-accessible, free online courses from Harvard, Stanford, and other high-caliber schools. All links will be included in the book. You Really Should Have a Chapter On X Yeah, I probably should. Do me a favor and let me know if you have a request. If I have time, I'll add it in there. Hopefully I'll have this thing ready to go in a month or so. It's taking me forever and it's mostly research - which is too damn fun. [Less]