I'm writing a book!
An exciting news coming...
👋 Hey, David here! Welcome to my newsletter where I share my journey as a frontend developer and an expat. Sometimes more.
It has been a while since I published a new post in this newsletter! A year actually! So much happened during this elapsed time!
Today, I want to focus on one of the significant change was taking the decision to write a book!
The decision
Deciding investing my time to write a book was not easy. To be successful, I had to choose how I will divide my days to make time to write. It does mean that I had to cut some non essential activities: less tv shows, less time on social media, less time building projects, less time studying… Not that I absolutely had to but I have been pushing for this type of project my whole life and now this was something I really wanted to do.
Change of routine
I had to start establishing a morning routine again, where I would try to spend at least an hour per day writing. Time is not something we can buy or add more to our lives. Planning my mornings and days is, for me, the only way to ensure I actually do what I want.
The “I don’t have time” has always been something I tried to avoid saying as much as I can. We take the time or we don’t. Not that it’s something simple or easy to do but I don’t like the idea of not being able to control my own time and how I choose to spend it.
I started in June waking up at 6am every morning (yes, even on the weekends), which also made me start going to bed around 9:45pm. That may sound early but that’s what I need to get close to my 8 hours of sleep.
I started using Structured which is a pretty simple app that helps me quickly organize my days. I learned about this app when I started using one sec, which helped me stop spending my precious time on social media. Highly recommend it!
As you can see in the following screenshot, my sleep consistency from the Athlytic app shows that I’m pretty constant with when I wake up, a little bit less when I go to bed but it’s a work in progress.
Making it public
As I’ve been reading many books about… “how to write a book”, probably the most common advice was to share the news with friends and family. And also have someone that will regularly ask you about your progresses. This sounded daunting at first, as I’ve been trying for the past years to no share projects that are far from completion.
But I decided to follow those advices and make the announcement on LinkedIn in July. As you can imagine, reactions were all positives and motivating, but a lot of work has still to be done and the process will be in part, pretty lonely.
Publish the work in progress
Most authors and publishers only release their book when it’s finalized, revised and corrected. Some publishers like O’Reilly have some of their books being published when they are still in progress and at different phases until the final release.
To follow this same logic and be able to get feedbacks as soon as possible, I decided to publish first on LeanPub. You can access the “Essential Tips for Junior Developers” homepage, fill out your name and email to know when I will publish my first version but also help me understand how much a book like this you think could be priced.
To this day, 14 people have subscribed. Knowing my lack of visibility across social medias, I’d say that it’s a start!
What’s next?
My My plan is to publish a first version on LeanPub once I reach 65% of my first draft. It will probably be pretty raw but that’s the goal. It will give me time to correct and adapt based on people’s feedback.
Feel free to comment on this post, subscribe to LeanPub updates and share this with anyone you think could be interested! I will probably explain in another publication why I choose to focus on junior developers and why.
Have a good one!
(Disclaimer: none of the content above has been written or suggested by any AI tool. This is my own and personal content.)
If you find this newsletter valuable, share it with a friend, and consider subscribing if you haven’t already! That would mean a lot to me!