One of my goals for the year is to learn a new programming language. It’s been a while since I learned a new language, and I feel like a lot of the languages I know well (Go, Python, C++) are similar to each other, so I want to try getting out of my comfort zone a bit with a language that feels weird to me.

Requirements

Here’s what I’m looking for:

I just finished listening to Simon Willison’s interview on the Software Misadventures podcast. I learned a lot from the interview, so I wrote up my notes.

This is not a summary of the whole interview, just the parts that were new to me or that I’d like to remember.

Who’s Simon Willison?

• One of the co-creators of Django, the most popular web framework for Python.
• One of the most popular indepedent bloggers on Hacker News.
• For the last few years, has focused his blog primarily on AI, especially on applications of AI technology in everyday software development.
• Currently working on an open-source data analysis tool called Datasette.

Plugins as a form of open-source contribution

Original discussion

Highlights

• Why am I making slower progress than I’d like on my book?
• I optimize my Asciidoctor write and preview workflow.
• I’m working on a side project to track Hacker News performance in real-time.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Write a blog post about lessons from Kickstarter

• Result: Published My $6k Advance as a Self-Published Technical Author
• Grade: A

I originally set out to write a guide that focused on Kickstarter, but the more I wrote, the less I felt like Kickstarter was the interesting part. I was more excited about crowdfunding as a path for self-published authors, and Kickstarter is just one way of crowdfunding.

I just received $5,947 in advance sales for my first technical book, even though it’s only 25% complete, and I’m self-publishing it. The book is called Refactoring English, and it’s a guide for software developers to improve their writing.

In March, I ran a three-week pre-sale for the book on Kickstarter. The pre-sale raised $6,551 from 191 customers. After Kickstarter’s fees, I get $5,946.92, or 91% of the total.

Suppose you host your podcast on a platform like Libsyn or Podbean. What happens if you decide to switch podcast platforms? You already gave everyone a RSS URL that pointed to your old platform.

For example Libsyn gives your podcast an RSS URL like this:

• https://feeds.libsyn.com/12345/rss

When you submitted your podcast to Apple Podcasts and shared your RSS URL with your listeners, you pointed them directly to your podcast platform.