Tech Books: Not Dead!

As someone who has made a decent secondary income for the last twelve years writing technical books, a recent post in the SD Times caught my eye: “Are tech books dead?” it asks. The author comes to the conclusion that no, they’re not, although the rise of blogs and other online material certainly plays a role for learners more than it has in the past. I agree with this conclusion, which itself isn’t interesting, but that this is the conclusion still in 2011—almost 2012—is interesting to me (and it supports my desire to keep on writing books).

I started writing technical books in 1999; I wrote the second PHP-related book that came on the market (for Prima-Tech which became part of Course Technology which became part of Cenage, if you’re interested), and from that point on I was solicited to write some more, eventually writing only for Pearson and putting out an edition or two of something or another each year.

I never thought I’d still be doing this a decade later. As a developer myself, I knew how I learned new things in the ever-changing tech landscape, and it isn’t from technical books. I thought “who on earth would pick up a chunky ol’ book and sit it next to their computer while working on something?” … my choice of “thickbook.com” as my domain name was meant to be funny, like “here are Thick Books From Which You Shall Learn Things” (tongue firmly in cheek). The joke’s on me, because that income has increased or remained steady each year; there’s been no noticeable drop-off in either the number of sales of my books, the purchase of rights for translation, or the amount I’ve earned in royalties.

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What’s Next?

I don’t really know.

I haven’t blogged much in the past year, but several months ago I wrote a blog post about what I do in my job at University of Virginia Library. All of that is now “what I did,” because I’ve resigned from that position effective the end of the year.

I’m not going to detail the reasons; you can chalk it up to philosophical differences in terms of technical focus, personnel, and institutional organization (and its resulting inertia). These are not unique to UVa or its Library.

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Selected ProfHacker Posts (from the archives)

From August 2009 to October 2010, I wrote almost 100 blog posts for (and was the managing editor of) ProfHacker, a blog hosted by The Chronicle of Higher Education and providing tips about teaching, technology, and productivity.

Here are links to some of my favorite posts from those times…including their dates of publication so you can take some of the content (and the links found within) with a grain of salt—internet time races on, and all that.

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This is What I Do

NOTE! As of the end of 2011, I don’t do this at all. I resigned my position after one year at UVa Library.

The other day I wrote up a “it’s June 1st, sounds like a good time for a quick status update” email for my bosses, and in doing so stepped back for a second and said “holy crap—we’re really doing a lot.” It’s true, we are. “We” in this case is the Online Library Environment group at University of Virginia Library. Seven super people (three senior engineers, a senior programmer, two programmer/analyst/DBAs, and a librarian/project manager) report to me, and I report to a director who reports to the Deputy University Librarian. Like I said in my post about an internal presentation I gave on the development lifecycle, my group is responsible for many of the public-facing web services that the Library provides plus the technologies that sit behind those interfaces. Almost every project we take on is driven by stakeholders outside of our department who have their own highly valued areas of expertise (e.g. librarians, archivists, media specialists, etc.)

The reason I thought about writing this blog post was because this morning I had the opportunity to see some of the folks at the NINES / NEH Summer Institutes for Evaluating Digital Scholarship…not because I was participating in the institute in any way, but because I was on my way downstairs to get coffee and the participants were all working in the beautiful, wonderful, comfortable Scholars’ Lab. I was able to talk for a few moments with some scholars I like and respect very much, and one of them (Amy Earhart, if you’re playing along at home, who—to reiterate—is pretty great!) asked me what project I’m working on right now.

Project, singular.

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Julie’s Recommended Web Hosting Provider

This is a question that I am asked all the time: “do you have a recommendation for a good hosting provider?” You know what? I do.

In August 2009 I wrote a ProfHacker post called Website Hosting 101 which explains what a hosting provider does, how to use it, and what to look for (or, what makes a good hosting provider) such as reliability/server uptime, customer service, bandwidth, domain name purchase and mangement, price, scripting languages and database support, and having a good control panel for host management. Also in that post (and in Sams Teach Yourself HTML and CSS in 24 Hours, 8th ed.) I linked to several perfectly good hosting providers, all of which I have used in some way…yet I did not name a favorite.

I’ve always had a favorite, though. Well, at least since mid-2005, when I started using Daily Razor. That’s right: my #1 web hosting provider recommendation is DAILY RAZOR.

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a short presentation: "Development Lifecycle: From Requirement to Release"

In my capacity as Lead Technologist/Chief Architect for the Online Library Environment at the University of Virginia Library, I manage a group of people who are responsible for many of the public-facing web services that the Library provides plus the technologies that sit behind those interfaces. Almost every project we take on is driven by stakeholders outside of our department (e.g. non-developers, or people not versed in technical matters) who have their own highly valued areas of expertise.

This is a relatively new department; it wasn’t fully staffed until I got here in January. As you can imagine, any processes we’ve recently started to implement (e.g. having processes for starting/working through projects) require a lot of training and reiteration of norms and ideals. Within the Library we have several interest groups that meet regularly to talk about current and future projects, possibilities, questions, and so on; one of those groups is the User Experience (UX) interest group. People from all departments and at all levels (from the University Librarian on down the line) come to these meetings to hear presentations and ask questions.

Today I took the opportunity to talk briefly about how we in OLE work with the specific UX folks (Joe Gilbert and Erin Mayhood, if we’re naming names, which I am) in the service of our stakeholders and their projects. Specifically, I discussed what we expect stakeholders (project instigators!) to do, and what we do with that information, how we communicate throughout a project, and so on. These slides are pretty generic (and my presentation was only 15 minutes) but it was another opportunity to get in people’s minds how we as developers don’t (or shouldn’t) just come up with stuff on our own and decide willy-nilly to do something. There’s actually a process!

(The titles of the slides are: functional requirements, example functional requirement, writing use cases (or epics), writing stories, an actual example, writing code, never stop communicating, releasing)

Here are the slides themselves (view at slideshare.net if they do not appear below):

Development Lifecycle: From Requirement to Release
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"Everyone’s a Coder Now": a presentation at 4Cs

A couple weeks ago I presented at the 4Cs (Conference on College Composition and Communication) as part of Session H18: “Writing text, writing code, writing connections”. My co-panelists were the lovely and talented Annette Vee and Brian Ballentine, and the panel was chaired by the inimitable Dennis Jerz. We had a good turnout—something like 25 people, and not all of them were our close personal friends (!!).

Here’s the panel intro:

An underacknowledged relation of composition and rhetoric is code studies, the critical examination of source code that comprises computer software. Yet the expertise we have in pedagogy, rhetoric, speech acts and narrative offer potential contributions to this new field. This panel plumbs the connections between two important means of communication—written text and written code—to update our understandings of composing with computers. We map productive inroads to code studies by way of rhetoric, Speech Act Theory and narrative theory and collectively argue that code is already central to the discipline of composition and rhetoric.

Here’s the abstract for my part (I was first up):

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went to MITH, did a little song and dance…

Yesterday I had the pleasure of spending time with friends/colleagues at MITH (the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities), as they invited me to say a few words for a session in their Digital Dialogues speaker series.

I took the opportunity to say a few words about something fundamental to my work here at UVa Library, and that is the Hydra Project. The abstract for my talk read as follows, and I actually discussed most of the things listed here:

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#reverb10, it's not you: it's me

I’m throwing in the towel with the Reverb 10 project—not because it was hard (I mean, it was, but in a good thinky way) but because with all the crazy traveling and life stuff I got so far behind that it seemed silly to go through the motions to catch up.

Honestly, I thought about each of the prompts every morning. I just didn’t write the posts. And really, the thinking is more important for me. I mean, sure—I know I’m just utterly fascinating and therefore who wouldn’t want me to hold forth on introspective personal topics (I’m kidding. No, really. I’m kidding.) … but really, the process was just for me to start orienting my brain in a different way. I’ve been doing that (independently of the Reverb 10 project), and will continue to do that, and hey, maybe I’ll actually blog about stuff in 2011. I’ve already declared it the year I get my life back.

I have some posts brewing—mostly technical thankfully (I know!) but maybe some personal as well. Or at least about nature. Or music. Those are good things.

smart != wise (unfortunately)

The Prompt: “Wisdom. What was the wisest decision you made this year, and how did it play out?” (Author: Susannah Conway)

Don’t worry—I’m not so arrogant as to write “the smart one” on my own wine glass name tag. Someone did that a long time ago and I kept it because it made me laugh. A lot.

Ever since I was wee, I’ve been “the smart one.” I contend I’m not all that smart. Lucky, for being in the right places at the right time, sure. Also, lucky for having parents who taught me to read early on and let me do my thing with regards to learnin’ stuff…and bought me a TRS-80 and a Commodore64 and a subscription to Byte and…well, generally nurtured the nerd. Ok, it’s not like the label “smart” is untrue—and for sure at the party with the name tag shown above I was the smartest person in the room, Stanford degrees be damned (no offense, Stanford), but have you met some of my friends? Some pretty smart folks there. It is so wonderful to hang out with people these days and not be pointed out as the anomalous “smart one”; the…not-smart-one would be the anomaly.

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