Blog Archives

Dear StackExchange: Will You Be My Valentine?

With all due respect to my partner, I am totally in love with StackExchange, the network of Q&A sites that began with StackOverflow and, over the last few years, has blossomed into one of the best communities I have ever seen on the interwebs.

I don’t say things like that lightly. I mean, I’m one of those grumbly old jaded “get offa my lawn, you!” people who has been working and building things on the web for a really long time (18 freaking years, if you’re counting at home). I’ve kept my distance from discussion/Q&A forums and listservs in recent years for a few reasons, boiled down to these: a lot of people are jerks, and a lot of people don’t even try to help themselves—both of these factors just waste everyone’s time, effort, and goodwill, and those are things I let affect me far more than I should.

But given the new year (always a good time to start new things), time on my hands after quitting my job, and a deep desire to get back to my roots (firmly planted outside of academia), I decided to commit time to becoming a good community member at StackExchange. Since I follow both Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) and Joel Spolsky (@spolsky) on Twitter and have read/enjoyed/learned from each of their blogs for a long time, I figured if there was going to be any network that I embedded myself within, it was going to be one that they started.
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Spend a Buck & Read “The Professor’s Assassin”

Have a spare buck in your pocket? Allow me to recommend Matthew Pearl’s dramatization of “The Shocking Campus Shooting in Virginia You Never Heard Of”. This long short story/short novella (you can argue which it is among yourselves) is set in 1840, on the grounds of the University of Virginia. On November 12 of that year, the dean of the faculty was shot—and later died—after attempting to quell a student-led disturbance on the Lawn (it’s true). The true story itself is interesting, but as usual with Pearl’s books both his characterizations and the locale are richly described and the tale told well.

I thoroughly enjoyed Pearl’s work, despite being in the perfect position to nitpick it to death since I work on Grounds and have held in my hands and read original accounts of the shooting and John Davis’s death courtesy of the Albert & Shirley Small Special Collections Library. But there’s no nitpicking from me—just praise, and the fervent desire that you all go take that dollar that’s been burning a hole in your pocket and spend it on this story.

While reading “The Professor’s Assassin” (available as a download from Amazon and numerous other outlets) you’ll be introduced to one William Barton Rogers, the future founder of MIT. This tidbit is important, as the novella is a prequel to The Technologists, a novel that focuses on the first class of students at MIT and, well, a fictional, yet historically-grounded, mystery. Intrigued? The book has its own trailer…and it’s about science and technology…in the nineteenth century. What’s not to love?

sort of interesting note: Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club was one of the only books I read for pleasure during my PhD work in c19 American Lit.

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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