Help me help you: building a library of useful software development writing
Software development is a complex field and web development isn’t the simplest corner of it. Beyond the inherent complexities of the coding itself, software has, to use the words of investor types around the world, eaten the world.
It touches on every business. It’s an integral part of modern product design. There is no marketing, no production, no media unaffected by software.
It’s both complex in detail and at a high level. But those of us working in software have to keep up and try to understand what’s going on.
- What do these new web platform features mean?
- How am I affected by these regulatory changes?
- Is my speciality being made obsolete?
- Will I have to relearn everything?
- How important is WASM anyway?
- I thought web components sucked? What’s changed?
Trying to answer these questions is work, usually unpaid.
If you’re a freelancer or a consultant, the time you spend researching and keeping up is time you’d otherwise spend either working billable hours or generating leads. Taking a week to research a topic and analyse the implications could literally cost you thousands of dollars, depending on the circumstances.
Those who don’t have to worry about each billed hour still don’t have the luxury to spend that kind of time or effort because they have deadlines, projects, and budgets to manage. Features need to be shipped.
“AI” was the dream of automated research and it didn’t pan out.
“Tell me what this means” #
Chatbots don’t analyse. They just give you the most generic summary of the status quo imaginable. Search engine results go in on one end, a pat answer comes out the other.
If anything, the generative model “revolution” has made research much, much harder. Search engine results are filled with “AI slop”. Social media and blog posts are filled with misinformation because the writers took chatbot hallucinations at face value.
You were promised a “figure this out and explain it” button, but that’s turned out to be the information equivalent of the futuristic jet pack. The dream turned out to be just plain dangerous.
Help me build out a library of useful software development essays #
My blog, books, and newsletter are the product of my own research done for my own projects. I research because my academic background trained me to tackle every problem by first researching. I write to explain my research to myself.
It’s cost me, because I fall into the same freelancer dynamic I described above. The effort of figuring things out and then trying to explain them has generally been paid less than spending that same time coding.
Maybe we can change this for both of us.
Selling the ebooks has been one way to recoup the investment. People seem to like them. My newsletter has been on a steady weekly schedule for a while now.
I think I can do more, so I’ve started a membership program using Steady.
The idea is simple. For a subscription price of €6 a month, you:
- Support the newsletter.
- Ensure that I have the time to invest in deeper research and more involved analysis.
- Get access to preview editions of essays before they’re published to the blog or the newsletter.
- Hopefully, with enough members, more exclusive essays and, possibly, a podcast or Youtube channel.
- Get access to web-based versions of all of my ebooks.
It’s the last bit that originally drove me to look into membership programs. Not everybody finds ebooks accessible or useful and I’m enough of a believer in the web to consider web-based versions of my books to be essential.
So, I’ve posted all of my ebooks as paywalled posts on Steady:
- Out of the Software Crisis
- The Intelligence Illusion
- Yellow
- And the essay collection Bad Writing
It’s over 170 thousands words of research into some of the trickiest topics in software development that you’ll immediately get access to upon joining. All for €6/month.
Hopefully, that number will only grow with time into a proper library of software development research and development.
The current preview essay is something I’ve been working on for a while: a look at the interplay between the post-React transition and the industry’s overuse of LLM chatbots and copilots.
I’ll publish it at some point next week, if all goes well, but you can preview it today if you join.
New Web Development. Or, why Copilots and chatbots are particularly bad for modern web dev (Preview)
Steady also has a “guest membership” feature which means I can, effectively, offer team plans.
You can see the main page for the membership program over on the Steady website.
And if you aren’t the subscription type, I still plan to always offer ebook versions of what I write, and to demonstrate that committent, I’m offering a The Intelligence Illusion: A practical guide to the business risks of Generative AI, details below.
For the first time ever, you can now get my book on the risks of “AI” for $9.99 USD.
(And, yes, I realise this may be a case of saving the best for last.)
This deal will last until end of day Friday 5 of July, 2024, a week from now.