In 2014 I had three or four self-published e-books under my belt. In the process I had written enough ebook publishing automations to have a deep familiarity with various project automation tools, in particular the Rake build tool. And I had formed some opinions about how to write robust project automation.
At that time, taking what I’d learned and putting it into a book about Rake seemed like a no-brainer, so I announced that I was writing one and started pre-selling it. And then promptly ran head-on into the worst case of writer’s block in my career.
Well, that’s not all. Life happened too, in ways I could not have predicted. But even when I found times to take a breather, I could never seem to find inspiration for what was ostensibly the lowest-hanging fruit I could have set for myself, writing-wise. I also hamstrung myself with yak-shaves; at one point creating a whole golden-master testing framework just to automate testing the code samples in the book.
It turns out that knowing about a topic and being energized to write about it are two very different things.
But in March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was getting into full swing, I found myself job-free, locked-down, and with some time on my hands. And I felt inspired to revisit the project.
I no longer wanted to write a book focused directly on Rake. My work had been moving steadily away from strictly Ruby-focused content. And I felt that the market for Rake-centric project automation skills was probably small and shrinking. As the buzz around Ruby died down and other technologies were taking the spotlight.
What I did want to write about was project automation as a more general, abstract practice. I also wanted to capture some of the things I’d learned over the years about the technical underpinnings of writing and publishing e-books for a technical audience. And I still wanted to fulfill in some form on my commitment to deliver a book about Rake.
The idea that emerged was a braided three-strand recursive loop of a book: I would write a book about the automations for publishing the book I was writing. It would be a book about e-book publishing tools, emergent project automation patterns, and Rake power usage. All at the same time.
I say “book”, but from the start I also envisioned delivering it in both e-book and course formats. That was part of the fun of writing the automations for it: they needed to support publishing not just multiple formats, but to multiple platforms and in multiple modalities.
The course form of that book is what you’re looking at right now. Consistent with the self-referential focus on automation, the main content portions of this course are [re]generated automatically from the A Book About Project Automation Github repository.
This is a course of a book about project automation for this course of a book. And this is me saying: I hope you enjoy it and take some useful ideas away with you.
Cheers,
—
Avdi
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