Now that I’m writing and publishing my own book, I like to take note of a book’s construction. All the choices made outside of the writing itself—everything but the words. Reading Debbie Berne’s The Design of Books is helping me develop a discerning eye for such details.
Writing for Developers by Cynthia Dunlop and Piotr Sarna
- Planted:
I’m reading Writing for Developers by Cynthia Dunlop and Piotr Sarna with the Overcommitted podcast book club. We’re two weeks in, and so far we’ve read chapters 1, 2, 3, and 8.
On patterns
In the same way that this book identifies patterns of blog posts (“Bug Hunt”, “Rewrote It in X”), it might be helpful to collect a list of snowclones to be used as titles. Like, I’m using The secret life of X for my book’s subtitle. But there are countless others. Uber for X; Grokking Y; Z Considered Harmful.
On minimalism
Clean, clear, and straight to the point. This blog post’s appearance and writing style are exactly what you would expect from someone who implemented a functional search engine in 80 lines of code. (41)
Chapter 3 on “Captivating readers” includes case studies of top Hacker News posts from last year. This quote is from Cynthia and Piotr’s discussion of A search engine in 80 lines of Python by Alex Molas.
I’m torn between minimalist blogs with high information density and beautifully designed blogs where you have to scroll below the fold to get to the meat of a post (on mobile, at least). Two of my blogging models are Tom MacWright and Maggie Appleton. Tom’s blog is pretty minimalist, and Maggie’s blog is big and beautiful. I like both at different times for different reasons. My garden is modeled more after Maggie’s style. You can always zoom in on small text, but it usually doesn’t work as well to zoom out on big text. The best of both worlds may be offering a minimalist reading mode, e.g. by appending .txt to any post URL.
On bragging
Tech world bragging at the right dosage is good for you and your peers. (157)
A blog can be a public brag doc. I have trouble motivating to write a brag doc, but I like the idea of a blog as a way to track work you’re most proud of. Not everything in a private brag doc would work in a public one, of course, but it can cover some of the same ground and make the chore more gratifying.
Everything but the words
So many people work together on a traditionally published book! Beyond this book’s two authors, the copyright page lists eight team members—five editors and three others: developmental editor, technical editor, review editor, production editor, copy editor, proofreader, typesetter, and cover designer. I don’t actually know what each editor does. What’s the difference between a copy editor and a proofreader? Plus dozens and dozens of people read drafts of the book.
Why
I have three whys for reading this book:
- Become a better programmer-writer for my book, my job, and my garden
- Join a community of programmer-writers
- Learn how to run a writers’ book club (I’m leading a local one this spring)