I just finished listening to Simon Willison’s interview on the Software Misadventures podcast. I learned a lot from the interview, so I wrote up my notes. This is not a summary of the whole interview, just the parts that were new to me or that I’d like to remember. Simon Willison on the Software Misadventures podcast Who’s Simon Willison? One of the co-creators of Django, the most popular web framework for Python. One of the most popular indepedent bloggers on Hacker News. For the last few years, has focused his blog primarily on AI, especially on applications of AI technology in everyday software development. Currently working on an open-source data analysis tool called Datasette. Plugins as a form of open-source contribution Original discussion

Highlights Why am I making slower progress than I’d like on my book? I optimize my Asciidoctor write and preview workflow. I’m working on a side project to track Hacker News performance in real-time. Goal grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Write a blog post about lessons from Kickstarter Result: Published My $6k Advance as a Self-Published Technical Author Grade: A I originally set out to write a guide that focused on Kickstarter, but the more I wrote, the less I felt like Kickstarter was the interesting part. I was more excited about crowdfunding as a path for self-published authors, and Kickstarter is just one way of crowdfunding.

I just received $5,947 in advance sales for my first technical book, even though it’s only 25% complete, and I’m self-publishing it. The book is called Refactoring English, and it’s a guide for software developers to improve their writing. In March, I ran a three-week pre-sale for the book on Kickstarter. The pre-sale raised $6,551 from 191 customers. After Kickstarter’s fees, I get $5,946.92, or 91% of the total. Proceeds from my pre-sale on Kickstarter

Suppose you host your podcast on a platform like Libsyn or Podbean. What happens if you decide to switch podcast platforms? You already gave everyone a RSS URL that pointed to your old platform. For example Libsyn gives your podcast an RSS URL like this: https://feeds.libsyn.com/12345/rss When you submitted your podcast to Apple Podcasts and shared your RSS URL with your listeners, you pointed them directly to your podcast platform.