The Recap #1

A weekly recap of my journey towards financial independence. Contains my notes, community feedback, and a few scattered links. Subscribe to get those in your inbox.

Preslav Rachev

Jan 12, 2021 • 3 min read

Dear friends,

Happy New Year, and welcome to my first weekly recap for 2021!

I am still figuring out a proper format for these newsletters. If the first couple of emails seem a little chaotic, please bear with me. What I am hoping to achieve is not just a log of my experience, but an actual community with 2-way communication. That is why your early feedback is vital. Please, do not hesitate to send me an email with your critique and suggestions. Also, I am ready to listen to your project ideas if you are looking for collaboration.

What follows:

A recap of my book writing challenges
A couple of links and resources you might enjoy

Book writing challenges

The first week of 2021, I dedicated most of my free time to my little e-book project - Generative Art in Go, due for its first release in February. Although I am back on track, I thought I had underestimated certain aspects for a couple of days. Like the publishing and distribution part, for example. As it turned out, there is a plethora of note-taking and writing tools out there, but none explicitly designed for exporting e-books. Some were good at generating beautifully laid-out PDFs but terrible when it came to ePub. Others had their way of handling graphics and imagery. A third had it all figured out, except providing an option for generating footnotes (it's a book, after all). In the end, I found Leanpub's Markua to be the best possible compromise. It is technically a superset of Markdown, so I could still keep using my preferred editor of choice (iAWriter). Indeed, the specific Markua additions stick out a little, but that is not such a big deal. The fact that Leanpub manages to render books of decent quality in multiple formats is something I thought the open-source community has long since cracked, but that is not the case.

Anyway, this part solved, I was able to continence my work on the book. To complement the last chapter, I created and released a small experiment yesterday. It uses the Go code I describe in the book but compiles it to WebAssembly to run on a browser. I will not go into technical details here, so I am just going to say the following. WebAssembly works, but we are not quite there yet.