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.
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:
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.
Links and other findings
Hans Zeiger
And some podcasts, of course
Note: Episode embeds might not work in email, so please, check out the Web version of this post or use the direct links.Fareed Zakaria on Life After the Pandemic
Austin Kleon on Writing, Creativity and The Importance of Idleness
Until next week. Stay safe!
Cheers,
Preslav