Thursday, March 27, 2008

Developer, Teacher, Musician.... Author?!

It looks like I'm going to be adding another title to my list of accomplishments in the not-so-far-flung future. I'm working on a book, of all things, on OpenOffice.org. It's not the first time I've worked on documentation, but it is the first time I've tackled something this big. If you recall, I wrote the first draft of Haiku's User Interface Guidelines. I started hacking away at the initial manuscript last Friday and I'm just about finished with Chapter 4 of the part on Writer. I don't know how long it will be, but I highly doubt it will end up being one of those 500-page coffee table books like the "Learn Something in 21 Days" books that Sams Publishing does. I haven't come up with a title yet, but that's OK -- it's not like I'm on short notice or anything. It'll be published through Lulu.com for the print version and released online as a PDF with a Creative Commons license.

I thought I knew a lot about Writer, but I've learned so much in just the 6 days that I've been working on it. I never thought it would be as much fun as it has been. The upshot of the whole thing is that it requires *so* much less mental energy than writing code. I've put code on the back burner for now -- this is just as fun and has the potential to make me some money. With me moving late this year (tentatively), it's not like I don't have need for it.

1 comment:

  1. I'm trying to Email you about doing a revision of your original "How-To" for building Haiku in BeOS R5. Seems it's not possibly any more, until I get some revised GCC (gcc-2.95.3-haiku-[number]) from Haiku.org, which... doesn't exist, as far as I can tell.

    Could you possibly find it in your heart and time and interest, to possibly revise your How-To, taking all the new changes into account? I'd be very appreciative.

    Luposian

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