Week 2 progress

This week, I've worked for about 30 hours (ouch) on the outline of the book. The more I think about it, the more insane it sounds ;-)

But I did make good progress, so it's not all wasted effort. The thing is that I've spent a whole lot of time reorganizing the content, eliminating duplication, finding the right order in which I could introduce the concepts, etc.

The more I thought about what to cover, and the more I added to my mindmap. At this point, what I first envisioned as a 150-200 pages book about software development concepts risks turning into a 600+ pages behemoth.

I haven't made a final decision yet, but I think that I'll split up the product into multiple parts and let buyers select the part(s) they're interested in.

So far, I've 13 (!) parts in mind:

Software craft
What clients need
Product management
Architecture
Software design
Computer architecture and operating system basics
Coding basics
General concerns
Back-end development
Front-end development
IT infrastructure
Security
Software development approaches & methodologies

Each of those indeed covers very specific topics. I believe that the "whole" will bring a lot of value for beginners/juniors, but pricing it is going to be difficult.

Also, specific parts will be useful for all skill levels (juniors to experts) because someone who is an expert in front-end development might not be so at ease with back-end development or vice versa; the same goes for security, IT infrastructure, etc.

I hoped to finish the draft outline this week, but given how deep I've gone, it's no wonder that I'm not done yet.

I did create a complete mindmap (https://twitter.com/dSebastien/status/1330538772908412930) with what to cover for all 13 parts, but I've only completed the outline text for 10/13.

Another problem with the draft outline is that it is already 15 pages long, so I clearly need to make a condensed version of it, all while still showing that the content will indeed be interesting.

Next week, I should be done with the outline text and I should be able to publish it. I'll probably publish the full version on a dedicated page on the landing site (https://dev-concepts.dev) and the condensed one on Gumroad; linking back to the full version.

I'll also think about how to adapt the options/packages on Gumroad and how to adapt the prices.