My New Book on Kubernetes for Developers

I wrote a book! It’s a focused, clear introduction to Kubernetes for web developers. You can get the book from Golden Guide to Kubernetes Application Development.

This post covers the behind-the-scenes of how I wrote the book. If you want to be sold on the book… click that link 👆.

Workspace

There’s a high table in the back left corner of the IKEA cafe that’s got this book written all over it.

Every time I start a new project, I seem to pick a new place to work from. For Vanilla, that was a windowless room with sandstone walls… essentially a cave. Whatever place it is, it becomes forever associated with that project. All work must happen in that space, and once the project is done that space is tainted forever.

I highly recommend the IKEA cafe for a few reasons. (I’m putting faith in the fact that not too many people will read this and so the IKEA cafe won’t be ruined by crowds.)

• A tonne of space with no one side-eyeing you. The IKEA cafe is pretty much self-service, so you don’t feel pressured to buy something every eleven minutes
• Solid wifi, access to power outlets
• Unlimited coffee for $2.50. Although I swear they ramp up the caffeine in the coffee so you don’t want more than a cup.

A caveat: get the hell out of there before lunchtime. I had no idea there were so many families with kids in the world. And they all congregate in the IKEA cafe at 11:50am.

Tools

What does a programming nerd do when he writes a book? What about a programming and a Mac nerd?

I really thought I’d get to write some interesting document generation code… maybe some hardcore LaTeX… at least a script that did something to some Markdown.

I didn’t get to do any of that! What’s the point of that CS degree again? I just ended up using Pages and Keynote, and exporting to PDF. It was… too simple and easy.

Pages is decent. Keynote’s diagramming features are excellent. If I wrote another book, I’d probably use the same tools again.

The purchasing flow is handled by Gumroad. There are also some Zapier integrations I’ve created to generate notifications and give access to the upgraded package repo. The upgraded package is hosted on a private GitHub repo.

Stats

Some fun stats!

• 22,632 words
• 107 pages
• 16 diagrams
• 2k+ lines of sample code, solutions, and resources
• $621 first week sales

Long Term

Marketing-wise, this project is much more of a slow burn than my other apps. The current strategy is to write Kubernetes blog posts on commonly-asked questions regularly, and let Google do the rest. I’ll also experiment with answering StackOverflow and Quora questions.