David Clinton, Author of Solving for Technology: How to quickly learn valuable new skills in a madly changing technology world

Please Note: As a special promotion for this podcast, you can use the discount code podmatter19 when buying any product from Manning Publications. At the end of this transcription, you will also find limited-use discount codes for one of David's books and one of his courses. - Eds.

Len: Hi I’m Len Epp from Leanpub, and in this Leanpub Frontmatter podcast I'll be interviewing David Clinton.

Based in Toronto, David is the author of a number of books, video courses, and articles on cutting-edge technical subjects. In his books and courses he covers areas like learning Amazon Web Services and Linux. David is a Linux Server Professional and has worked on real-world deployments in traditional data centers and the AWS cloud.

You can follow him on Twitter @davidbclinton and check out him website at bootstrap-it.com.

David is the author of the Leanpub books Solving for Technology: How to quickly learn valuable new skills in a madly changing technology world, and *Manage AWS Resources Using Ansible: the super short guide to cloud automation.

In this interview, we’re going to talk about David's background and career, professional interests, his books, and at the end we'll talk about him experience as both a conventionally published a self-published author.

So, thank you David for being on the Leanpub Frontmatter podcast.

David: Thank you for having me, it's a great opportunity.

Len: I always like to start these interviews by asking people for their origin story. So, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about where you grew up and how you first became interested in technology?

David: Well, I was born in Toronto - and a long, long, long time ago. Back in the early sixties. In high school, I was introduced briefly to programming in Fortran. I enjoyed it to a point, but the bug didn't bite that deeply. The other guys, the guys who were really good at it, were spending hours and hours writing programs that they would print on tractor feed paper - diagrams of Snoopy. I remember there were lots of x's with Snoopy and his dog house. And that was cool, I guess - but it didn't bite me that deeply. One of the guys actually - like my brief brush with fame - one of the guys in that group was actually Rob Sawyer, who became a very well-known science fiction writer.

Len: Oh wow.

David: That's the end of my brush with fame stories in life, I think. But it was really utilitarian. Years later, I had a book I wanted to write, and a neighbor got me a spare unused XT computer, with the 640 screaming kilobytes of RAM, and taught me how to use, what was it? Word? I guess it was WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS, unless I'm mistaken. And I started just to write books, but then it developed.

Once I had the tool, I was very curious to see what else I could do with it, and I taught myself to program a little bit in Basic, and then Visual Basic, and put together some resources that might have been of some use to someone somewhere.

It had bitten, and bitten deeply by that point. Whatever I saw that could be done with it, that was useful to me, I did it. And it expanded and went from hobby to career.

Len: And that career, as I understand it, initially took the form of being a high school teacher and vice principal?

David: Right. Although that was before technology really was still - the technology was still a hobby at that point.

I was teaching other topics and I was, by the - along the way, as a side hobby - a helpful device, I would build the school's networks and manage their IT. And I did the same at home, and for other people who needed it. It was an interesting hobby and it was a challenge, but it did eventually lead to this - to my second career, third career or whatever that might be right now.

Len: I'm sure the schools must have been really glad to have you around. Before I ask you a question about high school teaching in Ontario, what subjects did you teach? I'm sure there were probably many over the years.

David: Yeah, I touched on history and some law, and it was - you know the old joke in the academic world is, "Read the book, I haven't even taught it yet." By no means do you have to know anything to teach. It's useful to have skills as a teacher, and it's definitely useful to be enthusiastic and idealistic, and really want to share something of value with your students. But by and large, knowledge isn't really critical - at least until you step into the classroom, then you'd better know something.

Len: One thing - we were talking a little bit before we started recording this interview, and one of the fun features of this podcast is that I get to interview authors from all around the world, and they often have local knowledge of things that people might have only read about in the headlines. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the issue of violence in Ontario schools. Ontario is the province in Canada that the city of Toronto is in, where David's from. And I think a lot of people might be surprised to hear that there is a problem in parts of Canada with school violence.

David: Yeah, I mean I never experienced it in my own teaching. But that was a bunch of years ago and it was also much, much smaller. It was a private school.

But I do have colleagues who are in the front lines, and I've read the local reports. It's a problem. There hasn't been gun violence, as I remember, in Ontario. But there's been a lot of other problems. As I mentioned to you earlier, some school districts in Ontario now provide body armor, Kevlar body armor to some of their middle school teachers.

Because there are in many classrooms - children who can't be, or aren't restrained - and can actually do damage to their peers and their teachers. Why this is happening, and is it connected to the shootings in the United States and elsewhere? I have no idea, honestly. There are many factors in a complex society like we live in, that can lead to - well, alienation and depression. I don't know really why. I'm not an expert, and I don't think anybody's really an expert to be able to nail it and say, "This is why it's happening, and this is what we can do to solve it."

Everybody wants to know - nobody wants to see this. But education is pretty much impossible in that kind of environment. There are schools, obviously, that are a lot better than others. And there are classes that are a lot better, and there are teachers who are a lot better at managing it than others. But it takes experience. I always joke that a teacher, when he starts, or she starts, is idealistic, enthusiastic and filled with energy, but has no clue how to teach.

When their career ends, usually from around the time you burnout - they've got loads of experience and know exactly how to manage a classroom, but they're burnt out. There's a point when they have enough experience and still enough enthusiasm that they can do a great job. But then unfortunately it only lasts about 45 seconds. Of course I exaggerate, but it's not every teacher who can be running on all cylinders all the time. We're human. And all the teachers I know do their best every day - in every minute in the classroom, and everything beyond the classroom. But to be perfect is an impossible task.

Why schools - and teachers of course are not entirely to blame, or maybe not at all to blame for violence. And those are two separate things, but why violence happens is a very big question that all of us really want an answer for - and I don't know. I've heard answers, and none of them ring true.

Len: It's such a deep issue. You were just reminding me. So my dad - people often don't spend their entire career as teachers because of burnout and things like that, or just the challenges or wanting to move on.

My dad actually taught high school for a couple of years Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in the 1950s. And he occasionally regales people with stories of basically like the Fonzie-type pompadour, Brylcreemed kids with literal switchblades, who he had to disarm. And he never really talked about what he thought the reasons were - other than "teenagers are kind of crazy." And especially if you throw povert risk into the mix, then weapons sometimes appear.

David: I guess, yeah. I mean, up to a certain point, it's just kids being kids. And sometimes they are kids in ways that are dangerous and reckless and have to be controlled. But I don't know if it was even in the fifties, that there was anything like the - well I don't even know how to describe it. In some cases and in some environments, it's almost uncontrolled. But I don't know, I wasn't there in the fifties, and I'm not really there now. So I'm really just guessing. But it's a problem. Violence is a problem that has to be addressed somehow.

Len: My next question is related to a question that often comes up on this podcast. Which is - when I'm interviewing people who write books and have careers in computing technology, the question I often ask is - if you were starting out with your career now, would you spend four years doing a formal Computer Science degree at a university? Or would you choose another path, given the plethora of rapidly evolving educational resources out there? And I guess, as a former high school teacher - if you were teaching in high school right now and someone came up to you and said, "I want to be a software developer, should I go to university or not?" What would you say to them?

David: I actually get asked this question a lot, and I'd say that there are different reasons for wanting a university degree. Some of them make a lot of sense, and some of them make a lot less sense.

If somebody is at the age of 18 or 19 confident that they enjoy coding, and they can see themselves making a career out of it, I would generally recommend that they - depending on the kid of course - but I would generally recommend they don't go to university.

If you want the skills that will make you good as a coder, then you don't need to go to university. In fact, going to university will very often - by the time you're finished - most of the skills you've learned will have dated, and they won't be nearly as worthwhile as they were six or seven years ago, when the curriculum that underwrote them was written.

I worked for a company in Ottawa. And the lead developer at the time - I asked him, "Would you take a kid out of high school with good programming skills and a good portfolio - but would you take them actually to work for us?" He said, "Who needs high school?" And he was actually quite serious. He said it when he takes a developer, this is five or six years ago, I guess? When he takes a developer, a new guy fresh out of university - the first six months he has to deprogram him from all the bad skills he learned in university. That's from his perspective.

Obviously not everyone's going to see it that way. But certainly, it's so easy to pick up solid skills now, ad hoc - just off the internet. From Pluralsight, if you want to take Pluralsight courses, where I create courses. Or free at freeCodeCamp, which is a fantastic resource. Or a thousand other places. There's so many places you can learn to program, or learn to be a system administrator, or learn all kinds of skills. And if you're motivated, if you're clear about what you want - or relatively clear about what you want, you can do it on your own, and save yourself a tremendous amount of time, and of course all the opportunity costs, the four years in university you're not working and earning a living.

On the other hand, there are certainly people who - I mean, I never recommend people go to university with no clue of what they want to do. Because that can be an enormous investment that doesn't pay off in the end. And then they change their mind half a dozen times during the four years, which will always stretch out to six or seven years. Because of course universities have economic interests, incentives in keeping you in university as long as possible.

Because every extra semester, it is more money. And when you transfer credits from one program to another, or one college to another, then there's usually an extra six months or an extra year you'll spend just to make up the credits that don't transfer.

So there are a lot of risks in going to university. But if you're fairly sure what you want to study, and you feel that you need the maturation perhaps or the maybe - some people talk about the social skills, although universities don't always teach the right social skills, if you've ever been in a dorm.

So there is a case to be made for a university Computer Science degree. Because obviously, some jobs will only go to people with Computer Science degrees. So if you're really - if you have a background in physics and you want to make that part of your career, then I guess you'll need university. Because physics doesn't - you can't demonstrate expertise in physics without having a couple of degrees behind you. But for a lot of people, I really think you can make a go of it quickly, efficiently and cheaply - without a degree.

Len: Thank you very much for sharing that from that perspective. One of the reasons I love asking people this question is because there are all these sort of built in paradoxes to the choice you have to make when you're, say, 18, and graduating from high school, or 17. For example - how do you know what you want to do, when you don't know all that much about the world yet?

David: Yeah. There's no quick solution for that. The lucky few - and I had a student in high school, who - when he was 14 or 15, I don't remember - was offered a summer job by the RCMP - the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Ottwa, working on their website or something like that. I don't know how that happened. I'm not sure it was a serious offer.

But he was the kind of guy who just picked up - he absorbed talent almost, almost unconsciously. The skills just came to him. And so a guy like that - by the time he was 18, he actually had a lot of marketable skills and could have made a go of a lot of different careers right off the bat. In the end, he went to law school, and he's doing very well as a lawyer. But certainly there are some kids at 17 or 18 who are lucky enough to have skills and know what they want to do and how they can do it.

But you're right. There are an awful lot who don't yet, and you can make choices that are - in hindsight, weren't the best choices. So if you do the investment of university - especially in the United States, where it's so much more expensive, an enormous investment - the wrong choice has much greater consequences. The investment of trying a couple of careers without necessarily a full university degree, is a lot lower. And if you make the wrong choice, the consequences are much less consequential.

So you have a little bit of an advantage, I guess, if you don't know what you want to do - to keep as many alternatives open as possible, while not being crazy about it - by experimenting. That's why the apprenticeship program was so great over - through the middle ages and the last eight, nine hundred years or longer. Often young people - probably at the age of 12, back in the middle ages - would apprentice to a master, and they would learn the trade for a couple of years, and earn their food. And from then on, they had a career. And the various government organisations around the world have tried to recreate versions of the apprenticeship program, with varying levels of success.

But I'd say that IT is a fantastic domain for apprenticeships. There is a lot that can be gained by a company, let's say - a mid-sized company that wants to have a nice flow of new talent. They could open up one end of one of their rooms in an office where they have a couple of developers or sysadmin guys - and they can get 18, 19 year old kids to come into their office and do work and be guided, be mentored by the professionals. And after a year or two of that, they may have crackerjack programmers to work for them. But either way, the people that are being mentored have new skills.

Len: We don't want to get derailed and go on with this for too long, but it actually is something that comes up on this podcast all the time. Because Leanpub is a platform that's often with more or less educational material, it's actually probably an important thing to talk about. But one of the interesting features of that kind of apprenticeship type program - I believe in Germany there actually is a sort of like two-track system. At some point in, what we might call your sort of middle school years, you either go down - as it were, the academic route, or the trade route.

And there is a popular discourse about how not everybody's suited towards university. But there's also a popular discourse of, "How the fuck do you know?"

David: Right, right. It's frightening, yeah. In England, it used to be the A-levels and O-levels, I think? They split at the age of 13 or 14, and it's frightening. You didn't perform quite as well as you wanted to at the age of 13, then you're done. So that is a - it's a frightening choice to have to make, or to have made for you, indeed. But having said that, the alternative - I don't think it's rational that everybody should go to university, because I don't think it's a good use of resources. I don't think it's a good use of human beings. Not everybody should be there. And as almost everybody knows, a lot of what goes on in university in a lot of cases, has nothing to do with education, is -

Len: Yeah, that's true. And sorry, just to go on about this a little bit more, because it is something I think of a lot, but one of the things I like to say, is a secret to having a middle-class life is actually the people that you meet in your university years if you happen to go.

David: Right.

Len: So for example, the veneration that a lot of people have for doctors and lawyers - you lose it, precisely because you lived in the dorm with the ones who became - if you know what I mean?

David: Yeah, yeah.

Len: And but also like - for example, I used to live in London and I got called up for jury duty one day. And I could call my friend who was like a barrister in the Inns of Court, to ask him, "How does this all work?" Growing up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, I never would have had the opportunity to have friends like that to call upon. Like if I've got an ache in my back, I call my doctor friend. If you know what I mean?

David: Right, right.

Len: I actually don't do that, but much of what goes on at university that doesn't have anything sort of strictly to do with the classes that you're taking or what you're majoring in, actually can deepen your network in a way that you might not have an opportunity to do otherwise.

David: Absolutely.

Len: Which is just another reason that it's such a big decision and so complicated.

Just moving on, you recently published an article called Why is so much enterprise documentation so awful? It's interesting. Documentation is something that might seem unimportant to people, or sort of tedious. But in a world that's been eaten by software, documentation is basically the way we have of capturing how pretty much everything works underneath the hood. So, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit as an expert in the area, why is so much enterprise documentation of how things work so awful?

David: They're probably - it's not as bad as I make it out to be, mind you. I did exaggerate for some effect in that article. But to some degree, everybody who's involved with software has to write documentation, or at least has to make sure documentation is written. Otherwise no one will be able to use it - and the guys who take over for you when you leave, won't be able to pick up and maintain what you've done.

So we need the documentation, but not everybody enjoys writing as their primary way of communication, or primary task at work. So everyone's got to do it, but some people see it as just an add-on. "Well, it's just a chore I have to do after I finish writing this code," or, "After we put this UI together, I have to put some documentation on it too - so let's get it done." And it probably won't get done that well.

Or as I describe I think in the article - you have complex software that users will come to from different places and with different expectations, and to - and it's changing. Because there are new modules being written and pushed out to production rather regularly. Updated probably more often than the documentation itself. So it's not at all clear - it's difficult to create a system where you can be confident that the latest releases actually are documented properly and that users can find the documentation that's appropriate.

AWS has a great system. If you notice in the URL of all their documentation pages, there will be a - I think there's usually a date, but there's also the word - I think the word is "current" or "latest." Maybe "latest?" I can't remember. But in the URL itself, you'll see, "Is this the latest version of this documentation?" Which gives you confidence that it's maintained and it's changed when necessary. And that you've got the latest, greatest version.

So a lot of thinking and a lot of money has to be poured into documentation to make sure it works well, and not everybody has that - especially open source projects, where they're working on a shoestring, and they may just be doing it as a hobby on behalf of mankind to help humanity - and they don't have the time and the energy to also do good documentation.

Len: Thank you very much for sharing that. I actually looked into the AWS documentation - following through, I think a link in your article. And it is really good, and it is this just inherent problem where things are constantly changing, and, "how do you keep up with the documentation?" is just a problem that people have. And having time stamps might seem like a sort of detail, but that's actually really important - even just for searching your own documentation to know what you should update and what's fallen behind.

We actually had a recent experience with a customer who was like, "I was looking at this article and it was updated just a week ago." And actually we use Intercom - which is very good, for our Help Center. And the little statement that they had was "updated over a week ago." It was actually like a two year old document.

David: Well it was over a week at one point - and it is still over a week, I guess.

Len: It's an interesting sort of issue, because giving people confidence - which is presumably the reason they said, "Over a week ago" - because they didn't want you to be embarrassed that something was old. Is actually really - like, you don't want to be misleading at all when it comes to this kind of thing, because of the inherent problem that documentation will always probably be behind what you're actually doing. And so actually, the more clues you can give someone who's hunting around for solutions, about what they're really looking at - is actually helpful to them. And then they can tell you, "Oh, it's old. This needs to be updated." Things like that.

David: Right, right. I often actually see documentation that's incomplete, because I'm often teaching topics for relatively new technologies, where the documentation isn't there yet.

In fact, sometimes I'm actually creating the documentation. So that's happened too. In fact, one of my very early jobs in this career, which lasted about a week - because what they wanted me to do turned out was just not something I was ready to do yet - but it was a very large company in Europe, which shall remain nameless, involved in a very cutting-edge technology, which - as far as I know, is still not perfected six years later. And they wanted me to write the API documentation. That is, to write for developers how they can interface with this particular technology. I remember - again this is very early in my career - and I'm not a developer, I'm a sys-administrator - but I remember googling, "What is an API?" Just to give you an idea how unprepared I was for that task. And then I basically had access to the syntax, and nothing more. So someone has to write that stuff. But I felt very, very, very urgently how difficult a task it can be to write it well.

Len: Actually, I've got a question about that. So, you made this transition in your career to being a sysadmin, and also to creating content. How did you get involved with Pluralsight?

David: They asked me that once, I remember, about six months after I joined. It was a friend of mine - someone I actually never met personally, but we were friends and colleagues remotely. We were working for the same company. He suggested at a certain point that I had the perfect skill set for the kind of thing that Pluralsight was looking for. And he put me in touch with one of their acquisitions editors. Back then, that's what they called them. They've changed the title now.

And we were a good match. Pluralsight is a fantastic company. They are extremely well run. They treat their authors, and I think they treat their customers also, really, really, well. They were looking - and they're still actively looking for subject matter experts in a lot of technology-related fields, who have the ability to create video content. I had created video content, Linux-based and AWS-based, in the past. And it was a good match.

But I'll add what I told them, one of their vice presidents, when they asked me six months later, why I came to Pluralsight. There was an article that I had read, why Pluralsight had resonated with me. When this friend of mine mentioned it, why it clicked. And said, "Pluralsight, maybe that's a place to go?" There was an article I'd read a couple of years before that, I think the title was - it really stuck with me, "The world's first millionaire teachers now exist."

I should preface to say that I'm not a millionaire teacher, nor anywhere close. But the title stuck with me. Because Pluralsight handles - along with other companies too - they handle the question of education at scale really, really well. You create a course, you create 20, 30 videos, covering an hour and a half, two hours - and you do it as well as you can with a really well-thought-out curriculum.

It's been well-edited by your peers, and then you make it available for anybody to stream on-demand anywhere on the internet at a fairly low cost for, certainly for someone on North American salaries - what Pluralsight charges for a monthly subscription is pocket change. It's not true if you live in Africa or India perhaps, but certainly if you live in the west.

The scale makes it so that anybody who wants that particular skill right now - he's working on a project, and he or she can't figure out a problem. They can use the search engine in Pluralsight or one of the other providers, and find a video very quickly that'll solve that problem specifically. They can get to it very quickly. It's available so easily and readily to so many people, you've got scale.

I think there are about seven billion people in the world, and an awful lot of them seem to want to learn about technology. Whereas, in the good old days, you could have 30 students at a time in a classroom, now I could have - well I'll tell you, in a given month my videos on Pluralsight are viewed by, I think around 9,000 people. 9,000 unique people are viewing my videos. They'll view my content - about 4,000 hours of my content in a given month.

That's a tremendous reach. So of course, if everybody is paying their subscription - then there's a potential for teachers who are more successful than me, to actually make a million dollars a year.

So, the title of that article just stuck in my mind. I said, "Well, it makes sense. Scale is something we understand. And if it's executed well, then it's something that's respectable and useful and helps the world - then why not give it a shot?" So I did, and it worked out very nicely.

Len: It's really interesting, this issue of scale. I think people who are coming into the technology world now might take it for granted that you can stream videos and reach the whole world. This was not true even just 20 years ago, really.

David: Right.

Len: And it really has changed the way you can go about solving problems, both in your career and your life. So the idea that - again, I'm just only mentioning it because it's something that we take it for granted - but if you want to know how to fix your faucet, you can go on YouTube. Twenty years ago, you had to call a plumber. Or if you wanted to fix an object that was broken or wasn't functioning properly, you had to read an instruction manual.

And if I'm correct - so the sort of video content that you're talking about - t's screen captures of you doing things, and talking over them?

David: Mostly. It'll be slide decks and screen captures of demos. But my face doesn't show up on the screen, mercifully. The world's a safer place without my face on the screen. There are some authors on Pluralsight who actually, who do have very nice green screen set ups. Where they have their own face, and - well, they have faces that are worth seeing, let's just give them the credit.

It can be more engaging to actually see a person's face when you do it. I couldn't. I mean - well, if I'm worrying about being presentable on screen at the same time as remembering commands and typing them without messing up my typing, while also sticking to the curriculum - I just can't do that much at once. But you work with what you have.

Len: Moving onto the next part of the interview. So you, at one point, became an author of books.

David: Yes.

Len: I was wondering if you could talk about how - you've explained how you got into Pluralsight a little bit. How did you get into book publishing? And I should mention, you've had a couple of books published with Manning Publications, which is one of the top-shelf technology book publishers. How did you get into that?

David: Well, first of all I should add that before Manning, there was this company called, "Leanpub." Sketchy site they have somewhere. I won't talk about it much because, you know? But they - I believe the first book I put on Leanpub was - I believe that was up before I signed contract with Manning.

I may have the timing off a little bit. It was a guide to the Linux Professional Institute's LPIC-101 and 102 Certification. I wrote it quite quickly, based on the content I had used for a video course on the same topic. I wrote the book up in less than a month, and decided to self-publish. And I used Leanpub very productively, I think. And the sales were respectable, nothing spectacular.

But it caught the attention of the publisher Apress. And they offered me a contract and they bought it. And since then, it has, according to BookScan, a tool that the Nielsen company uses to track the sales of books in the United States - so according to BookScan, it has sold a total - I believe, 41 copies in the last four years.

Len: Oh my.

David: You heard that right, that's 41. So it didn't work out that well as far as numbers go. But they're great people at Apress. But nonetheless, that did start at Leanpub - and I have a couple of books that are actually active on Leanpub now, which I'm very happy about. The versatility that it offered me, was something that was very attractive. That I could use Markdown, which is - I do all my writing in Markdown. Just convert a Markdown document to anything, and then do anything with it - especially selling it on the Leanpub platform itself.

But soon after that first book, I think if I have my timing right - I did make an offer of a project proposal to Manning. We discussed it at great length, and changed it quite violently by the time actually we came to our contract.

Manning takes their planning very seriously. They'll have editorial board meetings which last hours. They're painful, but they're very productive. They take a long time. They seriously think, "What do our potential readers need, and how can we give it to them as quickly and as effectively as possible?" And they'll hash it out. "How should we organize the book? What should the book be about? How should it be focused?" They really do their absolute best to create a book that is as perfect as possible for the people who are going to be buying it and using it. I have to give them a lot of credit for that. I wrote two books with them, one on Linux and one on AWS.

The process was painful, but it was a very, very productive process. I'm happy I went through it. That was, I think, a natural progression. I've always written - as I joke somewhere in my profile, I've been writing since I was able to hold a crayon between my fingers. The punchline is, the walls of my childhood bedroom have since been repainted. But I have been writing for a long time, and it was a natural fit. The technology skills I was learning and teaching went well with describing them through the word, teaching through writing.

Len: Thank you very much for sharing that story, that's great, particularly for our listeners who are thinking about becoming book authors themselves, to hear the different paths that people can go down, and the choices that you have to make along the way.

One of the things that we always talk about - one of the things we love to hear about is Leanpub authors getting snapped up by conventional publishers. Self-publishing can become a way into the world of conventional publishing, and sometimes when people get snapped up, they come back.

David: Yes.

Len: Most importantly, the idea for people to absorb, is that it's actually not an either/or. I think this is a lesson that had to be learned over the last sort of ten or fifteen years, as self-publishing has become more respectable. But I don't know if the lesson needs to be taught so well anymore. Like when we - particularly when we have younger authors that come onto Leanpub, they're like, "Of course, I can both self-publish and be a conventionally-published author." They're just two different types of projects. And for example, you mentioned - for one of your books you published with a conventional publisher, it didn't have that many sales. But then again, you've been able to say, "Here I've got this book," on your CV for all this time.

David: Yeah.

Len: And so for a lot of people, in their journey to building their online platform as an author, getting a conventionally published book actually isn't about the sales primarily. It can be about improving your profile. And so for some of our authors who are independent consultants in various areas, having a published book gets them clients.

And actually, it's funny back when we were bootstrapping Leanpub, my co-founder Peter had published a book with Manning. And actually my co-founder, Scott, had published a book as well. And someone pirated both books, and then discovered that Peter and Scott worked together. And we got a client who we made a great deal of money from over the years, because of the pirating of these books.

David: That's hilarious.

Len: Yeah. And it's just a sign that having, I don't know? What's the right metaphor? Like, having a lot of hooks in the creek is the best way to catch fish. And this is true in a lot of areas.

Actually, one of the things I wanted to touch on, that was really interesting to me in w hat you said - it might have sounded like a detail. But you'd produced this video content, and then realized you could actually package it up and make a book out of that as well. And that's something really important.

Because on Leanpub we actually have the concept of online courses. So, you can create a MOOC on Leanpub. Part of our hypothesis, and one of the reasons we built this into our platform, was that someone who's written a technology book actually is sitting there on content that can presumably be transformed into a course, where someone can get a certificate of completion and then have social proof of what they've learned.

And so the idea that you've got content in one form, it actually can be transformed into content in another format, and reach more people who might have - there's some people who like books, there's some people who like video courses. There's some people who like MOOCs. And multiplying your content across these different avenues is actually a really important way of reaching people.

David: Absolutely. And also the idea that you can - well - reduce, reuse, recycle. You can make multiple uses out of a single piece of content. So this course that I was preparing for, and I was writing content for a course - and then the course didn't work out. So I could easily re-purpose it into a book. And within a couple of days, I really had it in shape, and I had it on Leanpub, and it was selling already.

But more than just the selling, it was - I just yesterday published a part of it as an article on freecodecamp.org on their, I guess you can call it a blog. But it's a repository of thousands of how-to articles on technology. So it's been seen in 24 hours, more than 200 times. So I know from my own Twitter followers and LinkedIn connections, that the large majority of people that are interested in my content are from what - I guess, sometimes they're called "the developing world."

I don't know what's developing and what's not. I don't want to start stigmatizing countries. But certainly countries where English is not the first language, there's a thirst for this kind of content. And they're smart people who are consuming it at prodigious amounts. And when I publish an article, and when lots of other people publish similar articles or courses or books, they're consumed, and they're providing a tremendous benefit in ways you couldn't foresee. So, I have a little piece of throwaway content that I was - I could of thrown away, but I've re-purposed it, and it's having an impact - and because of platforms like Leanpub, and like freeCodeCamp.

Len: Actually, I had a specific question I wanted to ask you about that. So this has actually turned into a different kind of interview than I was envisioning, because you've got such a wide kind of experience with creating and disseminating informational material, and you've been there to see these changes over the last few years.

And so, we've talked about Pluralsight and we've talked about self-publishing on Leanpub. And we've talked about conventional publishing and how that process can go, how it can be very planned or unplanned - things like that. But you've also - you also publish articles on freecodecamp.org, and you've been transferring your articles from Medium to freeCodeCamp.

David: Right.

Len: I wanted to ask you specifically about that. Because this, the decision - I mean, I - people talk about having your eggs in many baskets. And I had the metaphor of having many hooks in the creek. But it's not necessarily right to be everywhere. We're actually planning to transfer away from Medium ourselves, and we have our own reasons for that - and they might be the same as yours. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about -?

David: Well first of all, the articles - most of the articles are still on Medium. But I posted them also to freeCodeCamp, and new articles, I'm posting more or less exclusively to freeCodeCamp. I had nothing against articles being on Medium. They were a nice medium. They had a very nice UI, and they allowed us to retain full ownership and control over the articles. They have great tracking tools also, so we could see who was coming and how many.

The reason that large publications like freeCodeCamp and Hacker Noon moved away from Medium, is because Medium was moving towards a paywall. They wanted the premium content - and as much premium content as possible - to be behind the paywall. So only paying users get to see it. And when I write content, when I publish an article on a freely available platform like - well, like Medium was, I want it to be free. I want as many people as possible to be able to access it and use it.

And then they can - I have to admit, I'm not entirely altruistic. One of my goals is that they should follow links back to my content, which is paid - Pluralsight or my books. But really I do passionately want it to be available to as many people as possible, so they can use it. And Medium is moving away from that.

And the other thing is - of course, in the tech world - and perhaps in the larger society, there's a distrust of large technology companies. And Medium is owned by Twitter, which does not have the best reputation for privacy, respect, and other decisions they may make. Perhaps they're innocent? Perhaps we overdo it? Or perhaps not.

So, freeCodeCamp is an organization that is genuinely free. They don't even allow advertising on the site. And their goal is completely idealistic. They just want to provide technology training to as many human beings as possible, without any barriers. And I'm very comfortable having my content there, because I like that, I subscribe to that ideology.

Len: It's really interesting you bring up the distrust of big technology companies, and Medium being owned by Twitter. One of the reasons - and this is sort of personal, this isn't because of Leanpub's blog - but it's because of my own posts. I started seeing the sort of - they make it look like it's a mistake if you don't choose to be behind the paywall.

David: Right, right.

Len: They're very aggressively prompting you to do that. And the thing about being behind that paywall is that really, what Medium is setting up as I understand it, is a situation where they're picking winners and losers based on internal algorithms. And it's sort of like - maybe this dates me, but in the olden days you searched for stuff, and sort of trusted that there wasn't too much steering going on in the background, in one direction or another. And particularly with Twitter now, they have this distinction between Home and the Latest Tweets. So it used to be - Twitter was just Latest Tweets. And now they have this concept of Home, which they'll actually - if you choose Latest Tweets, they'll just move you back to this Home concept, where they're deciding what you see.

It's not the people that you follow who tweet, and that's what you see. There's something else going on there. And we know this from the political realm, where people can go down these rabbit holes in YouTube, and things like that.

But the idea that - it just seems to me that there's a threat to the promise of having all this wonderful educational content available, often free, to people all around the world, to help learn things and develop their careers. And this idea of being steered by these big technology companies does seem, it's just - I haven't worked out a theory of it, but it does strike me as a threat to the independence that's promised by places like free -

David: Yeah, they could be really hurt. I mean, not just Twitter, but Google. If - there are plenty of rumours going around that Google is actively subverting the objectivity of their search engine. I can't prove it, and I'm not trying to prove it. But there are many, many, many rumours that are certainly flying around. And if commercial interests and very parochial commercial interests govern those algorithms and the objectivity of the search engine, then there will be a large chunk of the internet that will be disenfranchised. It will simply disappear for all intents and purposes.

Back in the good old days before Google and before Yahoo! or before Yahoo! was a major player, at any rate - the internet was like a phone system without a phone book. You either knew about the place or you didn't know about the place. So there were blogs who acquired followings and became influential - just through word mouth or email. There's no other way to find it. But they were independent, and they could say whatever they wanted to say, and have any guests they wanted to have on their sites.

It was clunky and it was definitely imperfect, because it was hard to get a big following. But at least it was under your control. And there were certain advantages. We're never going to go back to that, I don't think - for better or for worse, those days are gone. But it is concerning that we may be subject to a kind of dark tyranny in a way that we may not even be able to define properly, much less control. So, will people find solutions? Humans are very resourceful and technology is very powerful. So maybe there will be ways of working around it?

I know Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web - he is working on his new web. I can't remember what he calls it offhand, maybe you remember? But his idea is to allow, to create a new network within the Internet that allows all users to completely control their own content. And he hopes that through that, we can once again control our conversations, and have more of a say in how we are surfaced, and how we appear to the rest of the Internet.

But there are problems. It's a mind-bogglingly large environment, the Internet - and no human could have dreamt of it even 30 or 40 years ago. So there are going to be problems as it grows, and there are heroes - and maybe there are villains also. But it's something we should certainly be aware of. The ability, the right to speak and to publish and to be able to publish to any community we like to, is not an absolute right and it's not guaranteed.

Len: On that sombre note, with a hint of optimism, moving on to the next part of the interview - so, we've talked about the various types of content that you produce. What are you working on now?

David: Lots of things. At any given time, I might be signed on to five or six different projects, and I'm pretty good at pivoting. When I have to wait for somebody else to get back to me, to respond to something - then I can just pivot for a couple of days to something else. One of them is a, I think it's public knowledge? LPI - sorry, I'm not allowed to say that. Linux Professionals Institute, the LPI is a - the manager of the Linux Professional Institute keeps telling me that there are copyright issues. Or not copy-- Sorry, what is it?

Len: Trademark, probably.

David: Trademark, yes - that's it. There are trademark issues. Because there are too many other organizations that have the acronym LPI. So they don't want to get into that. Their lawyers want them to describe the organization as "Linux Professional Institute." They're a certification institute, a non-profit distribution neutral organization that creates certifications for - so far, mostly for Linux technologies.

But they're actually branching out to internet security. So they are creating a new certification on the general topic, not tied to Linux specifically, but for all operating systems. The topic of internet security. So I'm actually working with Wiley on a book that will cover that certification.

Len: And what's it like working with Wiley?

David: Very different. Well, it's different because it's a different sort of book than I was writing for Manning. With Manning, we were trying to create a market. We're trying to envision a market, I should say - and then fit the book to it. In Wiley's case, I'm writing certification books. I've written two certification books for them already on AWS certs. And that's a lot more straightforward. They're an old company, and very established. And they have a profile of what they want their certification guides to look like. And you just have to follow the profile.

And there's not nearly as much peer review or editorial review. They have editors, don't worry. They have editors going through every word many times. But not nearly as much as they had at Manning. So it's a much lighter hand on you, in a way. Not that you have a whole lot of freedom to be extra creative. I throw gags in sometimes, into my books, and I'm curious to see if they pass through the editorial system. Because some of them are pushing it just a bit. But they do let some through. But I like them.

Publishers don't tend to be crooks. They're decent people all around, as far as I've seen. And they're better than just not crooks - they're actually nice people. Good, talented people to work with. So I've been happy with Wiley. That's my - I guess that's my major project right now, this security certification.

Len: We usually like to end the podcast by asking a couple of questions about Leanpub. Do you remember how you found your way to -?

David: Probably Google, that's my guess. Or, well, it's a long time. I had published books, self-published books through Lulu for many years, actually. And it might have been, I might have been reading an article about Lulu that also mentioned Leanpub? It might not have been Google actually. But it's a long time ago, and I'm very happy I made that connection.

Len: The last question I always like to ask is, if there was one thing we could fix for you, or one magical feature we could build for you that would improve things for you, can you think of anything?

David: I don't know. It's - the platform is very good. The platform gives me everything I need, except more readers. But that's your challenge too. We're all looking for more readers. And if my books don't have as many readers as I'd like - it could be the books just aren't good enough. Maybe I shou0ld be writing better books? So I can't blame you if there aren't 500,000 readers buying my book every month, I guess it's more my fault than yours. So I don't know - I'm happy with the platform. It gives me a lot of versatility and it takes Markdown, which is great. What more can you ask for than just being about to handle Markdown flawlessly?

Len: Thanks for sharing that. Yes, getting readers is the secret sauce of publishing success, and we do what we can. It's hard to know what's going to succeed and what's going to fail of course, if you could predict it everybody -

David: Yeah, I'd be in a different career probably.

Len: Yeah. But one thing I would say actually is that - for people listening, if you can write books on certifications, that's actually - like, if you've gone through a process of getting a certification of some kind - basically any exam and this is sort of well-known like with the LSAT or the GMAT or things like that - people really like to read those books, because they have a very specific reason for coming to the book - and they're sort of easy to find through searches.

So actually, anybody looking to get a start in self-publishing - if you've basically taken any kind of exam at all and succeeded at it, write about it. There's other people out there who are taking that exam that don't know anything about it who are -

David: Right. I would add - by the way, to that - that not only do you - you might have the technical background to write such a guide to a certification. But you shouldn't let your insecurities stop you sometimes. And not everybody should write books. But a lot more people can, than do. I just read an interview this morning with Linus Torvalds, the fellow who made some reputation for himself creating Linux and Git. He has quite a portfolio to go for him. And he says he still suffers from impostor syndrome. Is he really qualified to do the things that people want him to do?

And if Linus Torvalds is worried about impostor syndrome, is he really qualified? Then I think if we feel - I certainly feel it sometimes, "Do I really have the -? Am I really qualified to write about Ansible?" So I mean, again - you have to make sure you're accurate, what you write is accurate. And you have to be careful and do all your due diligence, and do all your research. But if you're insecure about it, don't worry - Linus Torvalds is also insecure about what he does.

Len: That's great, thank you for sharing that. That's a sort of good lesson for us all to learn. And the other - the only thing I would add to that, I guess is that - one thing that took me far too long to learn, was that you get better at things over time as you keep doing them.

And so if you don't feel like writing is for you, just give it - you will get better over time. And in particular, in a world where you can get feedback from people on sites like - we've said some critical things about it, but like Twitter is a fantastic feedback machine -

David: Right.

Len: As long as you -

David: You have a thick skin.

Len: As long as you have a thick skin. You do need to have a thick skin. You need to make liberal use of the mute button,.

David: Yeah.

Len: And things like that. But it can also be a very friendly place. And our experience - as authors ourselves, but also talking to - through watching Leanpub authors succeed over the years, people want to help you make your book better. It's just true.

David: Yeah.

Len: It's very rare that someone gets mad when they see an area for improvement. They'll tell you, "Oh, you've got too many typos." They're not being mean.

David: Right.

Len: They're trying to help you, and this is a really positive feature of this World Wide Web that's been built around us - including all the educational opportunities that it offers to both teachers to find students, and for students to find teachers.

So, thank you very much David for taking the time to do this interview. I really appreciate it, and it was actually really nice to go in-depth of the various ways that educational resources can be produced and disseminated - that exist now, that didn't necessarily exist all that long ago - and weren't necessarily platforms for a success.

David: Right. I'm still waiting for mine, but it's actually been a great experience that I enjoy, and I appreciate the opportunity you're giving me, and it's been a great conversation.

Len: Thanks very much.

And as always, thanks to all of you for listening to this episode of the Frontmatter Podcast. If you like what you heard, please write and review it wherever you found it. And if you'd like to be a Leanpub author yourself, please check out our website at leanpub.com. Thanks.

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