Nigel Poulton, Author of The Kubernetes Book

Len: Hi I'm Len Epp from Leanpub, and on this episode of the Frontmatter podcast I'll be interviewing Nigel Poulton.

Based in the UK, a little bit south of Manchester, Nigel is an author and popular speaker who is working to create the best Kubernetes and cloud learning resources in the world.

You can find his courses on Pluralsight, Udemy, and on A Cloud Guru and of course his YouTube channel, where he posts videos and hosts shows like Kubernetes this Month and the weekly Kubernetes Moment, #KubernetesMoment.

You can follow him on Twitter @nigelpoulton and check out his website at nigelpoulton.com, and please note that of of course we will include links to everything I've just mentioned in the transcription of this episode on our website at leanpub.com.

Nigel is the author of the Leanpub books Docker Deep Dive: Zero to Docker in a single book! and The Kubernetes Book.

In this interview, we’re going to talk about Nigel's background and career, professional interests, his books, and at the end we'll talk about his experience using Leanpub to self-publish his book.

So, thank you Nigel for being on the Leanpub Frontmatter Podcast.

Nigel: It's an absolute pleasure, thanks.

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?

Nigel: I was born in 1978, and I lived in the northeast of England - I should be careful what I say here actually, in case anybody from the area is listening, I don't mean this in a demeaning way at all - but in quite a deprived area. We didn't have a lot when I was growing up. So I think in some way, because we didn't have a lot of things at home, I used to dream of things, and I would thumb through - we used to have catalogues back in the day - and as a child, you'd look at toys and things that you couldn't afford or whatever, but that you really wanted.

I think from a young age, I had a very similar experience with technology. So I got into Star Trek, the original series that used to show on TV in the UK - and just fell in love with the whole idea of exploring space and having all this technology, communication devices, phasers. All that kind of stuff, which really stuck with me through my teenage years.

A story that I tell quite a bit, actually - so if anybody that's listening has heard it, I do apologize - but when I was about 16 or 17, I had my own computer by then, and I was learning to tinker with it and program it. I started an evening class, after school, I think it was a 7 o'clock start or something like that, at a local college, learning to program C. And it was on a Wednesday night, which happened to be the same evening that Star Trek: The Next Generation aired on BBC 2. That would start at six, and it would finish at about quarter to seven. And then I would quickly leave and run off to college to go and program, or learn to program C.

But I would use that Star Trek: The Next Generation episode - almost, if you will - to pump me up for night school, to go and learn with the computer. Because there would be like Geordi La Forge and Commander Data and people speaking, just talking to a computer and fixing engineering problems and exploring the galaxy and stuff. I would get so pumped watching it, I would then go and have this like dusty old 386 PC in a - like a pretty grim classroom at a local college, where I would learn to program the computer.

So I think for me, from a super early age, I dreamt of - I want to say I dreamt of the future, right? Where computers would be absolutely amazing. I feel very privileged in quite a lot of ways, to be honest - although we're not exploring the stars, well certainly I'm not personally at the moment, I do think in a lot of ways, what we can accomplish and do with computers and phones and apps and automated cars and things like that, or self-driving cars and things - has almost surpassed what my dreams were, in a way.

Len: Thank you very much for sharing that story, that's just amazing. You just reminded me of a lot of different things. But in particular I think it was "Star Trek IV," where they're on earth in the 1980s, and Scotty is introduced to a Mac. And of course you talk to a computer, you don't type into it. So he picks up the mouse, and he talks into it and says, "Hello, Computer." And of course, we can do that now.

Nigel: Oh absolutely, yeah.

Len: We totally can do that now, and we've been able to do that for a while. It is actually really interesting. I'm actually a little bit older than you, and to think sometimes about the things we were presented with as fiction that are now fact, is a really good - to put it in kind of clinical terms - like exercise to do, to remind ourselves of where we are now - one of the things that actually comes up a lot on this podcast, because so many Leanpub authors are in technology and are programmers, is under what circumstances were you given your first computer? So the oldest person I think we've interviewed for this podcast was a man named Gerry Weinberg, who has unfortunately passed. But he was actually the first computer that he ever worked with. He was from the times when, yeah, he was a computer.

That was his job. And so I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about what your first computer was? I think you've mentioned it already, but did your parents introduce it into your household for work?

Nigel: Yeah.

Len: Or did they give it to you as a toy?

Nigel: Right. So that actually wasn't my first computer. That was actually the first computer that was, I guess, mine. The first computer we had in our house - now I know this isn't going out as video, but you can maybe see this, Len - is a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K.

Len: Oh there it is, yeah.

Nigel: It was a British-designed computer, and it was - to be honest, quite shocking - even in its own time. Of course everything - when you look back on it, looks kind of shocking. But that was my first introduction to a computer. We had a couple of games which were - again - well actually they were very playable, if I'm quite honest. But of course the graphics and the sound and - it's absolutely nothing like it is today.

But it came with a manual, and I remember learning to program the computer. Not that I really understood a great deal, but I actually enjoyed being able to type in commands. And I remember being able to change the color of the screen, to change the color of the border of the screen, to write text to the screen. And for some reason, I was the only one in a household of two brothers and a sister that actually thought that that was cool. Which tells me that there was something innate within me that kind of drew me to technology. So that was the first computer we had in our household.

But I put down as my first ever computer, or the one that kind of changed my life - I got it when I was about either 16 or 17 years old, my dad bought it for me.

Now my dad was one of these - he's passed away a few years ago now. But he was one of these people that came from a different era, where he didn't have hardly any money at all - but what money he had, he was very loath to spend. He would hoard money and he would kind of hide it under the rug and behind the toilet and things like that, until he got to the point where he could afford a PC for me, because he could see that I had a passion in computers.

And back in the day, buying a PC was actually quite an expensive thing to do. So despite the fact that I came from a household where we had very little - my dad was really good in spotting that I had a passion and potentially a talent for something, and investing in that. So I remember my first ever PC, right, was, what we used to refer to back in the day as an IBM-compatible. It was a 386 SX-33 with half a megabyte of RAM and a 40 megabyte hard drive. And of course it had one of those huge monitors - well, I say "huge," it was probably thirteen inches. But if you had to pick it up, it was like, "Bend at the knees, keep your back straight - otherwise you're going to get an injury." One of those huge old things.

And the guy that sold it to us was a local businessman who became a good friend of the family, actually. But he told me - when I stood in his sort of workshop one day, as he was installing Windows 3.1 from about 20 floppy discs, he told me that in my lifetime, I would never ever, ever, ever, ever fill a 40 megabyte hard drive. And look where we are today, hey? I mean that's barely a photograph on some cameras, right?

Len: That's so fascinating. Yeah, for people listening who aren't as old as me and Nigel - a 40 megabyte hard drive at the time he's describing, was absolutely huge. Like really, really massive. And there was probably no kind of like - you probably had no internet connection or anything like that.

Nigel: Oh no.

Len: So there was no downloading. So every program you acquired was on some form of disc. And you would put it on your computer, and you would run the disc. It sounds so funny to describe this kind of thing, but you would run the disc - and that's how you would run the program. And you only had to save things kind of incidentally on your computer, and so -

Nigel: It was a different world, yeah.

Len: Yeah. I remember the first computer I bought for myself was a little bit later than that, but it had a 40 megabyte hard drive, and I thought - like exactly 40 megabytes. And I thought, "I'll never be able to fill that up." But what a world we live in now.

Nigel: Oh yeah.

Len: And so actually, very specifically - we'll move on in a moment, but I really like these artifacts of time and people's experience. You talk about typing in programs into the computer. Where did you get the programs from?

Nigel: Right, yeah. So originally with the ZX Spectrum that I had with 48K of memory in it, that - it came with a manual that was wire-bound, I remember that. But later on we did have a Commodore 64, then an Atari ST, and then a Commodore Amiga. And with those, we did play a lot more games on them - but I still was curious about programming. So we would go to a local bookstore in the UK - WHSmith, for anybody who lives in the UK and knows the company - oh yeah, you used to live in the UK, of course.

Len: Yeah.

Nigel: And I would buy magazines that would then have program listings and things in there that you would - I'd have it open and I'd be typing in, and just learning on the go like that. But when it really kicked off for me was when I did that programming C course when I was about 16, and then I went to college full time.

Now, college in the UK is not college in the US. So this is sort of pre-university. And I learned to program a programming language which I'm almost certain isn't under active development anymore, but it's probably kicking around in the corners of the internet - FoxPro, which Microsoft eventually bought - sort of a database-focused programming language, but I fell in love with that. I mean, I would miss college to stay at home and program. I would miss going to the pub with friends and stuff from college, so I could stay home and program.

I think that was the point in my life where I realized, "You know what, Nige? You are a proper geek." And, "You're not going to be a footballer, unfortunately." Because of course I would've loved that. "Let's go with the next best thing and try and sort of chisel out a career in something that you're passionate about."

So here I am today, and I will say super, super fortunate or blessed or however you want to look at that. But I would say a day doesn't go by - that's hand on heart, where I don't think, "I must be one of the luckiest people out there." To be getting up and doing something that I'm passionate about every day. And living - I think, Len - almost in a golden age of technology.

Len: Thank you for sharing that, and for the positivity - that's very much appreciated. We'll get to where you are right now in just a couple of minutes, but one thing that comes up often on this podcast is - sometimes I'm interviewing people who did a full Computer Science degree - like a four-year Computer Science, US-style university degrees - and are so glad that they did that, it changed their lives. Other people I interview regret it. Other people I interview who are programmers and very successful and happy with their lives, didn't go to university and do Computer Science degrees - and are happy with that. And other people didn't and regret it.

If you were starting out right now in 2020, and you had a desire to have a career in technology and things involving computers - would you advise your alternate self to go to university and do a Computer Science degree, or to do things through a college, or just on your own?

Nigel: I have three daughters - the oldest of which is 14 at the moment. So things like this are very much on my mind. And I will say, right, that I do think the world, certainly in the UK, is a very different place now to when I was at university. I think when I started university, and we can maybe talk about this in a second - I dropped out of university to take a job. But it was much easier to get started I feel in the workplace, without a university degree back then.

I've been independently consulting and writing books and making video courses for over five years now. But in my last role before that, I was responsible for hiring for three different technology teams that I was team leader/manager of. And at that company - it was increasingly difficult, even to be able to interview somebody that didn't have a university degree. We were boots-on-the-ground IT in that organization, and all we cared about was getting somebody that had the skills. We wanted somebody that was passionate about technology, and we needed somebody that would fit in with the team.

We were central-London based, we were paying quite a lot of money for our roles. So we got - a lot of people would submit their resumes, and then the HR department within the organization would just bin resumes for people who didn't have a related technology degree - irrespective of whether they may have been the perfect person for the team - we just would never get to find out, because we never got to speak to them.

So to answer your question, I would say to anybody these days - and I say this to my own children - that while a degree might not be - and I don't think it is the be all and end all. I think if you do not have one and you're trying to enter the typical workplace, where you're not an entrepreneur or something, starting something yourself - if you are looking for employment, steady employment through another organization - if you don't have a degree, you're putting yourself at an instant disadvantage.

Len: Thank you very much for sharing that. I've heard that from a couple of people that I've interviewed, who were working for big organizations - and I won't name them, but, if there's an HR filter, not having a university degree can be an impediment - unless you've got some very demonstrable experience. You've started a company. You've created a bunch of open source software or something like that. Without that, you can actually get blocked. And so you dropped out of university, do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Nigel: Yeah, so I did start a Computer Science degree at university. But to earn myself some money, I took a job in a local call center that had an onsite IT department. I became friendly with those guys in the IT department. Well, mainly the guys that would come out and run cables and fix PCs that wouldn't boot, and all that kind of stuff. And because I'd programmed in FoxPro and I'd done a bit of C before, and I'd had a computer and I'd tinkered around quite a lot - I was able to strike up conversations with those guys, to the point where I was offered a job.

Starting at the very bottom, of course. Resetting passwords and changing backup tapes on a daily basis, and things like that. But I decided that the opportunities within that organization - if I took that job, were what I was looking for at the end of my degree anyway.

Now, I don't necessarily recommend it to everybody. It worked for me, it doesn't mean that it'll work for anybody else. But the timing was quite fortunate for me, in that not long after that, we had the dot com bust. And my brother in law - who is the same age as me and stayed on at university and got his degree, found it extremely hard to find a job in technology for at least four to five years after that.

He's doing really well now, don't get me wrong. But I ended up getting a five year head start on him. Because I'd always looked at it, and I would hope other people would look at it in a similar way, right? That even if you have a university degree, when you land in an organization - I really feel passionately that you should start at the bottom and learn how everything works, and work your way up. Rather than just coming in somewhere in the middle and not having a real appreciation for everything that maybe you've skipped, if that makes sense?

I always thought that, at the end of my degree, I would get a job and I would start somewhere at the bottom and work my way up. And partway - in fact, just towards the end of the first year of my degree - I was offered a job like that, in an organization that looked to me - and don't get me wrong, I thought long and hard about it - but the organization looked like it had plenty of places for me to grow, and there would be opportunities to branch out and do other things. So I bit the bullet and quit university and took a job. And fortunately, or however you look at it - I've not looked back, it's been great.

Len: It's really interesting you mentioned the dot com bust. Again, for those of our listeners who aren't old like me and Nigel, there have been a number of these setbacks in industry, and I mean, I guess capitalism in our lifetimes. And one of the big ones was around the turn of the millennium when there had been this huge boom - a positive thing with the emergence of the World Wide Web, and a lot of people were told, "If you want to secure a job and profession where you can be highly paid, go become a computer programmer and get into tech." And then there was this huge crash, which we won't go into - because it would take another episode to talk about the whole thing. But a lot of people ended up having made this decision - "What am I going to do with my life?" - on the grounds of security and income, and not what they were actually going to be doing - and then ended up in a doldrum, which was very unfortunate. I'm glad to hear you made it through that.

You ended up - I scrolled through your LinkedIn profile a little bit - you ended up at Barclays for a while, and I wanted to talk about that.

A lot of people's experience working - doing programming and tech - is with startups and big tech companies and stuff like that. And I should mention - I've actually interviewed Ian Miell on this podcast in the past - who was the Chief Software Architect for Barclays for a while. But what was it like working for a giant bank?

Nigel: Yeah, so my role at the bank. I come very much now from more of an infrastructure operations background. So although I did code and develop early on in my career, I became very much more of like a networking and then a storage and then a Linux guy, before I got into containers.

So when I was at Barclays, I was fortunate enough to be on what was called the Storage Strategy Team. There were three of us in the team that were effectively responsible for looking at potential new storage-related technologies to bring into the bank. And I think like, without saying too much and without - of course, I don't speak on behalf of the bank at all - and things have changed potentially a lot since I was there - but it was an organization like most banks, that invest heavily in technology. Because technology is fundamentally a part of their business. No tech, no business, no bank, right? So they put good money in to building good infrastructure.

I ended up flying all around the world looking at new technologies, testing them. We had a proof-of-concept lab. We would have vendors, different storage-related vendors, and technology vendors would fly us all over the world to show us their new technology. It was a super interesting role from that perspective.

But I will say that - we mainly focused on the retail bank side of the business. And retail banks are - while they invest heavily in technology, because it's such a core part of the business - they are the proverbial huge oil tanker trying to turn, when it comes to actually implementing and deploying new technologies. So in one respect, we were looking at very interesting and cool new technologies that we felt would be very good for the bank, but the bank had this super cautious approach to everything. And it's a bank, right? It looks after people's money, and so it should have an approach like that, right? Otherwise me and the two other guys on the team would probably have brought the business down.

But we got to look at some very cool technologies, rubbing up against some very frustrating policies and procedures and lead times to doing things. I really enjoyed it in a lot of respects. But I work for myself now - it's literally me and my brother, and my wife does our finances. But after I was at Barclays, I didn't ever work for another large organization. I did work in finance again, but it was more hedge funds and smaller investment banks. I think that I preferred those kind of environments, where it was easier to get things done. You had very small teams, and you could just go over and talk to somebody and get something done.

Whereas at larger organizations - and it wasn't just Barclays that I worked at, I worked at other large banks - to get things done sometimes, the hoops that you had to jump through and the time it would take, was really frustrating. So after Barclays it was smaller companies for me, until I got as small as I could go and it was just me - and now that's built up to myself, my brother, and my wife kind of of running everything now.

Len: I've got a couple of questions to ask you about that transition and the risk involved in that, and what it was like, but I can't help myself. Once - in addition to having interviewed the chief software architect for Barclays at one point, I interviewed someone who had been the chief software architect for Allianz, a guy named Gregor Hohpe. And he has this concept, and we were talking - a little bit before we started recording this interview, we were talking about Star Trek. And he viewed himself as being kind of like Geordi La Forge.

The metaphor he likes to use is he had an elevator to the top. And so he knew the engineering and he knew the engineers, but he also had access to the high level of the company. And he viewed his job as trying his hardest to bring the information that he could to the attention of the captain who was steering the ship, who didn't necessarily - who respected engineering, but didn't necessarily - and I'm not talking about Picard, who understood everything about the ship in the stories.

But the metaphor is that - there you are, you've got all this knowledge, you've got all this understanding of how everything works. But you're not the decider. And it can be very frustrating to have all that knowledge and not be in a position where you can decide, and where there's things at stake. It's important sometimes that ships are hard to steer, or take a long time to steer. But it can be very frustrating to be in a position where you believe you know what direction it ought to go technologically, but getting the people who decide where it goes to agree, can be very hard.

Nigel: I have a quick story, if you don't mind then, Len. It's a really good example of that.

I won't say any of the organizations that were involved, but it was one of these - I don't know? Sort of big enterprise organizations that were slow to turn, and we were bringing in a relatively - well a, quite a very new technology actually, from a startup. It was a very good technology all across the board. We loved it. We were passionate. We were behind it. We were excited to deploy it. And our existing vendors in that space that were losing a bit of the account, or a bit of the footprint on site, were very much against it. And we took the approach that - we do our testing and proof-of-concept things.

And we're not mugs, right? We've done this for a long time, we know what we're doing. Of course we thought, "Yes, that vendor's potentially losing out some of their share of the environment, of course they're going to say bad things." And they were very much, "Look, this is too new. It's not enterprise-ready, it's not battle-hardened." All of that kind of stuff. Well, we went ahead and we deployed the technology and somewhere later down the line - not too far down the line - we had an engineer onsite on a production system changing a faulty cable that was part of the backend wiring.

It was all highly available with multiple redundant cables. So it was done under change control and it was done during business hours, because it was deemed that the risk was not that great. As he was moving his hands around inside around the cables at the back of that piece of equipment, he knocked the big red power switch off.

Len: Oh my.

Nigel: And, yeah - the system went down. It was a storage system. If I remember right, data was lost - which is the worst-case scenario. We probably had backups that we recovered from. It was a very long time ago for me now, so the details are a little bit vague. But what it turned out - and the other vendor really loved this -t that as much as had gone into making this startup technology as highly available as possible, and all of the testing we did - when we compared it with the longer standing vendor, their power button was recessed with a plastic cover covering it, to avoid just such a scenario as that.

And it's one of those things that - I think, in fact, I have no doubt it would've happened a lot more if a lot of these organizations hadn't put the brakes on the likes of me and the people that were in the teams that I were in, saying, "This is good, this is enterprise, this is great, this is the future." And as a result of that, of course all future models of that then had a fix put in place - and we were unfortunately the ones that learned the hard way. But it is true that so many of these organizations - while it is frustrating for people like maybe me and you, there is wisdom behind that, "Let's take things very steadily."

Len: It's funny - I mean, at Leanpub I'm sort of on the technology side, but I used to be an investment banker in London on the investment banking side of things. And, yeah we were very conservative about technology. I mean it was an interesting - it was funny - it's like, you want the latest and greatest, but you can go to jail if you screw up.

So you absolutely want everything to work as well. And "screw up" can mean things like data being leaked, data getting out. And yeah, when billions of dollars are on the line and so is your freedom, you get very conservative about it. But at the same time, it's extremely competitive. And so you want the latest and greatest. And so there are all these tensions. But I know, I mean I - my heart beat faster when you talked about that button being pressed and losing data. I mean that's terrible stuff.

Nigel: Yeah.

Len: But speaking of things being at stake - so you had these high-flying jobs at investment banks and hedge funds and stuff like that, and then you decided to go independent and to teach. So what prompted that decision, and what was it like at the beginning?

Nigel: My wife prompted it, but we'll get to that.

Len: Okay.

Nigel: So what happened was - I was making a little bit of a name for myself on the internet as a storage expert. I was one of the early people running a technology blog, which got me visibility in the wider sort of - I want to call it "social media," but we didn't call it social media back then. But I began to get a name for myself. And most of the big technology vendors like NetApp and EMC and Hitachi and HP and all those people ended up starting to fly me around the world to their different shows. They would take me to their labs. I got flown out to Japan with a small team to go and see the research lab at Hitachi, which was a very privileged thing.

So, I got to this point where I was making a little bit of a name for myself. And I always had this passion where I wanted to write a book. So early in my career, Mark Minasi's book, I think it was called, Mastering Windows Server 2000 or something like that, was a monumental work in my career. I still have a copy of the book now. I took it on my honeymoon. I read it at the pool, I read it at the beach. All that kind of stuff. It was a very important book for me. It helped me really propel my career on. I always thought from that point, "At some time later in my career, I'd love to write a book to give back."

Well anyway, so as I was becoming moderately well known in the storage world via my blog, I was approached by Sybex, or Wiley Sybex, the publishing company. To say, "Look, we'd love you to write a book on data storage networking for us." So I did that while I was working at a hedge fund in London. The hardest year of my life. It took me 11 months to write the book. It almost cost me - I don't want to be flippant about this. I am slightly, I don't mean any disrespect to anybody here - but it was almost the end of me and my family and my relationship and stuff. I was so stressed doing it.

But coming towards the end of writing that book - when I only had a few chapters left, a company called TrainSignal approached me and said, "Hey, we're looking for somebody that's good at storage to create some video training courses for us" - on exactly the same topics that I'd written the book on.

I was having a really difficult year. And I had a word with my wife and said, "Look, I think I've done all the hard work for the book. Assuming there are no non-compete issues here, I think I'd quite like to do this." So I went back to Wiley Sybex, and they said, "We don't compete with video courses, so go ahead - as long as it doesn't make the book delivery date late."

So I finished off the book, while at the same time I started creating some video courses for this company called TrainSignal. I finished the video courses. TrainSignal was acquired by a company called Pluralsight. And they said, "Look, we hold this annual convention over in the States for all of our authors, and we'd love to pay for you to fly over, come and talk to us - just to see what we're all about". So I said, "Yeah, okay, go on, we'll do that."

So they flew me over to the States. I went to this whole convention thing with a bunch of Pluralsight and TrainSignal video trainers. And at the end of it, they sat me down and they said - and again, this is rough- from memory - but number one, I think they liked the accent. Number two, they said, "You seem to have taken really well to this video training approach to things." Because I try and make things conversational and fun and entertaining, and have a laugh while we're doing it. And they basically said, "We'd like anything else that you feel that you've got enough expertise in, to make more video courses for us." So I flew home and mentioned it to my wife.

Now, bear in mind - wind back to the beginning of the call, and you say, "I live in the north of England." I was commuting three and a half to four hours a day to London and back, at this hedge fund. And I had been using the time to work on my video courses while I was on the train and finished my book and stuff, but it was a really tough year. And my wife said, "So, right - you will be able to make video courses and work from home and never have to go to London and stuff again?" And I said, "It kind of sounds like that." And she said, "Well, Nigel, I think we're going to do that." So I said, "Alright, let's give that a bit of a go."

And I will say, that I'm in a good position now. But early on, it was very, very difficult. Generally speaking, the way that video courses work is - you get paid a royalty for how many hours of watch. Now, I love the model, right? Because if I make a rubbish video course, or if I'm lazy and I just do one a year or something - then I'm not rewarded for it. But if I put in effort and I make something great, that when people click "play," they don't want to click, "stop." And if I create enough of these, I will be rewarded commensurate with how much effort I've put in. I really like that model.

But early on, when I didn't have another income, and I only had one course in the library, and I was working on my next course and my next course - I don't mind saying that Pluralsight were very good to me and gave me advance payments and things like that, so that I didn't lose my house. Because it got quite difficult at times. I mean, there was a point when we were selling the children's toys at what we call a "car boot sale" over here in the UK, where people go and set up a table in town and sell little things for next to no money. So in the very early days, we're out there selling the kids' toys to try and get by. A very, very humbling experience. But something, I think, that changes your perspective on life and your work ethic, and things like that.

Now I'm super fortunate that I've got quite a lot of video courses out there. Royalty rates are much lower now than they used to be, but I've got enough out there that I have a work/life balance, where I'm doing something that I love, like I mentioned before. I'm around at home. So I do the school run every day. I go to all of the sports days and stuff at school. I don't get paid contractor rates like I did in London, necessarily. But the balance is totally different. So I'm absolutely loving it, Len.

But I will say - I'm going to caveat it, with - I do spend all of my time now creating and keeping up to date my video courses and my books. And I am a little bit worried that there will come a point potentially where I am - and I mean no disrespect to anybody here, right? But when I was working for the companies - and we would have accounts with Gartner and people like that, who hadn't touched a production system in the trenches for 10, 20 years - would try and tell me what was best for me. I kind of resented it. And I worry whether there will be a point where I become the video trainer and the book author that hasn't touched a real-world production system for 20 years - I'm not quite there yet, obviously. But I will be trying to preach to somebody that just knows the world way better than me - might not know the technology better than me, but my understanding of how it's applied in the real world might start to - I don't know? Fade, for want of a better term. Does that make sense to you?

Len: Oh - well first of all, thank you very much for sharing that wonderful story and for sharing the ups and downs as well. So many Leanpub authors are people who have made the decision at some point to go independent, and face these challenges and these hard times, and then these up times, and things like that. I think it's really, really great to hear the story.

It definitely makes sense to me what you're saying. This sort of thing that like - people who are really smart and really know what they're doing and go into the teaching side of things, I think this is - not exactly an anxiety, but a concern that they all have. And it's something that they face, right? I mean it's the old challenge to the teacher, "Why are you teaching it instead of doing it?"

But of course, teaching - you wouldn't know what you're doing if you hadn't been taught or learned from somebody. Like your great story about this book that changed your life. If someone hadn't taken the time to think about how to teach and to do the teaching, then you probably wouldn't know what you know now in the first place. So there's always this interplay. But it definitely makes 100% sense to me.

Before we move on to talking about what you have been teaching and the technologies in the next part of the interview where we talk about your books, I just wanted to do two things. One was a little anecdote. So you mentioned the accent. When I was researching this interview, I listened to a podcast you did. I think back in February, where you brought up the fact that maybe Pluralsight was partly attracted to the accent.

Nigel: Yeah.

Len: That just brought up an old memory of mine from back in the day when I was doing a Master's in English at the University of Saskatchewan, in the middle of Canada.

We had a student come in in my year from Cornwall, and everybody fawned over his sophisticated English accent. Which to him was like, "Where I come from, this is not considered to be sophisticated," a Cornish accent.

Nigel: Yeah, we would call them "pirates" probably.

Len: It's funny - to generalize, to the North American ear, all English accents sound like BBC accents.

Nigel: Of course.

Len: But once you've been there for a while, you can start to tell someone's from Newcastle or someone's from Liverpool or someone's from, and in fact, the neighborhood in London even, if you get precise enough.

So the second of the two things I wanted to talk about before we went onto the next part of the interview where we talk about technology and your books, is the pandemic.

One of the pleasures of this podcast is I get to interview people from all over the world about how they've been affected. I've interviewed an Argentinian programmer who made the last flight for foreigners to Poland with his girlfriend, people in Denver and Seattle and Austin - but that's all just the United States - and from lots of different countries, and in particular, people who do conference speaking and things like that, and consulting and how they've been affected - how has the pandemic affected you?

Nigel: So, like I was saying before, I work from home full time anyway. So from my perspective, I won't say not a lot has changed - but not as much as has changed for people who didn't always work from home prior to the pandemic.

I think from a working at home perspective, the biggest change for me has been having the children around a lot more. We had an incident just earlier on on this call, where the kids were outside making quite a bit of noise. So it has been not as much of a change for me from a working practices perspective, though my productivity has taken a dip, because it's just more difficult to record audio and things like that when the kids are around playing and doing what they do, fighting - yeah.

However, we have done a lot more livestreams. So whereas we used to do face-to-face training gigs at events like DockerCon and KubeCon and things like that, we're doing a lot more livestream-based events.

I don't enjoy them as much. I mean, I try and be as interactive as possible, and get people to ask questions via the Q&A widgets and things, and make them feel as present as is possible on something like that. But it's not the same as being in front of a room of 50 or 100 people. And then when you're done, they come up, we're talking and interacting like that. So we are doing a lot more livestreams outside of our main technology business.

As a family, we do now have one or two other businesses, which have taken various different beatings - just to step away from technology very quickly, if you don't mind?

We have a half share in what is effectively an environmentally-friendly water business. So we own half of a spring water company - it's a startup, really. And we're all about no single-use plastics, zero waste. So all of our water, still and sparkling, is in reusable glass bottles that we deliver to your door. We collect them, we wash them and reuse them. And of course, we're no longer able to deliver to hotels or restaurants or anything like that, while they've been closed. But we are delivering to end users. So that side of one of our businesses has taken a big hit. But we're super passionate about this kind of environmental aspect of the business. In fact, it was why we got into it.

So we're really hoping that things can get back to normal as much as possible. Hopefully we would like to improve some things. I don't mean in the business, I just mean in society in general. Maybe drive a bit less and fly a bit less? But we really feel that this business has the potential to make an impact on the environment and in people's lives, that we super hope it doesn't fold.

Now, that's not a sob story in any way at all, Len - I'm just saying like - I'm sure you've had a lot of technology conversations, or conversations with people about how technology businesses and working life has changed. But just from one other side of us there, that like - we have other small businesses as well, which I won't go into - that have taken similar hits and things. So it's just been all change, in almost everything that we do. The only thing that hasn't changed for me is the fact that I'm sat in this office 24/7, seven days a week, yeah.

Len: Thank you very much for sharing that. I actually think it's very important for people to share, to talk about the different ways it's affecting them. It's affecting all of us in lots of different ways. Having the children at home, and I don't have kids myself, but this is something I've heard from a lot of different people - schooling children has become a thing that everybody talks about, as well, feeling like you're productivity is going down because of all of that, is really important.

But also, yes - I mean people's - they may have a primary occupation, but they may have had a secondary form of income that's been affected by it as well. I remember interviewing Kyle Simpson for this podcast - he did a lot of in-person consulting, and when I interviewed him, he'd not only talked about how that had already - this was a couple of months ago. This had already taken a huge hit. But he'd been planning his 40th birthday for a long time and it meant a lot to him. And he was similarly apologetic. I know - I mean there are people literally dying. But at the same time, there are these dimensions of our lives that have been affected and things that we've lost that aren't coming back. And I do think it is important to talk about. I think everybody's on the same page about that kind of thing.

So, shifting gears to the next part of the interview. When you did make this leap to being independent, there was a particular technology which was Docker, that you were writing about, and doing videos about and talking about. And then - we could talk about that, and there's so much else we could talk about as well. But eventually you moved onto writing and teaching about something called Kubernetes. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about - I sometimes sort of spring this on people, and sometimes they push back, but if you were talking to someone who didn't know anything about computers, and you had to explain what Kubernetes was, what would you say to them?

Nigel: Actually I don't need to avoid that question. I have that conversation quite a lot. I address it in my book and several of my video courses actually.

Just take a sporting analogy, okay? A football team, it can be American football or it can be soccer. But that team is made up of lots of individuals, and each of those individuals has their own unique set of attributes, and what they bring to the team.

I'll take soccer, because I'm more comfortable with it. I'll probably call it football, but I mean soccer.

Obviously the goalkeeper is very different to a striker, like the quarterback is different to a defensive guard - if such a thing exists, it sounds like it does to me. But then - look, I'll go with American football as well. A wide receiver is very different to a running back, okay? A defender is different to a midfielder and a winger in football. But they need somebody or something that brings them together, has them playing as a team against a plan - but can then also react and adapt to changes.

And in a sporting analogy, that's a coach, right? She or he comes along and takes all of those different individuals and assigns them a position on the field and a job and a role, and puts together an overall tactic or plan of attack for the game - for a particular match or game. And they're responsible for implementing it, and making sure that all of these different individuals actually do what they're supposed to do.

But then let's say the circumstances in the game change, and you're behind and the clock is ticking and you need an extra goal or a score or a try or touchdown or whatever it is, they will adapt. The playing staff, they may take people off and replace them with other people. They may say, "We'll have less people playing in defense and we'll push forward and we'll take more risks." Maybe somebody gets an injury and they replace that injured person?

Well, Kubernetes does that role of the coach for modern - and I'm going to throw a couple of buzzwords out here, I apologize for doing that. I could just call them "modern applications," right? But Kubernetes does that for modern cloud native microservices applications, which is basically just an application. But instead of being one huge, large binary that does everything - like a big computer program might've done the web front end and the persistent data store and the back end and all the authentication and logging and reporting - whereas now in a modern application, we break out all of those different pieces.

So there might be a couple of developers responsible for the reporting system, and they can develop that and deploy it and patch it and scale it independently of the other components of the overall application.

What we end up with modern applications is lots of different things - a web front end, a persistent data store on the back end and authentication system, some middleware. Lots of different moving parts, but they have to talk to each other and pull together and form - I guess a useful application that provides a useful experience for an end user, and Kubernetes does all of that.

It plans what all of the different components do. How they communicate, how they talk, whether we need to scale the front end up to cope with demand, whether we need to scale it back. If a node dies or if a part of the application crashes, it's responsible for restarting it. Is also responsible for performing things like - buzzwords, again I apologize - but we would call them "zero downtime rolling updates," right? You compare a modern application with all those different individual moving parts to a sports team with individuals with different roles.

A sports team has a coach comes in and sorts it all out. Kubernetes comes in and sorts out that modern application. And that's the elevator pitch as long as the building is about 500 stories tall and the elevator ride is long.

Len: Thank you very much for sharing that, that's a really great analogy. To shift from sports to kind of something else that people might be familiar with, let's take an application like Microsoft Word. I've got an iMac Pro, like a $6,000 computer, and when I turn on Microsoft Word I get a spinning beach ball and I can't actually have a document that's more than 100 pages without getting slowed down. And one of the reasons is that it's this giant program that does everything internally, right? So like it has a mail merge feature, where I can give it a bunch of physical addresses, like street addresses. So it can print out hundreds of letters. This is like a very old, old thing, but I imagine it's still there in Microsoft Word.

But it can make tables, it can make tables of contents. It can do captions under images and stuff like that. And I think - I'm just bringing it up because it's a program that I think a lot of people are familiar with, and they're also familiar with it being slow. Because everything is happening in one service, rather than many services. And perhaps an analogy that people might understand on the computing side of things, is that like - imagine if instead of having one program like Microsoft Word with all these things happening and being managed within it, you actually had a bunch of different services? And then Kubernetes would be the thing that kind of picks out the service that needs to be used for what needs to be used now, instead of having everything running all the time.

Nigel: Yeah, for sure. I just had a horrifying moment that I thought you were going to ask me if I knew how to fix that problem with Word.

Len: No, no. Don't use Word. We don't like to be mean about other people's products, but don't use Word. But anyway, I just thought that would be an analogy that people would--

I'll link to a recent video you did, I think just a few days ago on YouTube - a livestream about the current state of affairs with Kubernetes. But what is the state of the nation right now?

Nigel: So, Kubernetes has a lot of hype in the whole ecosystem. It's very much like what VMware used to be like in the early days, where all of the major vendors want to have a VMware story. All the major vendors. HP, Dell, NetApp - all of them want to have a Kubernetes story now, and want to be seen on stage with Kubernetes. And it's being sold as like it's the answer to all software problems out there. But then on the other side, it can be horrifically complex. So I always try and say that the truth of the matter is somewhere in the middle.

We've had Kubernetes for about five years now. So obviously quite a lot of the core components there are pretty stable, and are pretty simple. Well, I mean you have to be able to write yaml files and know a bit of command line stuff. Don't get me wrong, it's not super simple. But it's way simpler than it used to be. So it's not horrifically complex anymore, but it also doesn't solve everything. And a lot of the things - it's growing all the time, and a lot of the newer things that are building or growing the feature set - are newer and greener, and are more complex.

So I don't know. In some respects, it's not for everybody because of the complexity. Like if you're a small team in a small company and you don't have a lot of engineering time or talent to invest in learning Kubernetes - to be able to leverage its power and what it brings, then it's probably not for you, and you might want to go with - I don't know? Docker Swarm or maybe a cloud that you use has a similar service that's not Kubernetes-based, it's simpler to use.

Versus, I think - more and more though, going forward - because all of the vendors are behind it, it's looking like it's going to be a VMware, in that - when I say that, right - I mean that if you don't get on board with it at some point, you will find that you've been left behind. Both as an individual in your own personal career, but then potentially your team within your organization, or even your organization in general. So if it's not for you at the moment while it's hard and you go and you use another technology - I would recommend to people, to still keep an eye on Kubernetes as it gets simpler, and people build tooling around it that abstracts a lot of the complexity, and just makes it easier to use.

Because I do think at some point - this is difficult for me to say, right? But I think a lot of companies will find that they do want it eventually. And I find as well Len, that there tends to be - within an organization or within an organization's culture, if an organization doesn't have a culture of adapting to change in their own product set, but also in the technology that supports their business - if you don't have one eye on the future at least, there's a good chance your company will not be in - at least a stronger position as it is now in the next 10 years, and it might not even be here in the next 10 years.

So I always try and encourage people, from an organizational perspective - don't be one of those companies that got blindsided by a new product and thought that they didn't have to adapt to it on your main product side, but also on the technology side - keep an eye on what's coming.

And Kubernetes very much is front and center. It's got a very strong ecosystem. It's marching forward like a juggernaut, very much like VMware was. I do feel that if you don't get on board at some point, you may regret it. It's all about that balance of making sure that you get on it at the right point. Because of course within organizations now, engineering time and resources are being squeezed more than ever. I don't know if that made sense or if I was rambling.

Len: Oh no - that totally makes sense, I think it was totally coherent actually, and it gives me an opportunity to segue into the next part of the interview, where we talk about your experience as an author.

So you talk about how people don't want to be left behind, things are changing all the time. You've got a book about something that's changing all the time, The Kubernetes Book. How do you manage - I mean I know you do it by updating the book, but what's your cadence for updating the book that you've hit upon?

Nigel: I'll start this by saying that writing a book is both a very challenging and time-consuming thing to do - you'll know this yourself. But on the flip side, it can also be a very rewarding thing to do. So I don't try and frighten people off. I do feel it's very rewarding. But I would love nothing more as an author of two books on two technologies that change relatively quickly, especially Kubernetes - I would love to be able to write a book and put it on the shelf on Amazon, on Leanpub - all those different places, and have that book be valid for five years, like it used to be with that Mastering Windows Server 2000 book, right?

But that is not the world that we live in anymore. And I feel very much like a book on a topic such as Kubernetes - if it's like more than a year or 18 months old, certainly two years old - it's potentially almost dangerous, because things have changed so much. And the return on investment that anybody that buys that book is massively diminished. I wouldn't want to have my name against something where people are buying and spending their hard-earned money on it and saying, "Well, half the stuff that you talk about's changed since then." So with The Kubernetes Book, we try and update it three or four times a year.

Now, we want to make at least one of those changes where we're adding more content. So maybe something new has come along and it's got to a point where I feel it's stable enough to put into a written book. But then, some of the other updates may just be me going through the entire book - and every update that I do, I do this, by the way. I go through the entire book, I re-read every word and I go through every example, and I run them against the very latest upstream version of Kubernetes, so that I know if you're on the bleeding edge right now - what you're reading in my book or on video courses as well, because I try the same there - it's a little bit more difficult - that it will work on the latest editions.

So, The Kubernetes Book, I try and update it three, hopefully four times a year. My Docker Deep Dive book, I'm currently on a one year update release cadence, just because Docker is a lot more stable now. But I find that - and I don't really know how the book publishing industry really likes this model when it comes to ISBNs and things like that, and changing content of books and potentially adding content. But I will say, if you don't mind me saying - that from a Leanpub perspective, the process that I have to go through - because I'm not a big Microsoft Word fan either. I write in Markdown in Visual Studio code. And the back end platform at Leanpub makes it very easy for me to write updates and push them to the platform and get them to existing readers. And again, of course I sound like a shill for the platform here and I don't mean to. But of course then anybody that's previously bought either of my books, automatically gets the updates free of charge, so that they don't have to go and repurchase it again or anything like that.

So as much as it is challenging to keep it up to date, it feels like a rat race at times - the technologies and the platforms are out there now that like, that make it much more simple, right - for me as an author. Like my Data Storage Networking book via an established publishing company - it would not be possible to do such a thing via the old way, if you will.

Len: Thank you for sharing that. I mean as far as shilling goes, this is the exact reason that Leanpub exists - is to allow people to write books that they can update, particularly so that they can keep up to date with the evolving technologies that they're about. And it's one of the reasons - I mean you could use in-progress publishing for all kinds of reasons. But having books that are up to date with respect to evolving technologies is one of the reasons that - having the ability to keep your books up to date is one of the reasons that Leanpub is so popular particularly with people who write about evolving technology. That's the classic, classic Leanpub use case.

And so just before we go on to talk a little bit more about writing - of course you do a lot of video production and creation as well. And books and videos are very different things. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your thinking about the difference between books and videos? Instructional books and videos - both from the creation side and from the consumption side, how you think about that.

Nigel: Quick story then. When I wrote my Data Storage Networking book, I had several changes that were mandated on me. Because the publishing company - probably rightly so, in some respects - was concerned that some of the things I was saying wouldn't come across very well in different cultures, and things like that. One of them - I was talking about a technology called "Fibre Channel over Ethernet." And the Ethernet that it used is not like the typical Ethernet. It was like a much - I won't say "improved." It was a much-changed Ethernet that was lossleess, all kinds of different things.

I made the comment in the book that it wasn't your grandmother's Ethernet. And they were concerned from two angles on that - that some people wouldn't understand what I meant by that. Which is I think a fair shout. But they were also worried that I would offend certain cultures who respected elderly members of the family, potentially more than we do in the Western World. So I took that change on board.

But another one was - I forget what I was actually talking about, but I was saying that a certain practice in data storage was so important it was practically the law. And I mean no disrespect to anybody in the US when I say this, right? Because these are not my words. But the publisher came back and said, "We need you to take that out, because we feel that some people that buy the book in the US may actually think that it actually is the law to do that." And I'm like, "You have got to be kidding me, right? It's a tongue-in-cheek remark."

Now, it's very difficult to put that across in written word - whereas when I'm talking on a video and you can hear the way I'm saying things and I can laugh about it, "Doing it this way, it's practically the law," right? You get what I'm saying about that. I can do that in video form.

It's much more difficult to do that in written word. So I find that when I make video training courses, I can be a lot more personable. I can be a lot more relaxed. I can be flippant at times. I can make jokes. I can also augment it with animations and things like that, which is super useful.

But, then, on the downside, it is much more difficult to keep a video course up to date, than it is a book that's published via Leanpub or something.

Because - in fact, I actually find - if I have like a - let's call it a 10 minute video clip and I need to change just two sentences in that clip, it's easier for me to rewrite the whole thing and just re-record the whole 10 minutes, than it is for me to try and splice in two sentences. Nothing else might have changed in there, other than those two sentences - but I have to be able to get the audio at exactly the same pitch, and I have to have my voice sound exactly the same. I have to time it with the animation on the video, which will skew everything out. So it's much harder.

I prefer video courses. I will say that, right? Because I can have a laugh and it's fun and I feel like I'm having a chat with somebody at the bar, and it can be very informal. But updating them is super hard, compared to changing the sentence in the middle of a paragraph in a book, right? So don't get me wrong, I love them both, but they are very different beasts.

Len: Thanks for sharing that. The anecdotes are really quite striking and informative - particularly, I imagine, for people who have had this experience themselves or who are thinking of getting into the content creation world on their own. Yeah, the notorious kind of contextless nature of writing, compared to kind of in-person interaction, is fraught, right?

Nigel: Yeah.

Len: It's funny - because there's less, there's more, and you can do things. In a video there's pitch and tone and body language, and also the in-the-moment nature. Even though something's recorded and planned, there's a bit of an in-the-moment feature of it. Whereas with writing, it's like, "No, you wrote that", you committed to that, you re-read it, you edited it. Maybe someone else looked at it?

And anyway, I mean of course video recordings are real as well, obviously, and commit and represent commitments. But there is something that we all know - everyone's had this experience of where you write something in an email or a text, and someone gets the wrong message from it because - but anyway, yeah, it's very different.

It's interesting. I've talked to a few people - I mean, both on the podcast, but also just like interacting with so many content creators through Leanpub, who talk about how - in a way it's much easier to update a section of a book than it is to update a section of video. Especially if you've got high production value, it can take hours and hours and hours to do a video. But it is true that it's easier to re-shoot a whole bit, than it is to re-shoot a part of a bit. So for anyone listening who has been into, or is thinking of getting into this - you're not wasting your time or making a mistake if you reshoot a whole segment, as it were.

Nigel: No. It's incredibly rewarding, but it is incredibly hard work as well. I would tell somebody that if I am putting out a three hour video course, that is between four and easily six months sometimes of hard, hard graft. Because other people are different, but I do everything myself. All the planning, all the testing, all the demos, all of the audio, the video editing, post-production, the lot, just because I am sort of super anal, if I can say that?

Len: Yeah.

Nigel: When it comes to quality, I only want my name against something that I feel is absolutely amazing. Other people might disagree, don't get me wrong. But I put everything heart and soul into it. Which I think makes it a little bit more rewarding when the final product is out there, and people are thanking me for it. But don't underestimate the amount of work that goes into it - wow, honestly.

Len: Yeah, I forget who it was that I was interviewing - but who said that for every hour of video content that he produces, he probably puts in 20 hours of work or something like that?

Nigel: Oh easily for me, yeah.

Len: It's hard, and for anyone who's done it, they know exactly what we're talking about. I mean one little flub, and you might have to start over.

Nigel: Yeah.

Len: And so all the planning in the world can't necessarily protect you against the tiniest weakness in your plan.

Nigel: Do you know the thing for me, Len, as well - is because books were really important to me early in my life, and I owned quite a few books that I thought were outstanding - but equally quite a few that I was extremely disappointed with, and I'd spent my own hard-earned money on them. I was always a mixture of gutted, and almost angry if I would buy a book to learn something or had had a chapter that I needed to learn the topic of that chapter. And I would read the chapter and come out at the end and think, "I still don't understand it." What was a real bugbear of mine, if that translates? Was a real pain point for me.

So anything that I do now, I am - I mean, I will go to extremes to make sure that I am explaining something as clearly as possible. Because the absolute last thing that I want is somebody to take one of my courses or read one of my books and say, "I still don't get it." Because I was certain - that used to wind me up something rotten. I'm committed and passionate to never deliver something like that.

And that's actually easier said than done. Because I won't ever call myself an expert in anything, but I've done containers and Kubernetes for a long time now.

You find that when you're explaining something, you automatically - you don't mean to do this, it's subconscious. You make assumptions that other people have fundamental groundwork knowledge that you have, but they actually might not have. So I may record something, and when I'm listening back to it and doing the editing, at the end of the edit, I'll think, "But what if they don't actually understand this other thing that's fundamental to it?" Painful as that is, to go back and say, "I've got to redo it in a way that doesn't assume they already have knowledge of something else."

Now that's a fine line, don't get me wrong. I have to assume that they know what a computer is, can use a mouse and a keyboard and certain fundamentals. But I draw the line very carefully so that I'm not assuming that people have like ten years' experience already with Linux or something. But I'm waffling.

Len: No, I'm very much on board with you. You're reminding me of - at the book level. I mean it applies at the book level, but it also applies at the kind of message board level. And there's this certain kind of - I shout at the computer when I see this kind of thing, where someone goes, "How do I do X?" And someone goes, "Well you just need to grink the shizzle."

Nigel: Yeah, of course - yeah. "You asshole."

Len: Yeah.

Nigel: You know when you say that, it's -

Len: Anyway, people are - I often, like - it's often not neglect, it's often deliberate.

But I'm quite passionate about that kind of thing myself. Like, just don't be an asshole, be clear, explain everything. Of course there's a certain level beyond which you can't go. Like how do you - what's a left click, what's a right click? Things like that. But explain things clearly if you're going to explain them at all.

And so - just my second last question, is related to that actually. Conventionally, people often think a self-published book is actually one that's probably going to be lower quality than a book that's published by a conventional publisher. Your first book was Data Storage Networking, with a conventional publisher.

Nigel: That's right.

Len: Where you had that very stressful year or time. But your Docker Deep Dive book, and your Kubernetes book, were both self-published. I mean obviously you could've probably had any tech publisher take you up with a contract, and had thrown editors and stuff like that at you. Why did you decide to self-publish these books?

Nigel: Yeah, so no disrespect to any traditional publisher, but I vowed after that book that while I was proud to have my name against a book - and it has been influential in my career - that I would never write a book again via a conventional publisher.

So, I wanted to write a book on Docker. Though I don't know, there was maybe one other Docker book at the time. So I reached out on social media to see where would be a good place to do a self-publish. Somebody pointed me at Leanpub, and I sailed into the distance and lived happily every after - no.

But it kind of was that. It provided a way for me to give something to the community.

I will say writing text books, my experience is you will not retire early off of the money, that's for sure. It's almost - the amount of time I put in, it feels like I'm doing it for charitable reasons sometimes, almost. But the engagement that you get with the community and with your readers, it is beautiful at times - if that doesn't sound too cheesy. So yeah, I vowed that I would never do a published book via a standard publisher again. I published Docker Deep Dive via Leanpub. I do self-publish paperback versions of both my books on Amazon now.

I have had several publishing companies come and ask to buy the rights of both books from me. I will go to my grave fighting for those books, and will never sell them to anybody. Just because while I might get an upfront payment from that, and it might validate the book in some people's eyes - because it has a - I'm giving quote marks here, air quotes - a "real publisher" behind it. I will lose that - in my world, right, the book will lose its authenticity. Because right now I have the freedom to correct any mistakes or oversights or add clarifications - like we were just talking about that, right - as and when I want. A few mouse clicks, right?

After half an hour's work - boom, it's republished. I can update it as often as I want.

I'll say this - it's my book. When I publish via Leanpub and Kindle paperback on demand publishing, it's mine, right? Whereas as soon as I sign over the rights to it to another company - not only is the process just way more horrible and restrictive and the book would lose its soul - it wouldn't be mine anymore.

So for those reasons, I love the self-publishing route, and as long as things stay the same financially, and I am able to keep my head above water - I would never sell the rights to those books.

Len: The last question I always like to ask Leanpub authors when they're on the podcast, is - if there was any one thing you could command us to build for you, a feature - or something you could command us to fix for you - can you think of anything you would ask us to do?

Nigel: On the Leanpub side of things?

Len: Yeah.

Nigel: So, I used to have to do quite a lot of work taking a PDF and making it workable for Amazon self-publishing paperbacks. But you now have - and have had for quite a while actually - the print-ready version, I think.

But I would say that I still have to go in and add and remove some of the front matter content in that side of things. So if there was a way for me to be able to - via the normal Leanpub publishing route that I take, to not have to go in and manually add like an intro page - an "about the authors" page and stuff like that. Or to make that simpler. And I'm not sure how you would do that, but then again it's not my job to know that back end. That would be the one thing.

But honestly, aside from that - I really probably am struggling, because I've been doing it for quite a few years now, so I've got the sort of publishing process - pushing updates to Leanpub, of course, couldn't be easier. I do do the paperback self-publishing on Amazon as well. That takes a little bit more effort. But with the print-ready versions, it's way less effort than it used to be. I don't have to try and left-right margin align and page numbering, that's all done for me - so thank you for that. Yeah, that's it really.

Len: Well thanks for sharing that. I should say that we do have a Print-Ready PDF output option for all Leanpub books. And it is the way it is, because authors have reached out to us and said, "Hey, we need this left-right page numbering. We need this and that."

So both to you and to anyone listening, if there's anything that - if you're interacting with a major print-on-demand service that has requirements that we don't currently provide, please reach out to us and ask us for them. We might not be able to do it right now. We might not be able to do it ever. But we won't do it if we don't know that it's out there as a requirement.

Sharing all that stuff with us is one of - I always like to say that one of the reasons - insofar as Leanpub is a good service for authors, it's because authors - we've got the best authors in the world,wWith respect to developing products, because so many of them are product developers and programmers themselves - so they understand how to communicate their requirements to us. So we're very lucky, we're very fortunate in that way.

And so if you have any requirements or anything like that - if you're a Leanpub author, please just reach out. It might not happen, but it might also happen. And that's one of the reasons we like to ask this question at the end of every interview.

Nigel: Right, yeah.

Len: So well, Nigel - thank you very much for taking the time out of your day to talk to us, and for using Leanpub as a platform to publish your books. We really appreciate it.

Nigel: No, it's my pleasure. Thanks for creating the platform.

Len: Thanks. And as always, thanks to you for listening to this episode of the Frontmatter podcast. If you like what you heard, please rate and review it wherever you found it, and if you'd like to be a Leanpub author, please visit our website at leanpub.com.