Philip Riecks, Author of Stratospheric: From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS

Len: Hi I’m Len Epp from Leanpub, and in this episode of the Frontmatter podcast I’ll be interviewing Philip Riecks.

Based in Berlin, Philip is a freelance developer and IT consultant.

You can follow him on Twitter @rieckpil and check out his website at rieckpil.de. You can also find his YouTube channel at youtube.com/c/rieckpil, and his Java-related online courses at rieckpil.de/courses.

Philip is co-author of the Leanpub book Stratospheric: From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS.

In the book, Philip and his co-authors Tom Hombergs and Björn Wilmsmann take you through everything you need to know to get your Spring Boot application running on AWS, by developing a working web application.

In this interview, we’re going to talk about Philip’s background and career, professional interests, his book, and at the end we’ll talk about how he got together with his co-authors to write a bestselling book.

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

Philip: Thanks a lot for having me, Len.

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 found yourself interested in computers and the web, and development?

Philip: I grew up in a small town in Bavaria in Germany. It’s actually a city with the headquarters of three major companies. One of them is Adidas and Puma. So, even though we have 20k of citizens, we host three major firms.

I grew up there. I went to school, played soccer, got a little bit into computer science at school - already quite early at school, we were taught Java with BlueJ. This is like an IDE, that teaches young students object orientation. We had to program a slot machine that’s - this way we learned the loops, and everything about IT.

After school, I wasn’t quite sure if I would go deep on Computer Science. I went to a job fair, and there was a company presenting a job opportunity with a dual-study program. It’s a mix of university and internship. You’re already employed for three years. You switch between three months at the university, and then three months at the company - and that’s what I did.

I went for a business information technology Bachelor’s degree, which I was doing in Mannheim, Germany, for three years. After that, I really found the IT part more interesting. The Bachelor’s goes 50/50 business and IT. But really the IT part stuck with me, and ever since I’m a software developer.

Len: We interview people for the podcast from all over the world. Most of our audience, though, is familiar with the North American model of university, where it’s kind of like two four-month terms, and then a summer off. Is that how it works in Germany, or is it a bit different there?

Philip: That’s how it usually works, yeah, for the normal students. They go off to summer holidays. While normal students have summer holidays, we were doing our internship and working. We had just the 30 days of vocation a year. And, yeah - we - it was like a working student, already, for three years straight, employed at the same company. Which was quite great, because you could shift between the departments. You could see six different departments in a short period of time. Already see what fits, yeah.

Len: I’m going to ask a version of a question that comes up often on the podcast. You’re a more recent vintage from university than many of our authors. But if you were starting out like now, like in 2022, with the intention of having a career in the same field that you’re in, do you think you’d do a full university degree again?

Philip: Yes, I guess I would still do a Bachelor’s. I was always hesitating if I should go for a Master’s degree, thinking about all the pros and cons. But in the end, I thought that at least for what I’m looking forward to do, it’s better to just get my hands dirty and develop software and solve problems.

But if I would start over, I would definitely go again for - maybe even still a business information technology? Because you get both sides of the world. You’re not the code monkey that develops software, you also understand a bit of the business context. And, yeah - I have a lot of options to choose.

Len: That’s really interesting. How does knowing the business context help you in your work?

Philip: It helps me now that I’m a freelance developer, to also do calculations for revenue for my monthly income, for taxes. For the business context, for marketing - I can understand when I was working the companies, the KPI’s. I had a rough understanding of the CFO presenting the numbers for the last quarter. I guess - normal Computer Science students, they may skip the slides. But actually for me, it was a bit interesting. Because I got the context, and I understood what’s behind the balance sheet.

Len: That’s really interesting. It’s actually also something that’s come up a few times on the podcast in the past, is - knowing at least the language to speak to people’s interests on the business side, and vice versa - right? It can really help businesses produce products better, and speak together about where they’re going, and what they want to do next - a lot better, if they can at least - they’ll talk their own language when they’re amongst themselves. But when you’re with each other, you need to be able to have a shared language as well, and that can really help.

I’m just looking at your LinkedIn profile here. You did a little bit of work, as you said, as a co-op student. But then you worked for a big company called Schaeffler.

Philip: Yes.

Len: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about who they are, and what you did for them?

Philip: Yeah. This was the company where I did the study program, for three years, and then I switched from being a student to a full-time employee at them.

They are the third major company in my small hometown. They are a big manufacturer for automotive and industry. They deliver parts for the big automotive companies, and doing a lot of manufacturing. There, I was part of the digitalization department, where we were bringing more and more IT and Industry 4.0 to the manufacturing plants, and getting the cloud inside such a manufacturing company going. And, yeah - building up a lot of things in that area.

Len: Did you say Industry 4.0?

Philip: Yes.

Len: What’s that? I’ve actually never heard that term before.

Philip: That’s the move, I guess it’s already a little bit late now. I guess that it was coined - I don’t know, ten years ago? It’s the move in the industry, in the manufacturing area, to go more into a connected world with IoT, and connecting all the machines with business software, and having the 365 degree of your manufacturing plant. And, yeah - digitalization in manufacturing industry.

Len: Oh, so this is super fascinating stuff. I just hadn’t heard that term before, but I’m sort of familiar, I think, somewhat with the transformation that happened in industry. Are you talking about things like digital twins, and things like that?

Philip: Yeah. They also form a part, this broad term - yeah.

Len: It’s super interesting. For anyone listening, who might not know - a digital twin is a - maybe you have a very sophisticated and expensive machine, and you can have a digital twin of it - that has all of its characteristics, that’s virtual. You can run tests on it. You can like do things to see what parts are more likely to fail, and need repair, and things like that, given the specific work that you’re doing on it.

Not to go into too much detail, but anyone who’s been in a - particularly in an American airport for the - in the last few years, has seen like, “Go to the cloud industry,” blah, blah, blah. But what does it actually mean, to be working at a big company like that, and to be moving things to the cloud? Does that mean they used to have their own server farm, and now they don’t anymore - and they’re working with a big company like AWS, or something like that?

Philip: Yeah, that’s one part of the transformation, to get rid of some of the data centers. But it also starts really in the plant, to get rid of old processes. Like Excel spreadsheets that are being printed out and handed over in a shift. You can’t imagine what’s going on there. You have to replace all the Windows servers running in the plant. That’s also part of it. That’s where it starts. The shiny buzzwords always tell about digital twin and a full degree of the manufacturing, but it starts really at automating manual processes, and having insights into the manufacturing and optimizing for the best output.

Len: And at a certain point, you decided to go independent or freelance. What led you to make that decision?

Philip: I left this manufacturing company for another company in Berlin. I moved then to Berlin to a real estate marketing place in Germany, where homeowners can advertise their home, and search for - oh, they want to rent it out. I switched places. I moved to Berlin. I worked there for almost two years, and then the whole work from home period started. I guess it was back in 2020. We were all told to work from home. In Berlin, I had a commute of about 90 minutes, back and forth, together - and I saved this time, without having to commute and working from home.

I started to use the time to work on my online course. I’ve been blogging for the Java niche for quite some time. But I used this gained time in the mornings to work on an online course, and this really took off. I decided, then, “Why not invest more time into both developing and content creation?”

The best thing to do this - I guess, was freelancing - because I would still be employed, and I would like to have two months of creative pause. That’s quite hard to argue with your manager - to say, “I want two months off.” I don’t know? “Co-working in Thailand, figuring out my next online course or book.”

Len: So, when you went freelance, did you have clients lined up in advance? I’m asking about the particulars, because this is something that a lot of our listeners might be thinking of doing themselves, or - it’s definitely something that a lot of Leanpub authors have done themselves in the past. Did you have something lined up, or did you just dive in?

Philip: I hadn’t had a backlog of clients to work for. I had a backlog of content ideas, and stuff I wanted to work on my own. This was not monetizable at the point, but I still wanted to do it. I thought the IT industry is hiring like hell, and also for the freelance market - there are recruiters which will reach out to you, and connect you with an employer. I though it would work out eventually, and it did. I found my first client, and worked there for seven months. But also, not with 40 hours a week. I am still doing my clients part-time. I still can split my weekdays for client work, and my own business.

Len: Is all of your client work remote?

Philip: Yes, so - as of now, it’s all remote. It’s slowly getting back to, “Let’s meet once every four weeks for a sprint demo or for a workshop.” But most of them are remote.

Len: We were talking before we started recording - I listened to a podcast interview you did last year, when I was preparing for this interview, where you talked about your productivity techniques, and stuff like that. I was just wondering if you could maybe walk us through a sort of -? There’s maybe more than one typical day that you have? But, balancing this independent client work. Then content creation, and stuff like that. We’ll go more into that in a little bit. But what are your days like, and how do you structure them? Maybe if you could talk a little bit about the Pomodoro Technique, and how you incorporate that? If that’s still something that you’re into?

Philip: Yes, I’m still doing the Pomodoro Technique, since two or three years now.

A usual day works - I get up at six, and really the first thirty minutes of the day are for the day planning. I think about what happened yesterday, what I want to accomplish today. Then I get right into writing. Back then, I always procrastinated on writing. I thought I have to do it the first thing in the morning. Go eat the frog. Also, I found out that I’m most creative in the early day, in the early hours of the day. I write for thirty minutes. Then I have a light breakfast. Then the day starts. It’s usually either a client day, where I work solely for the client. Or I work on my own projects.

When working on my own projects, I have my tasks split up in Pomodoro units. For example, I planned for today - three Pomodoro units for this podcast. One Pomodoro unit is twenty-five minutes. The technique works as - you have a counter, which I have a browser application that I can click on. Then the twenty-five minutes stopwatch goes down. If it’s over, you get five minutes of break. Then, after these five minutes, you get back to work, and then focus on your work. Within the twenty-five minutes, you’re only allowed to do what you planned for.

Don’t do scrolling on Twitter. Don’t check your emails. Just focus on what you planned for. And, yeah - on a usual day, I get between ten to fourteen of these units done. That’s a structure I found quite useful for me.

It also helps me to time box my work. Because if I just say, “Today I will write a blog post,” this can take hours. If I just say, “I have three blocks, one and a half hours for writing a blog post,” I will get done as much as possible in this time window.

Len: It’s a really fascinating approach to doing things. In particular, I mean, I’ve never done it myself, but if you’ve ever done independent work - I did a doctorate years ago. That’s a multi-year, relatively independent project. Just keeping up a sense of your own productivity, is actually really important. Like even if you’re maybe not being all that productive some days, but being able to look back on it, and go, “Well, at least I got this done,” or, “At least I got that done,” can often be really important. Tracking things, like you were mentioning - it sounds like that can actually probably be really good for keeping your morale up.

Philip: Yeah exactly, working on your own, it’s quite easy to slack off and say, “I have the time on my own, I can now do whatever I want.” But with these techniques, I tried to get at least some stuff going. In the end, it adds up over time - those thirty minutes each day added up to about 150 blog articles over five years, that I was able to produce, while still having fun and not burning out to produce them, while procrastinating on a Sunday evening.

Len: I’m really curious about the breaks. What do you do when you’ve got a five-minute break? Is it like, go do some dishes, or just go stand on the balcony? What is it that you might do on a typical break?

Philip: Yeah, get a new coffee. Go to the balcony. Because one recent hack I found - go to the balcony and look into the far distance, so your eyes can adjust, and you get sunlight into your eyes, and you stand up.

Then maybe also, I usually - when working on my own, I work from co-working places. I then shift between working locations. When I’m writing, I’m usually sitting in a more comfortable seat. If I’m doing software development, I’m using my laptop stand and sitting up straight. I’m going to the toilet, getting fresh new water. In the afternoon, doing a quick email check. That’s usually how the breaks work. Sometimes I also skip the breaks if I’m in the tunnel, right? If I’m developing something, or have an idea for the current article - I just skip the break and continue to the next technique, and then do a little bit longer break after the next unit.

Len: I really enjoyed hearing about that, when you were talking in this other podcast about it. Is the sort of - it all sounds very rigid, but it’s actually very realistic. If you’re in the flow, you don’t break it just because either your timer goes off, or something like that. You stay in it. Some days you’re superman, and some days you’re not.

That technique of looking into the distance, actually - it sounds like a very small detail, but I’ve heard that one before in the past as well, particularly for people who do a lot of sitting in front of screens. Every few minutes - just taking some time to look up into the distance, can actually be really helpful.

I’m very curious - maybe you already mentioned it and I missed it? But at what point did you start getting into making your own content, like courses and things like that?

Philip: I started with a blog, five years ago. But this wasn’t like professionalized - I was just summarizing what I’ve learned at work. When being a junior, I was always struggling with articles, to apply them to my work. Because either they got outdated, or the code I wanted to copy and paste - it wasn’t working, because I didn’t get the imports right. From day one, I wanted to fix this. All my blog posts have sample code uploaded to GitHub. New developers, they can check out the source code, and they have a running example. I did this for some years, but with no strict agenda - and it really went - I made it serious when the coronavirus hit. There’s time where I had time to build my own online courses.

I would say - two years ago, I really also narrowed down my niche. Before, I was blogging about everything in the Java ecosystem. But two years ago, I found my niche in the testing part. Specifically for Spring Boot application. That’s one of the major Java frameworks to develop web applications.

I doubled down on this niche, because I think mostly nobody on the internet talks about testing, right? They talk about shiny new features, how to implement them. You go to a conference, they show you how to implement. The next day you are at work, and try to apply it - and then try to raise the pull requests, and then your tech lead says, “Where are the tests? We can’t integrate this. It’s super nice, but nobody talks about testing.” That’s why I thought there is still some room for content to be created there.

Len: It’s really interesting you mention - regular listeners of the podcast might be surprised to hear that people don’t talk about testing all the time. Actually, we’ve had quite a few guests who have written books on testing. I mean, it explains it, right? That there’s - people are looking for these self-publishing platforms, to get the word out. Because testing just isn’t this thing that’s more commonly addressed. It’s very independently-minded people as well, who are often talking about it.

I’m really curious about the courses that you have, I’m looking for example at one right now, called Getting Started With Testing Spring Boot Applications In Three Hours. What platform do you use for the courses, and how do you manage to make a little bit of income from them - or a lot?

Philip: It works quite fine. I’m using WordPress for my blog. I have a WordPress plugin that lets me allow hosting my own university. I upload those videos to Vimeo. I can restrict them with some security configuration. Then I use the WordPress user management to have all the sign up flow, passwords, password resets, email management. This is connected to an ecommerce provider, where a user’s clicking on my learning page to “Buy Now.” They are redirected to create a user account on my WordPress site. Then they go to the checkout page, which is all set on this ecommerce provider. If they click “Buy” and the payment goes through, that hook registers or grants access for the user to the course, and they go to my blog underneath “Flash Courses,” and then can work through the course. Which is mainly video, but also sometimes mixed with text lessons and hands-on exercises.

Len: Do you do any grading, or anything like that?

Philip: Not much yet. The one downside of this plugin, they have some quizzes - but a really fully-fledged exercise quizzes and graduation system is still to come. That’s something I’m about to do. I have some certificates. I signed up for a certificate business that lets me sign certificates, or that course students can upload it to LinkedIn, or share it on their profile.

Len: The last question I’ll ask, just in general about content creation - because sometimes, when you’re on the other side of it and you’re thinking about doing it - hearing just even a few details, can be very, very useful and help you get going. You have a few thousand followers on YouTube. Are you monetizing YouTube directly?

Philip: Not from day one. When coming to YouTube, I always had the dream of how things look like as a creator, and monetizing display ads on YouTube. I mainly used YouTube as a playground for my online courses. Getting used to speaking to the screen, recording yourself, then recording and editing - all this process, I used YouTube as the sandbox. I didn’t start right with my first online course, because the quality wouldn’t be that good for people to pay money for.

YouTube was my playground. I’m now monetizing it a bit. That’s quite a big threshold to reach. You need 2,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watched content to become a YouTube partner. Then you are allowed to add in front or in-between your videos. It’s making me - I don’t know? Forty bucks a month, with having - I don’t know? 500 views a day, just as a ballpark figure. I’m not getting rich, but people get used to my content. Some also prefer the hands-on tutorials over the text articles. Sometimes I try to recycle. For those that learn better while seeing it in action, they can go to YouTube.

Len: Thanks very much for sharing all that. I think it’s probably heartening for people in a way, to hear that even with all these thousands of viewers and stuff like that, you’re not necessarily getting rich. But actually, getting all that interaction from people can make everything seem very worthwhile.

Of course, people are discovering your courses and things like that from their views - and genuinely learning things, which is really great.

When it comes to content creation, I guess moving onto the next part of the interview - you’ve co-authored the book Stratospheric: From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS. I asked you earlier about your origin story, of your own career. And, so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the origin story of the book, which - I’ll link to the really great blog post that you have, called “Self-publishing a Book With (Almost) Complete Strangers.” I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how that book got going, and what the book’s about?

Philip: It was two years ago. I didn’t start with the intention to write a book, but was doom scrolling, once again, on Twitter - seeing Tom Hombergs, who’s now a core author of it - reaching out to his Twitter audience, which I was part of back then - for other tech bloggers to organize some Zoom meetings to discuss ideas, marketing, how to structure your days, how to structure your articles. It was like an unofficial meetup for software developers which are running a blog and trying to get this going. We met there two or three times. I guess the group was quite big, up to ten people were in there. We were discussing WordPress over static site generators, and all the technical stuff you want to discuss when running your own blog.

I guess in the second or third session, Tom just out of the blue asked if someone would be interested in taking a deeper look into AWS and Spring Boot. Because he was working with it back then at his company, and wanted to get more into it - and potentially write the book about it.

Björn, the other co-author and I - we raised our hands, and then we organized another session, just the three of us. We’re talking about it. We were all having some AWS and Spring Boot background, but we all said we wanted to explore also the other parts. Because as a developer, you usually don’t tackle the networking or the infrastructure part - which is also quite interesting.

It really worked out from day one. We were implementing a small proof-of-concept application. Something that we wanted to do. We wanted to take juniors really from zero - knowing nothing about AWS, to production. As part of the book, we are building a real-world application that has features that you will use in almost all of your enterprise applications. Like storing data in a database. Doing asynchronous processing. Sending out emails. Having bap sockets for real time notification.

Once we found out we can develop a really nice educational piece of software, we sat down and laid out a rough plan for the book. Then just started with a scrum setup. With a team of three authors, we organized every two week - a “sprint review,” where we were showing the work we did in the past two weeks. We were planning what to work on next. Ever since, we incrementally created the sample application and wrote the book. And, yeah - I found out that Leanpub is the perfect place to do such incremental ebook work.

Len: Just for people who might not know, I’m sure everyone who’s listening knows what AWS is, but if you could talk a little bit about Spring Boot, what that is?

Philip: Yeah. With AWS being the major cloud provider these days, Spring Boot is like the leading framework for developing Java applications. It’s a framework like Django for Python, or any other framework that lets you build mainly web applications - and does all the heavy lifting for you in the background. It also comes with great AWS integration, and that’s why we picked this framework. Because we were using it in our day-to-day jobs and projects. And, yeah - Java as the main language, and built the whole project with a focus on deploying it and connecting to various AWS services, to educate the reader about the most essential services they need to know on AWS.

Len: In addition to the book on Leanpub, you’re using our courses part of the platform as well for a Stratospheric course. I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about that? I mean, it’s - you’re publishing the course in-progress, which is really interesting.

Leanpub, as many people listening will know - it promotes the idea of “Publish Early, Publish Often” for books. But we also actually do that with courses. Which is a bit unique.

I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about that project? How you guys decided to set that up, and what you’re - because you’re marketing it in a very interesting way. I was wondering if you could talk about that whole project as well?

Philip: Yeah. The ebook - I guess, in total - took a little bit more than a year from the first meeting via Zoom, to then our 1.0 release, where we could move the needle to 100% on Leanpub. A year for writing together. In total, about 500 pages. We split up the work almost evenly. Everybody was working on their own chapters, and we were using GitHub to do reviews. When we did a small - it’s also on YouTube, where we did a launch together with our audience. From day one, we were allowing - I guess it was 20% completeness?

People were allowed to buy the book. Those early adopters, we invited to a YouTube release party in August, 2021. Within there, we were showcasing application and hitting the release button together. Then it was the release 1.0. We also already said, “We may want to create an online course. We are thinking about this, because some readers mentioned they would rather work with an online course.” Or they wanted to go a little bit more hands on, go more in depth at various parts.

We were procrastinating a bit with this project, because our co-authors have their jobs. But I guess two or three months ago, we were really getting this project forward. We also - as we had made a good experience with the incremental process of publishing the book, we also wanted to adopt this for our online course.

What we are now doing, we are - all three authors are taking one module. We have three modules in the book. The first module is about getting started with AWS. The second module is building applications with Spring Boot on AWS. The third module is operating your application and production. Every author gets one module, and records videos on top of it. We are not just copy/pasting what we show with text. We also go at various parts, in more detail - or can explain it way better, when we are inside our IDE, or when we are on AWS, we can go way more in detail and give more best practices.

The way we launched it, we have early bird programs. So, similar to the book - those that join early may not get all the videos right now, but they get it for a cheaper price. With every release, every release for their videos - which we are creating in parallel behind the scenes, the price goes up a bit - and we let new users into the course.

Len: In addition to watching videos, will there be quizzes that people can take, and things like that - where they’ll get automatically graded?

Philip: Yes. That’s one of the biggest pros from the Leanpub choice we made. We saw quite early that the capabilities there are way better to have quizzes and embedded questions and exercises, and that’s what we are building in parallel. That, then, will have the entire online course set on Leanpub. In the end, I guess also get a nicely-formatted certificate of completion with their score. There are take-home quizzes, and how they performed.

Len: Thanks very much for sharing those details of how you’re doing it. It’s so interesting. Just for anyone listening, we leave the weeds part for the end of the podcast. There’s some people who actually skip to the end, to hear just that stuff. For anyone listening who might be surprised to know that - Leanpub books are written in plain text in Markua, the markup syntax. We actually also - you can also actually write courses that way as well. You can actually generate - from one manuscript document, you can actually generate a book and a separate course if you want to as well.

But if you’re familiar with how Leanpub works writing books, you could actually create quizzes as well. So if you create a course, you can then - just from plain text, produce these quizzes that people can take online in the browser. They can actually get graded, and then in the end, get certificates. I’m glad you say “nicely-formatted.” That’s nice to hear. But yeah, people can get certificates and things like that. There’s a little bit of customization that you can do, and things like that as well.

Speaking of the weeds though, you mentioned that the co-authors who were collaborating on this book, you’d actually never met in person. You were using Git and GitHub to do this collaboration. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how that worked? Did you create branches all the time, when you were doing new tweaks? Did you do pull requests with each other, and things like that?

Philip: We were really applying our best practices from software development to creating the book. We used the scrum technique. For the actual writing, we used a GitHub repository, wrote in Markdown files with the Markua-flavored syntax. The way we structured it - we have the “main” branch, which goes to production - which publishes the final book. A “preview” branch, where we first merge our changes, and then create previews for the next version. Every author was working independently on their own branch, which was created from the preview branch. Doing their changes, writing their section. We also split up the chapters per author, so that we are not writing for the same section at the same time.

In our bi-weekly meetings, everybody had their idea of what they wanted to explore more or write about. Naturally, it resolved all the time. Someone was working on this part, the other one was more interested - for example, in the monitoring end - so with AWS. We were then creating pull requests to the preview branch, and using the GitHub feature to review it. Because we were writing in Markdown, we didn’t have to share Docx or Google Docs.

We could, within the pull request, say, “Hey, here’s a typo.” Even with GitHub’s new feature tool, suggest a change. The author could say, “Hey, let’s restructure the sentence like this,” or, “Here’s a comma missing.” And, yeah - really using pull requests and the whole GitHub suite to develop the application, then merged all the changes to preview. After two or three months, we were generating a new version out of the preview branch by merging into main. Then clicking the button to release on Leanpub.

Len: Did that whole process seem natural? Because I think a lot of people might not know that, actually, writing software is writing. It’s a form of writing, and very collaborative form of writing. Transferring that to book. That’s in the Leanpub dream, is to get - there’s very sophisticated ways of collaborating together on software to write books. Did that all just seem natural?

Philip: Yeah. For us, with our development background, it feels super natural. It’s the way we work on our day-to-day projects, with the way we collaborate. Getting immediate or asynchronous feedback. We were all sitting at different locations, so Tom - sitting in Australia. Björn and me sitting in Germany. We had to align. We couldn’t have synchronous reviews. We were coordinating with a Slack channel, where we also now invite our audience to have a community - where they can ask their further questions or reach out to us, which is going quite well.

Every reader gets a link to a private Slack community, where we then answer questions or announce new versions of the book. Within there, we collaborated. Asynchronously, when Tom - in the morning in Australia raised a pull request, and going to work - I could review it in the morning in Germany. This whole asynchronous setup with remote work really felt natural and, yeah, was greatly supported by Leanpub.

Len: You spontaneously went and answered my next question for me. Which was - have you been soliciting feedback from people and getting it, and how do you manage that community? That’s really interesting. Giving people access to a private Slack channel, and getting feedback from them that way, must be really rewarding, both for you, and for your readers.

Philip: Yes. Slack was one of the ways for feedback to come in, and also our Twitter accounts. We also created our own landing page. On top of the Leanpub landing page, we have our own landing page - where we have a little bit more images, and can structure the way we want things to look like. Then we redirect to Leanpub. There’s also an email address where they can reach out and provide feedback. Using this incremental approach, we could really take those early feedback into considerations and adjust the ongoing chapters which we are writing.

Len: For anyone listening, the website is stratospheric.dev. You can get the book, and get the course and sort of - it’s a really great website actually.

Just on that note, for the content creators out there who are listening. what did you use to create that page? Was that WordPress as well?

Philip: This is a static site generator. This is Hugo. Somehow similar to Jekyll, and what GitHub pages provide. We are using Hugo and HTML templates. We purchased - I guess, I don’t know? 40 bucks bootstrap theme, Bootstrap CSS, which we then tweaked. We kept it really simple in the beginning. Just a landing page with FAQs. Also, a way to join our newsletter.

I haven’t touched this yet. We also have a newsletter specifically for this project. The main reason is, when joining the newsletter, you get a little discount, which visitors that just went straight on Leanpub don’t get.

If you sign up for our newsletter - enter your name and your email, you will get a coupon code. As part of this newsletter community, we also provide the updates. Even though we released version one last year, we have been releasing new versions almost every two to three months.

Because Spring Boot and AWS is changing. Not so fast that we can’t get behind updating the book, but we are still applying the best practices - the changes in the libraries, and also fixing security vulnerabilities or using feedback. And, yeah - this newsletter is another form of feedback channel, and way to promote it to our audience.

Len: So the coupon is a coupon link that you’ve created using our coupons feature, is that right?

Philip: Exactly, yes.

Len: Okay. How often do you actually -? I’m curious with the details about that. How often do you email people who sign up for the newsletter?

Philip: There is no automated evergreen sequence. When they are signing up, they get one email with the coupon code. They can go to Leanpub. Afterwards, we just email them - for example, if we also - if there’s something to announce in this niche, Spring Boot on AWS or a content piece - or a new version of the ebook, a new version of the online course. We did quite some marketing for this newsletter for the online course, because it was quite new. In total, I guess - maybe every two to three weeks they get an email. It’s not high-volume. It’s not that frequent. But we try to keep it to a minimum, that there’s [not] too much churn.

Len: Thanks very much for sharing those details. That’s actually something that we’re thinking about ourselves, is newsletter signups, and things like that - and how we could foster more - because typically, the features we have for communicating with readers are - people can sign up, people can opt in to be notified if there’s a major new release, and you can send them a little message, and they’ll get an email.

We have an “Email the Author(s)” form that people can use to contact authors. That can be double-blind if you want it to be. You don’t need to release your email addresses to each other.

But of course newsletters are a huge thing. And, yeah, that’s something that we’re definitely thinking about doing. Hearing that feedback will be really great for our plans.

The last question that we always ask on the podcast, if the guest is a Leanpub author, is - if there was one amazing feature we could build for you, some dream feature we could build for you, or if there was one terrible, awful problem with Leanpub that you hate, that we could fix for you - what can you think of that you would ask us to do? I think you’ve got a couple.

Philip: I mean, now that I have to find one that is the killer feature. One feature that we thought would work, so we saw your - the bundles on Leanpub. We thought, “Oh, we can bundle our ebook and the course.” After I created the sample and we released the first version, we thought, “Oh, bundles only work for ebooks.” You can bundle multiple ebooks. What would be great - because this is probably a little bit of manual process - if someone is completely new, they are asking, “Hey, do I get the ebook if I get the online course? If I get the ebook, do I get the discount?” and vice-versa. If we could bundle online courses with ebooks into a bundle, that would be a nice feature. Not the killer feature, but it would really, really help us promote both sides of the product.

Len: Thanks very much for bringing that up. For people listening - on Leanpub you can create bundles of ebooks. It can be bundles of your own ebooks. You can actually invite people you’ve never met, who are other Leanpub authors who’ve written about similar subjects. You can invite them to participate in a bundle - where people make one purchase, and then they get copies of all the participating books. It would be totally natural, and it will happen someday that - I can’t promise any timing, or anything like that. But of course, being able to bundle a book and a course together, would be natural. In fact, one of the reasons we’ve built the courses dimension of the Leanpub platform, is that so many Leanpub books are, what’s called in the industry, “prescriptive non-fiction,” which is “how-to” books, basically.

Ensuring that they’re up to date, and a very natural thing is - if you’ve gone to all the trouble to write a whole book about something, actually having an accompanying course that people can get, and then get a certificate, to show some social proof of what they’ve learned, and confirm for themselves what they’ve learned as well - is just a natural thing. Having to buy them separately is fine. But obviously being able to buy them together would be great.

Actually, what people have been doing, just like you guys have, is some manual process. Where it’s, “If you buy the book, here’s a discount coupon for the course.” Or, “If you buy the course, here’s a discount coupon for the book.” You might be giving it for a discount. Or the discount might be actually “Free” for the other product.

Philip: Yeah.

Len: Thanks very much for sharing that. That is definitely something that we’re going to be delivering at some point.

Well, Philip - thank you very much for taking the time out of your busy and structured day, to be on the podcast. Thank you very much for being a Leanpub author.

Philip: Thanks a lot for having me, and thanks for this excellent platform. I’m eally looking forward - maybe in the future, to create further ebooks on my own, or with other co-authors.

Len: Thanks very much.

As always, thanks to all of 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.