I've been getting a lot of questions lately about the status of my OpenGL ES 2.0 book for PragProg. What I've been telling people is: "it's about half done but I have no idea when I'll be able to finish it". To say I've been busy lately would be an understatement of epic proportions. As a part-owner of a business in its first year, being too busy is a great problem to have, but it does take its tolls in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
When you combine how busy I am with the fact that I've been completely unable to get even ballpark information about when Xcode 4 will go GM (the book is heavily based on Xcode 4), it means I simply cannot nail down a production schedule for the book. Even if I had time to finish the book right now, it can't be published until the Xcode 4 NDA drops. It also makes no sense to revise the book to a version of Xcode which is soon to become obsolete.
As a result, today, I made the difficult decision, along with my editor at Prags, to indefinitely shelve the OpenGL ES 2.0 book project. I would have liked to keep the project open and work on it whenever I have time, but that wouldn't have been fair to my publisher. They have to plan their production pipeline very carefully and a book with no set timeline throws a real monkey wrench into that process, which I really don't want to do. The door has been left open for me pick the book up in the future if and when I have time, but for now, it's coming off the production schedule to free up resources for other authors' books.
I have requested permission to post the existing seven chapters of the manuscript to my blog (tweaked so I'm not violating the Xcode 4 NDA, of course). From a contractual and legal point of view, I cannot just post what I've written without the the permission of my publisher. Prags has been nothing but fair, patient, and a pleasure to deal with and I want to make sure I'm just as fair to them and also comply fully with my contract.
However, if I can find a path to posting the chapters that's legal, ethical, and doesn't harm my relationship with Prags, I will do so.
Showing posts with label Update. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Update. Show all posts
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Complaining About Success
If you want to see how little sympathy you can get from those around you, try complaining about being successful. It just doesn't tend to be a problem over which people shed tears on your behalf. But I'm actually not here to complain. I'm really thrilled that MartianCraft is growing steadily and, more importantly, that we're getting interesting work.
I did think it was worth popping in here to explain my absence of late, however. I've got several partially written posts sitting in MarsEdit, including a couple for my recently-started and just-as-lonely personal blog. But time has become a scarce commodity for me, and will likely remain that way for at least the next month or two, possibly even longer. Even my OpenGL ES book for prags has suffered lately as I've been basically working double-time trying to catch up on my workload. Even the move to Florida is being affected, as we probably won't get our house on the market now until the new year.
The fact that I've been doing so much coding does mean that I've got some great ideas for blog posts, so hopefully once the dust settles, I'll have some goodies for you, but bear with me in the meantime.
Oh, and a somewhat related note. A client of MartianCraft is looking for a really mobile developer to work in New York City. They'll be happy with any mobile experience, with preference for iPhone or Android experience. Having both is ideal. This client is a very large media company and you'd basically be responsible for leading one division's mobile efforts, starting with maintaining their existing apps, but eventually eventually extending them and building new ones. It's a great opportunity for the right person. If you're in New York or willing to relocate there and have some good mobile chops, drop me an e-mail with your resume (my main e-mail is my twitter name at mac dot com or you can send them to jeff at martiancraft dot com) and I'll put it in front of the hiring manager.
I did think it was worth popping in here to explain my absence of late, however. I've got several partially written posts sitting in MarsEdit, including a couple for my recently-started and just-as-lonely personal blog. But time has become a scarce commodity for me, and will likely remain that way for at least the next month or two, possibly even longer. Even my OpenGL ES book for prags has suffered lately as I've been basically working double-time trying to catch up on my workload. Even the move to Florida is being affected, as we probably won't get our house on the market now until the new year.
The fact that I've been doing so much coding does mean that I've got some great ideas for blog posts, so hopefully once the dust settles, I'll have some goodies for you, but bear with me in the meantime.
Oh, and a somewhat related note. A client of MartianCraft is looking for a really mobile developer to work in New York City. They'll be happy with any mobile experience, with preference for iPhone or Android experience. Having both is ideal. This client is a very large media company and you'd basically be responsible for leading one division's mobile efforts, starting with maintaining their existing apps, but eventually eventually extending them and building new ones. It's a great opportunity for the right person. If you're in New York or willing to relocate there and have some good mobile chops, drop me an e-mail with your resume (my main e-mail is my twitter name at mac dot com or you can send them to jeff at martiancraft dot com) and I'll put it in front of the hiring manager.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Happy New Year! Closing Out 2009
Well, Happy New Year!
Thus ends (almost) my first full calendar year working exclusively with Apple technologies and also my first full calendar year as a published book author. I started working on Beginning iPhone Development in March of 2008, but because of the NDA and very beta-status of the early SDK releases, didn't start full-time writing on it until after WWDC 2008.
It's been a hell of a year. We finished the year on a positive note: More iPhone 3 Development shipped out a few days ago and some people have received it already. I've also heard that Beginning iPhone Development is fairly close to breaking 100,000 copies sold between the two editions. It's hard to say for sure if that has happened because of the way books are inventoried and sold, but our sell-through (books known to be in the hands of consumers) was over 75,000 several months ago. When you consider that Apress' expectation for our book when we contracted with them was that it would probably sell between 4,000 and 5,000 copies, that's really something. We were told before the book went to press that Apress would consider it huge success if it sold 10,000 copies.
I have to say that I love what I'm doing now much more than anything else I've ever done for a living, and infinitely more than what I was doing when I started writing the first book. I'm really glad I've been able to do this. I used to travel 48 or 50 weeks a year doing large-scale Enterprise software implementations. That was a realm where most of the challenges came not from the complexity of the algorithms (most of the work was pretty easy stuff), but the complexity of the social landscape and the politics of working in a large organization. As regular readers know, I'm not shy about giving my opinion even when it's unpopular, so you can imagine what I was like in highly-politically charged corporate environments. Yeah. I was miserable, even though I was good at it and it paid well. But the schedule was brutal. I'd leave my house like 2:00 or 3:00 am Monday morning or sometimes even Sunday night, and I'd get back late Friday night every week. I lived in hotel rooms and ate in hotel bars, and missed most of my kids' birthdays and other special events.
This is so much better. In many ways, this is the life. But, there's a downside to it as well, one that I've been aware of for a while but am only now coming fully to grips with: Even a "best selling" programming book doesn't really put the money on the table the way consulting does, and the blog doesn't generate any income worth mentioning. Some year-end financial calculations have made me realize that I've got some tough decisions to make about how I spend my time in 2010.
Dave and I both have similar philosophies about writing books, and neither of us are willing to rush a book out just to capitalize on a trend or hot market. But that, combined with the way we work, means writing books is incredibly time-intensive for us and there's no way to avoid that without compromising what we believe. I'm not comfortable writing about something I don't fully understand, and it simply takes time to wrap my head around something well enough to explain it to others.
That being said, if someone came along and offered a huge advance for a book I wanted to write, I could be tempted. But given the reality of the tech book market, the chances of somebody offering the kind of money it would take to make it worthwhile are slim at best.
If 2010 goes well for me financially, though, I'd like to write another book in 2011.
The pace of new installments may not be as frequent as it was this past year, at least the part of last year when I wasn't actively working on a book, but the posts will definitely continue.
If you want to reach me about anything, you can send e-mail to jeff underscore lamarche at mac dot com.
So, on that note, I'm going to go enjoy my New Year's even and forget about anything to do with finances or the iPhone for a few hours. I wish you all a prosperous and enjoyable 2010, and I'll be back to posting in a few days.
Thus ends (almost) my first full calendar year working exclusively with Apple technologies and also my first full calendar year as a published book author. I started working on Beginning iPhone Development in March of 2008, but because of the NDA and very beta-status of the early SDK releases, didn't start full-time writing on it until after WWDC 2008.
It's been a hell of a year. We finished the year on a positive note: More iPhone 3 Development shipped out a few days ago and some people have received it already. I've also heard that Beginning iPhone Development is fairly close to breaking 100,000 copies sold between the two editions. It's hard to say for sure if that has happened because of the way books are inventoried and sold, but our sell-through (books known to be in the hands of consumers) was over 75,000 several months ago. When you consider that Apress' expectation for our book when we contracted with them was that it would probably sell between 4,000 and 5,000 copies, that's really something. We were told before the book went to press that Apress would consider it huge success if it sold 10,000 copies.
I have to say that I love what I'm doing now much more than anything else I've ever done for a living, and infinitely more than what I was doing when I started writing the first book. I'm really glad I've been able to do this. I used to travel 48 or 50 weeks a year doing large-scale Enterprise software implementations. That was a realm where most of the challenges came not from the complexity of the algorithms (most of the work was pretty easy stuff), but the complexity of the social landscape and the politics of working in a large organization. As regular readers know, I'm not shy about giving my opinion even when it's unpopular, so you can imagine what I was like in highly-politically charged corporate environments. Yeah. I was miserable, even though I was good at it and it paid well. But the schedule was brutal. I'd leave my house like 2:00 or 3:00 am Monday morning or sometimes even Sunday night, and I'd get back late Friday night every week. I lived in hotel rooms and ate in hotel bars, and missed most of my kids' birthdays and other special events.
This is so much better. In many ways, this is the life. But, there's a downside to it as well, one that I've been aware of for a while but am only now coming fully to grips with: Even a "best selling" programming book doesn't really put the money on the table the way consulting does, and the blog doesn't generate any income worth mentioning. Some year-end financial calculations have made me realize that I've got some tough decisions to make about how I spend my time in 2010.
Books
At this point, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I won't be writing any books in 2010. I really enjoy writing books, and have a couple knocking around in my head that I'd love to get out on paper, including a soup-to-nuts OpenGL ES book, but I really need to focus on projects that bring in money more effectively and more immediately (royalties take no less than six-months, and often longer to start rolling in).Dave and I both have similar philosophies about writing books, and neither of us are willing to rush a book out just to capitalize on a trend or hot market. But that, combined with the way we work, means writing books is incredibly time-intensive for us and there's no way to avoid that without compromising what we believe. I'm not comfortable writing about something I don't fully understand, and it simply takes time to wrap my head around something well enough to explain it to others.
That being said, if someone came along and offered a huge advance for a book I wanted to write, I could be tempted. But given the reality of the tech book market, the chances of somebody offering the kind of money it would take to make it worthwhile are slim at best.
If 2010 goes well for me financially, though, I'd like to write another book in 2011.
The Blog
I have no intention of stopping work on my blog. I enjoy it, and some of you seem to as well. I will be more focused in 2010 and will mostly stick to technical subjects and covering things directly relevant to Mac and iPhone programmers. Writing lengthy opinion pieces is time-consuming and tends to provoke people in ways that I don't necessarily intend, even if I do get a lot of page hits from them. But I definitely do plan to continue posting installments of the OpenGL ES from the Ground Up as well as more virtual chapters for our existing books and code snippets that I write that might be useful to others.The pace of new installments may not be as frequent as it was this past year, at least the part of last year when I wasn't actively working on a book, but the posts will definitely continue.
Teaching
I'm still thinking about whether I want to continue teaching workshops. It's decent money, and I rather enjoy it, but I'm not sure I want to get into doing regular travel again and I don't want the workshops to interfere with my ability to take on contracting work. I'll probably continue to teach, but probably not more than every other month or so. We'll see, though.Conferences
I'm planning on doing a handful of conferences this year. I'm speaking at both NSConferences in 2010 and, of course, plan to attend WWDC assuming I can scrape together the money. I'd really, really hate to miss WWDC - it's my absolute favoritest week of the year - but unfortunately, it's not a sure thing at the moment. I've also been accepted as a speaker at 360|iDev San Jose.Contracting
This is what I really need to focus on for the next year. It is my intention to stay working within the Mac and iPhone space if at all possible, so if you know of anybody looking to contract or subcontract an experienced iPhone or Mac developer, please do feel free to send them my way. Though I'm willing to travel occasionally, I am not interested in contracts that would require full-time travel or anything close to it. I'm also available for corporate training or reviewing code or application architecture. I'm a very experienced troubleshooter and have spent a lot of time investigating how to architect iPhone applications, so if you've got projects that are running into problems, I may be able to help get you back on track. As a general rule, I'm not currently looking for full-time employment, though there's a small handful of jobs (primarily at Apple) that I'd definitely consider if they opened up.If you want to reach me about anything, you can send e-mail to jeff underscore lamarche at mac dot com.
So, on that note, I'm going to go enjoy my New Year's even and forget about anything to do with finances or the iPhone for a few hours. I wish you all a prosperous and enjoyable 2010, and I'll be back to posting in a few days.
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