Shownotes

Key Topics:

• The origin story and motivation behind Building Green Software

• The collaborative process of co-authoring a technical book

• Navigating publishing logistics, contracts, and setting deadlines

• The significance of translating technical work into global accessibility

• Managing co-authorship across different languages and cultural backgrounds

• The impact of industry events like QCon in shaping publication timelines

• Post-publication reflections: successes, challenges, and future updates

• The role of projects like the Green Software Foundation in shaping the book’s content

• Lessons learned about contractual liability and company formation for authors

• The balance between technical rigor, storytelling, and engaging communication in technical writing

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction to the episode and guest background

02:18 - How Building Green Software came to exist

03:39 - The importance of translation and global reach of the book

04:29 - Early discussions with O'Reilly and the seed of collaboration

05:31 - The Green Software Foundation and its influence

06:43 - Approaching publishers while managing personal circumstances

07:47 - Managing pregnancy and project deadlines

08:30 - The collaborative model of co-authoring a distributed book

09:20 - Maintaining consistency across co-authors’ writing styles

10:16 - The significance of deadlines in publishing and promotion plans

11:13 - The contractual considerations and liabilities for authors

13:00 - Setting up companies for legal and financial reasons

14:23 - How the book’s promotion and post-production process worked

15:14 - The advantages of having a dedicated company for paid engagements

16:32 - The importance of fair compensation for technical work

17:47 - Planning around a fixed publication timeline

19:04 - dividng chapter responsibilities and reviewer process

20:30 - The differences and benefits of co-authoring in technical books

22:09 - How style blending and consistency were achieved

23:09 - Changing chapters and content in response to real-world developments like AI

24:23 - Rapid evolution in tech and planning for future editions

25:41 - Current interests in green AI and ongoing research

27:17 - The workflow for sharing and editing the book via Google Docs and publisher tools

28:33 - Illustrations, layout, and the role of the post-production team

30:00 - The mechanics of the publication process at O'Reilly

31:33 - The quirky tradition of the book's cover animal and the graphic design process

32:46 - Recognizing contributors through tech review and feedback

35:00 - The parallel between our professional backgrounds and the book’s tone

36:15 - How Adrian Cockroft’s foreword aligned with the book’s message

37:09 - Infusing humor and personality into technical content

38:06 - Strategies to keep readers engaged from start to finish

39:11 - Accessibility of chapters and highlights of the standalone format

40:26 - Future plans, including workshops and upcoming episodes on hardware waste

41:15 - Closing thoughts and gratitude for the collaboration

Transcript

Anne Currie (00:03)
So hello and welcome to asynchronous and unreliable a new weekly podcast where we discuss the most interesting ideas in tech. I'm your host Anne Currie co-author of Building Green Software from O'Reilly, the cloud native attitude and the author of the science fiction Panopticon series. And for my guest today, one of my co-authors on Building Green Software, Sara Bergman. So do you want to introduce yourself, Sara?

Sara (00:34)
Yes, hi. Thank you so much for having me on again. Always, always a pleasure. Yes, I'm a software engineer at Microsoft as my day job, I usually call it. Nowadays, it's my only, only job. I never had a different job, but we also wrote a book together: Building Green Software.

Anne Currie (00:57)
So at the moment I'm cashing in on the fact that you're stuck at home on your second maternity leave to be a regular guest on the podcast. It's working out very well for me.

Sara (01:07)
Yeah, because there's no baby yet. So I'm just waiting

Anne Currie (01:13)
Yeah, so we're doing the distributed systems thing of getting as many recordings as we can do recorded so that you can still be around and about in podcast form while you're looking after two young kids simultaneously.

Sara (01:31)
Yes. Yes. Well, that would be fun too, but less podcasty.

They say pregnancy brain is the worst. For me pregnancy brain is fine. It's the sleep deprived "I have a newborn" brain. It's not very good for podcasting.

Anne Currie (01:40)
Hopefully this should be an easy episode for us, because this is just an episode about something that we both know very, very well. Indeed, we are the, well, you and me and our other co-author, Sarah, who's not allowed to be recorded in podcasts. We are the experts on this subject, which is...

How did building green software come to be written? And what was it like to write an O'Reilly book? And what's it been like after? It's two years ago that it came out. What has the time since looked like? So that is our topic for today. And I would say probably it's been mixed. Amazing highs, amazing, not quite as amazing. And we're no JK Rowlings here. We won't be retiring from our mega-reward earnings.

Sara (02:33)
Yes.

No.

No, I just did my taxes for my company for last year. So, no, so far not buying a mansion.

Anne Currie (02:57)
But we kind of went into it though, you know.

Sara (02:59)
No, yes, yes, that wasn't ever the goal.

Anne Currie (03:02)
Yeah, you don't write... I'm constantly telling people write a book because it's a heck of a lot of work to write a book. But you will learn a lot you'll gain a huge amount from it. But you're very, very unlikely to make any money from it whatsoever. No matter how successful it is. And building green software is a successful book. As you said.

Sara (03:09)
Yeah.

Yeah, even for the listeners, they won't see it, but I can show the people who are watching. We have even four languages now, which is crazy. And like, how did that happen? Well, I know we have a good publisher who translates them, but it's shocking to me.

Anne Currie (03:30)
Yes, that kind of exposure is only possible through O'Reilly. There are pros and cons of having a publisher. I mean, I've published books in various forms with various different forms of publishing and publisher, but it's only really through trad publishers that you get translations done because they don't do the translation.

Sara (03:47)
Yeah.

Anne Currie (04:04)
Companies come to them and license the ability to translate it. So they obviously take advantage of the fact that the trad publisher in this case O'Reilly has vetted the book and edited the book. So you know it's an okay book to invest in. So it's an interesting one. Yeah. I mean, so we should go back to the very origin story of this.

Sara (04:24)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think you have to start, because I think you were the first one who talked with O'Reilly

Anne Currie (04:33)
Yeah, that's true. The seeds had already been sowed for the three of us working together before O'Reilly approached me. And they didn't approach me actually. Well, they approached me because I'd done quite a lot of work with O'Reilly over the years appearing at their conferences when they used to run conferences. I used to do quite a lot of stuff about distributed systems at Velocity, which was their old fancy conference brand. So I knew quite a lot of the editors there. And a few years back, this must have been the year before we started writing Building Green Software, one of the editors, one of the development editors, Megan, at the time, she approached me and said, we're thinking we want to do a review of what we've got in the sustainability field and we want to do a blog post pointing people at all our materials and all our articles and stuff. 

I spent half a day with her, generally reviewing all of their back catalog to kind of pull together a list of all of their sustainability resources. And it turned out there were a really paltry number. There's a great Tim Frick book about web development. But that was like 10 years old at the time. It was really a long time. So when Megan and I sat down to review this, we were kind of thinking, oh, it's a bit sparse, isn't it? And I said, you really need a book on this subject of green software. A full book that covers everything, not just web development.

And so she went off and said, yeah, we decided we do need a book, do you want to do it? And I thought, I don't have time to do it. And I don't really want to do it on my own because I wouldn't have enough perspective. And I'd met you at that point at the conference where we'd spent a bit of time together. And I'd met Sarah Hsu at another conference, DevOxx in London, which, oddly enough, I'll be talking at next week. 

And I thought, "They would do so much better job than I would at doing this". So I approached you both and at that point I wasn't intending to be involved and said, "would you want to be involved in this?" 

Yet little did I know that there was a fly in the ointment of getting your involvement...

Sara (07:15)
Yeah, so this was late 2022 and I was secretly very early pregnant and terrified and didn't want to tell anyone. I hadn't even told my parents at the time. So telling O'Reilly would be a big step. It was my first pregnancy. I had no idea how it was going to go.

So yeah, but I think also maybe some interesting background is that the three of us also met through the Green Software Foundation, which was founded in May 2021, where we all had kind of big roles in the beginning. So I was the chair of the, we call it the writers working group. So everything that was published, like all the articles we published, the newsletter, the internal newsletter. I was in charge of all of that. I had great help, of course. But from a technical point of view, I was kind of the gatekeeper. So I had a lot of written material out and was talking to other people. And Sarah was the chair of the, now I can't remember what her group was called. They did the course that later turned into the Linux course.

Anne Currie (08:30)
Yes. Yeah.

Sara (08:34)
Training group? I can't remember what the group was called.

Anne Currie (08:36)
Education group? I also can't remember the name of the group, and actually the course has been a massively successful thing and I have a strong suspicion is that Sarah wrote one heck of a lot of it.

Sara (08:39)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes, yeah, no, no, she did a lot of work there. This was what later became the Linux Green Software Practitioner course, which now has a crazy amount of people who've taken it. I think even if neither of us had written a book before, we were very familiar with the space. And because the three of us had met through the Green Software Foundation, we were very aligned in our thinking. Like we had a shared view of the problem and the solution.

Anne Currie (09:23)
Yes. Yeah, which did massively help. But then I realized that actually... I obviously wouldn't, and you probably wouldn't have suggested that I put your name forward if I'd known that you were pregnant and you at that point probably would have stepped back.

Sara (09:27)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anne Currie (09:45)
But actually it was absolutely the right thing to do to step forward because it's been massively successful. And when it became clear that you had less time to do on it than one might have thought because you had a baby on the way, you had a deadline that was a fairly unmovable deadline. Then I thought, oh, well, actually we need to get this out. So I came back on and said, I shall be a co-author on this.

Sara (10:01)
Yeah. And actually, what was also going on for me kind of behind the scenes was I was also in another conversation with O'Reilly with my dear friend Abishek Gupta and Will Alpine. But Abishek was really the main author and that was like a green AI book. And remember, this was late 2022. So that was even before the big boom that came in 2023. But then, sadly, Abishek fell ill and has since passed away.

So obviously that book was never written. I do hope someone will write it at some point. But there was a lot going on and I felt like, is this a Swedish saying? You're like a mule between two haystacks. Being pulled in both directions. But yeah, in the end we decided to go for all three of us. But that doesn't... And that's kind of funny because then you think like, okay, let's go write the book but then There was so much to do before we actually could write anything. It was months of work before we could contractually put the first words on paper. I didn't know about that. Maybe you did because you're a more experienced writer, obviously.

Anne Currie (11:24)
Well, yeah, so I probably actually didn't warn you as much as I should do. Because there are various things that if anybody who's listening to this is ever writing a book of any form with a traditional publisher, the contract really shouldn't ever be signed by an individual. And they never warn you about that.

But you really need a company to wrap your signature on the contract because the contracts generally put a lot of liability on the person who's writing the book, which is kind of not unreasonable because as a writer, you're essentially exposing them to risk because if you plagiarized it. But you might think, well, I'm not plagiarizing it, so I'm safe.

But that's not really the problem because they're also exposing you to a lot of risk because a publisher is somebody that people will target to sue. Whereas me and you and Sarah, no one would target us to sue us, they might target O'Reilly. And O'Reilly would make you sign a contract, which basically takes all of their liability on yourself. So you should never do it personally, it should always be a company. But that was quite hard for you to... I already had a company, so it wasn't too hard for me, but for you two, it was a pain in the neck.

Sara (13:00)
Yeah, and I think Sarah, because Sarah is also based in Britain, she could ask you. I was at the time living in Norway, didn't know anyone. None of the people I knew in Norway were running their own company. Because there are also different ways to run a company in Norway and they have different liabilities. I had through my union, my workers union, I could access a lawyer and ask my dumb questions to, which was really nice. And it worked out fine in the end. It's quite a digitalized country. Once I figured out what I needed to do, it was relatively fast. It just was quite complicated to set it up. But now I do have an original company.

Anne Currie (13:49)
Yeah, so it's quite easy to set up a company in the UK. So it was relatively easy for Sarah, much more difficult in Scandinavia. And the irony is, it was never because there would be a load of money coming. We knew in advance, because I've published things before, I knew that if we could buy each other a cup of tea at the end of each year, we'd have done quite well. Because by the time you've taken off all the costs and everything, it's unbelievable how little money you see

from really quite a successful work. I mean, Building Green Software sells all over the world. There are university courses across the globe based on or using Building Green Software. But frankly, yeah, it's cup of tea level money. So you don't need a company for that. It was entirely for the liability, the limited liability wrapper on the contract that you have to sign with the publisher. But that will be true of anybody doing anything with any publisher. You've got to wrap the contract in a limited liability company. 

Sara (14:48)
Yeah. And then an added benefit is that you can then use this company if you do book promotions, you do paid speaking engagements, for example.

Which again, if you have a regular employment outside of this and there are of course rules that govern how I can then... even if I make cup of tea money, I still make money off the book and therefore I need to follow the moonlighting policies of Microsoft of course. Which means sometimes I have to do speaking engagements about the book that are not... that I have to take a day off from work. But now since I have a company, I can actually get adequately paid for that, which is something I really want to highlight, especially to any young women out there that you are allowed to get paid for your work. It feels awkward, but you should totally get compensated for your time and effort.

Anne Currie (15:43)
Yes, yeah, yeah, it's easy to... and people well-meaningly offer you exposure and say, well, exposure. It really is just a giant cost. I mean, you can choose to do it.

Sara (15:53)
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That doesn't pay your bills. Doesn't keep you warm at night. Especially if it's a big company asking you. If it's a nonprofit smaller thing, it might be a different conversation, but yeah.

Anne Currie (16:00)
Yeah.

Yeah, I do a lot of free talks, but I only give away stuff for free if it's a public conference and you're pushing a message to lots and lots of people. But if it's a private company that has loads and loads of money, it's amazing how often you get asked to do something you think, yeah, but you are a multinational corporation, you're not a charity.

Sara (16:32)
Yes, exactly.

So then that is a different story. But yeah, then once we had our three companies, we could finally sign the contract. And by then, I think we rushed it so that we would get done for QCon 2023, which was like April.

Anne Currie (16:49)
Mm.

Mm. Yeah.

Sara (16:53)
Something like that. So that we could, the goal was to be able to announce on stage at QCon that we were writing this book. And we did.

Anne Currie (16:59)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we did. I want say we didn't rush the writing, we just did the writing for a higher proportion of our spare time than we might otherwise have done.

Sara (17:08)
No, I meant that the goal was with having the contract be signed. Because we couldn't start writing before and we couldn't also say that we were writing a book until we had signed.

Anne Currie (17:20)
Yeah, yeah, that's true. So actually that was quite good because I think it puts a deadline. We said, actually we've got QCon London to sign up to us announcing there and doing a book signing and launching there. And that gave a deadline that was good for us, but it was very good for the publisher as well because they definitely moved us forward in their release cycle because we had a deadline.

Sara (17:47)
Yes.

Yeah, so at QCon 2023 we said we are writing this book and we hope to have a book next year 2024 to be able to sign it. And then our lovely editor...

Anne Currie (18:06)
Shira

Sara (18:15)
She was like, OK, normally it takes 12 months. But then also there's a post-production step and there's a printing step. So you really need to get this done by the end of the year. And we were like, okay, let's do it. And she was like, okay, well, it's still fine if it takes 12 months. We were like, nope, we're doing it. So then we got to writing.

Anne Currie (18:24)
Yeah.

So I had a sneaky... when I spoke to you two about it, I'm pretty good at recognising folk who are good at delivering. It's usually people who are already delivering are good at delivering. So you kind of go, you're already delivering. That means you're a delivery kind of a person. So it didn't surprise me. As soon as you two signed up, I thought we're going to go early on. We'll deliver early on this.

Sara (19:04)
Yeah. Yeah. And I had the additional deadline. I really wanted... because what we did also, that's maybe interesting for people to know, but when you send in... so we were approached by O'Reilly, but we still had to submit the proposal for the outline of chapters and stuff and what the chapter should contain. So there's a lot of thinking that goes into that, which meant we could then really, really hit the ground running when we started writing the chapters. But what we did was we divided the chapters.

So one person would be primarily responsible for a chapter and then the others would review it. The primary responsible person for that chapter would review it again before we would send it to our editor and then she would review it. There's a lot of reviews. And then there is a big one at the end. But for me, I really wanted to be done with all of my chapters before my baby came because I really didn't know what that was going to be like so that I would quote unquote "only" have review tasks after. So I really wanted to be done by July and we were now in April. So yes, it was a very intense spring.

But it was so much fun. 

Has it been different? Because you have written books with other people and you have written books yourself. What's the biggest difference to having co-authors versus not having co-authors, in your opinion?

Anne Currie (20:30)
Well, it's an interesting one because the way we did it... it was like meta. We wrote a book about the tech industry, which we wrote in a totally distributed systems microservices fashion, which is each chapter was a module with clearly defined

Sara (20:48)
Yeah.

Anne Currie (20:55)
Interfaces between the modules that could be delivered in parallel and then rearranged. And so that's why it delivered so successfully. It's actually not as different writing a book without co-authors to with co-authors as you might think. for us, each of the chapters that we wrote and we owned... we were the mini single author on.

We were collaborating on pulling it all together mosaic-novel style. And I'll be talking about George R.R. Martin and his early work in mosaic novels in a later podcast in this series with one of the editors of his mosaic novels sequence. But yeah, it's kind of the idea of you get speed and resilience while still at the same time having consistency by breaking up each book into a lot of mini books that you could then just hook together. It was also... we were very lucky that our styles are not that dissimilar.

Sara (22:09)
Yeah, and our humor.

Thank God for that.

Anne Currie (22:12)
Which is odd because none of us... we do not have a core first language in common. Your first language is Swedish, my first language is English and Sarah's first language is Chinese.

Sara (22:15)

Yeah, we were born in three different countries 

Anne Currie (22:36)
Yeah, so we worked all the time to, I think, bring our styles together to a certain extent and make sure... and I think when people read the books. When I say to people, some of us wrote some chapters and some of us wrote the other chapters, even people who know me very well find it quite difficult to work out who wrote which chapter, which I would consider to be a win.

Sara (23:09)
Yeah, that's true. At first, whenever I saw the name of a chapter, I mentally attached it in my head to the one who... but I don't do that now. They blended in my head, I guess. Also, we changed from the original outline. We added chapters as we went, which also, I will not say stressed, but was maybe a little bit of concern with our editors with our aggressive timeline.

But I'm really happy we did. I think the AI chapter was added from the original proposal. The networking chapter also came in quite hot and the Green Software Maturity Matrix.

Anne Currie (23:54)
Yes that's true. But we are managers of projects, so we took out chapters when we put chapters in. So it didn't grow. We tried to keep the same length, but we realized that some of the chapters were more valuable. I mean, there's a couple of chapters that we lost, and I feel it's a bit sad that we lost them. But at the same time, there were just subjects that became more important to go in instead.

You know, the Skynet moment for the tech industry in terms of AI was the 30th of November, 2022, when ChatGPT 3.5 went live and suddenly a million users within five days, a hundred million users within two months. That was while we were writing the book. So we had to put in an AI chapter.

Sara (24:40)
Yeah, there was no way to not have it. And if we ever do a version two, that chapter would probably be bigger and contain more things. There just wasn't... it's been moving so rapidly ever since. Where there's other chapters, I genuinely feel will be almost identical, even if we write the version two in 10 years.

Anne Currie (24:59)

Yeah, yeah. I get asked to do a lot of talks about green AI and what's going on. I'm doing one next week. I'm constantly having to revisit what's the state of the art in more efficient AI, what's going on, what services are available. 

Maybe if we can squeak in another episode before your baby derails all our plans, then we can talk about green AI and I will have to say things and you'll just have to nod and say nothing.

Sara (25:54)
Yeah. Yeah, there's some things I can talk about at least, but yeah, I think the writing part and the research part, even though we knew a lot going in, I feel like there's some parts that I just had to kind of get out of my head, but there were other parts we had to do some research for specifically. I did the hardware chapter and there were a lot of...

I knew electronic waste is a big, big deal. But now I have to go and read the research. That was a really enjoyable part of all of this for me, because you get to really geek out completely. And I remember I was also meeting with Sarah Wells, who were also writing an O'Reilly book at the same time, who I don't have it on my desk, but in my bookshelf. And she said the same. She's like, I'm researching so much about the hard part is sometimes you have to stop research and start writing. But her book is quite thick.

Anne Currie (26:57)
she'll be a guest on the podcast that will be coming shortly. I've got loads of people who are going to be guests. I think I'm going to have to move to... well, actually, my SLA I'm maintaining of one a week, but there'll be bonus episodes. So it might take up to two a week, but I'm not committing to those. So they will serve as regulators if my buffer gets too big.

Sara (27:17)
That's very distributed systems again.

Anne Currie (27:28)
As we said in the first recording, it's a guide to life, distributed systems design.

Sara (27:34)
Yeah, it surely is.

And then another thing I've been curious... so once we had written all the chapters, right, then we had reviewed them internally and with our editor, then there was this whole post-production step, which I thought was really cool as well. Have you had this similar experience when publishing other books or are you mostly self-published? So this was new for you too or?

Anne Currie (27:58)
So I'm mostly self-published, so my novels are all self-published, I haven't really ever attempted to get a publisher for them. But I do have another one which is kind of like half and half, kind of privately published. So Cloud Native Attitude was published by... was paid for and published by a company that paid another company to do the publishing side of things. So it was not

unlike, although in many ways it was quite unlike because they just took it and they said here's it all done, and I went fine. So it was less interactive but I think because the book was more prepped... it was like the third edition by the time that happened so it was already in pretty good state by that point.

Sara (28:33)
I remember the post-production step was, it was a very defined process. They were like, here's what we're going to do in this step. And then you will get it back and you will get to provide feedback. And then we take it back and then we do all these things and then you'll get it back. And that's the last time you see it before we print it basically, or your last time to provide feedback, basically, but they do print on demand. So typos and stuff could be fixed after. But it was really fun because also they did all the illustrations, which again, thank God I didn't have to do that. Because we're all engineers and we're all back end engineers. So our graphical skills are not... well, you're a painter, so yours would probably be... yeah, yours would be nice and mine would look horrendous. But it was very fun to kind of... yeah, we had ideas of graphs or simulations and then someone would make them reality.

Anne Currie (29:40)
So one thing that we should talk about... because people always ask about this,  is, what was the mechanics of writing and sharing the book? People are always really disappointed when I say it was Google Docs. It's so good for sharing editing.

Sara (30:00)
Yeah,

we did have a lot of discussions though. We were like, should we do Git and blah, blah. But then we realized we will do this on our phones and stuff because Sarah was traveling a lot of the time and I was going to have a baby on my arm a lot of the time. So we just needed something that worked on all platforms as easily as possible, really.

Anne Currie (30:18)
Yeah, it worked really well, didn't it? I have no disappointment. So the final stage with the editor, the stuff between us and O'Reilly to do the final copy editing and all that stuff, that wasn't in... was it in a Google Doc? I think it went to...

Sara (30:18)
No, they had their own tool, didn't they? 

Anne Currie (30:39)
Yeah, they did.

And that made it a bit more difficult. And it made me think, oh, thank goodness we used Google Docs for most of it.

Sara (30:46)
Yeah.

I mean, we did have one doc per chapter. We didn't have one giant doc for the whole book. That would have been crazy. And then there were folders and images attached and there was a structure. So yeah, it was.

Anne Currie (30:59)
Yeah, one Google Doc per chapter, because each chapter was completely decoupled effectively, so that you could work on it separately. Yeah. So that was good. 

Sara (31:08)
Yeah.

And also a lot of people ask about the animal, but you don't get to choose the animal. 

Anne

No, you don't get any say in the animal whatsoever.

Sara

No. I'm just happy because the green parrot, there's an emoji that's a green parrot. We always comment this on LinkedIn posts and stuff. It feels like the symbol of... yeah, I like it.

Anne Currie (31:30)
I'm quite happy with the Green Parrot.

Not even the editors, they get no say in the animal that goes on the front of the O'Reilly book. It goes to the graphic design team and it's supposed to be totally hands off. So you can't say, I don't know, I don't like that animal. There's no feedback. You are completely decoupled from the animal.

so you can't say to your editor, make this happen, they can't do anything about it. But I'm quite... I think that the graphics team at O'Reilly are often quite literal. So I was expecting a green animal.

Sara (31:41)
Yeah.

Yes. I think I'm very happy we've got the green animal. I think it makes it look amazing. It just fits and then the subtext is green. Yeah. No, I really like it.

Anne Currie (32:21)
Yeah, I like that.

They know what they're doing, those graphics teams. And they're right that you can't feed back because designers do know best when it comes to design.

Sara (32:29)

Yes, they really do. I also realized we haven't talked... so we had a bunch of tech reviewers. We should probably mention them. We do thank them, right? I don't want to accidentally miss someone.

Anne Currie (32:46)
Yes.

Sara (32:58)
Now I'm looking in the book.

Anne Currie (33:02)
So I can remember some of them because they're on the podcast. I can remember the ones who will be on this podcast later in the series. So Holly Cummins, she was great. She just reviewed the whole thing right at the end in like a day and then gave us quite a lot of detailed feedback. So she was actually the best.

Sara (33:10)
Yes, and then Sam Newman, of course. Yes. Bill Johnson. Yeah, and then Bill Johnson and Asim Hussein and Henry Richardson from the Green Software Foundation. And then Karim Satterli. Very sorry if I mispronounce your last name, Karim. Who I think O'Reilly chose because he was a writer of another book. Yeah.

Anne Currie (33:28)
That's Sam Newman, yeah absolutely, he's fantastic and gave us a quote on the back.

Sara (33:53)
And then also Adrian Cockroft who wrote our foreword, he read it too I believe. But he didn't have that much feedback, I can't remember. It was a long time ago.

Anne Currie (33:57)
he gave me quite a lot on my chapters because they were more aligned with his areas of expertise. Yeah, I'm very pleased with the foreword because it was... he took a bit of a different approach, which is we've been very clear in the book to not really talk that much about the energy transition, not push people... because we're thinking, well, we'll just hand over the "this is what you need to do to make things more efficient." So no judgment, which was a decision, but it did mean that there was no campaigning in the book at all for being green. But then Adrian came storming in the beginning and was like super

Sara (35:00)
Yes, guns blazing.

Anne Currie (35:02)
super activisty. And I thought that worked very well to have that kind of comparison between. And as well, I think that one of the reasons why we weren't quite so storming around it is because it's three women, it's quite easy to sound like, we're just three green women. We wanted to make it a techie book.

Sara (35:06)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Anne Currie (35:29)
But it worked very well. There's no one who has more techie creds than Adrian Cockroft. So he can come in and be quite activisty. The irony is that in our book, the Greta Thunberg character was Adrian Cockroft, not any of us.

Sara (35:35)
Yeah.

Yes, not the actual Swedish person. No, I agree. I hate that that's the state of the world, but you have to operate in the world you live in. And even though the three of us are incredibly techie, we are all engineers, we all work as engineers, very hands on and are big geeks. But everyone who buys the book doesn't know us. They don't know that about us. And we also wanted that to shine through.

Because also that's what we know. And I think you should write about what you know best, which for us is the techie part. So now I still remember reading his foreword for the first time and I was like, OK, this is good for real. Like this is not just some dry like, read this book. It's good. Like this is funky. So I really...

Anne Currie (36:18)

Yeah, the only slap around the head you get in the book is from Adrian.

Sara (36:43)
Yeah,

yes.

Anne Currie (36:46)
The rest of us were a little bit more emollient.

Sara (36:49)
Yes, but also, one of my favorite pieces of feedback I get is when people come up and they're like, your book is funny, like you're funny. And I'm like, thank you. We tried to be funny. Or not tried to be, like we are funny. And I think it just naturally came through. But I'm glad it comes through.

Anne Currie (37:09)
I agree that comes up quite often, people go, were jokes in it? Or was I just thinking there were jokes? No, there were genuine jokes. We tried to put jokes in it. And something I think people when they're writing books... and I think what I underestimated when I wrote my first book was you've got to keep the readers hooked and you've got to keep the readers entertained.

Sara (37:20)
Yeah.

Anne Currie (37:36)
But you've got to keep yourself entertained and hooked as well. It's a lot of work and it's a lot of slog. You need to have something to kind of leaven it a little bit for you. So thinking up jokes is part of that, I'd say.

Sara (37:39)

Yeah. Yeah. And even though it is a technical book, it is not research. You don't have to publish this in a scientific magazine. It is a book and you want your readers to actually read through to the end.

Anne Currie (38:05)
Yes, absolutely. Because it's also a campaigning book in that we want people to do the things in the book, which means that we did all kinds of things to try to make sure that people read to the end of the book, or at least read the stuff that we really needed them to read.

Sara (38:13)
Yes.

if you're writing something about how to implement a standard or something that people kind of have to do for some reason, then they have a different kind of motivation. But yeah, we wanted to explain more like why should you do this? And then you need to keep them hooked.

Anne Currie (38:49)
We put all the key things in the beginning, the first chapter, just in case people only got to the end of the first chapter, at least you've got the key concepts. But there was value all the way to the end, you really wanted people to read to the end if they possibly could.

Sara (38:58)
Yeah, exactly. I mostly read it online because sometimes I have to reference something in a talk or something and then I have it on the O'Reilly website. Then I like that the chapters are standalone. Even when rereading it, I could just reread one chapter.

Anne Currie (39:34)
Yes, I'm glad we did that. As it turns out, distributed system design is quite good. Decoupled chapters with clear interfaces and clear jobs.

Sara (39:40)
On our life retreat that we're planning we should have a writing workshop. That'll be fun.

Anne Currie (39:57)
A writing workshop. Yeah, yeah, we definitely should.

So on that, keep it short and sweet. I am going to try and keep my... I've let my last couple of podcasts go a bit long, because it was quite interesting and now it's like... but I also like keeping them a bit short and sweet so that people have to come back for another one.

We'll come back for another one. We've got to do one about hardware waste, which hopefully we'll be able to get that in before baby number two arrives.

Sara (40:39)
Yeah,

so who knows, maybe I get a baby who sleeps this time and I'll be doing all the podcasts. I don't know. Yeah.

Anne Currie (40:43)
Cross fingers.

Yeah, yeah, or maybe you want to have your baby asleep on your lap, learning the podcasting skills from the cradle.

Sara (41:00)
Yeah, that's true. That could be... Well, we'll see. I haven't opened my eyes on the second time, Mom. I'm much more aware of the limitations of newborns

Anne Currie (41:11)
, indeed. You never know what your baby's going to be like. It's like there's no... they're completely decorrelated.

Sara (41:27)
Yes, yes,

I think everyone who has a sibling can attest to that.

Anne Currie (41:32)
Well, thank you very much indeed for sneaking in another... hopefully we'll get another one but you never know this might be your last one pre-baby we'll see how things go. But thank you very much indeed for being on another episode.

Sara (41:50)
Thank you so much for having me.

Anne Currie (41:52)
And to all the listeners, thank you very much indeed and watchers. Thank you very much indeed. And hopefully I will see you again on another future episode of asynchronous and unreliable. Thank you very much and goodbye.