I think another key to your success: you are writing a book about design and your front page is stunning... congrats! I would happily trust your judgement on design based on your home page. Did you design this yourself?
Thanks! I appreciate the compliments. Yes, it is my design.
I guess I should have included that you should know something about the topic you choose to write about. Being able to demonstrate some level of expertise is important. But that doesn't mean you should wait until you are speaking at conferences before you start teaching on your blog.
$15k certainly sounds impressive, but how many hours have been spent researching, writing and marketing the book? Only once we have a ratio'd figure to compare can we claim success.
The flip side to opportunity cost is the hidden benefit of launching a successful ebook.
It's SO not just $15k.
Think about all that crippling anxiety over building something no one wants. Or the psychological wounds still bleeding raw from a product attempt that failed for whatever reason.
One small step in the bank statement, one giant leap toward 37signals.
This is why I made the point about killing my other "product". I had nowhere to go with it. Perhaps I didn't say it well enough, but my initial plan was to build something but the problem wasn't marketing, it was that nobody wanted it.
My book, however, people want. I looked for what developers need first and then built a product around that, rather than thinking of something that might be nice and try to get people to buy it (like my CMS hosting).
Is it a false dichotomy to assume he could have made the same $15k doing something else in less time? $15k is still $15k, and it's likely that had he opted not to write the ebook n+6 months ago he wouldn't have earned any additional income.
There may also be some non-financial benefits of going through the experience as others have commented, plus the sense of accomplishment.
This is a really good question. I actually avoided recording this because I didn't want to depress myself during the writing. I spent a LOT of time on this.
It does, however, come from real-world work. My client projects have been successful from techniques in the book.
I'd need to split hairs to determine what time was spent where and in the end I just needed to write.
It's the same problem with choosing a ebook platform. No tool does you any good until you are actually using it. I'm currently writing in Apple's Pages app because it was the nearest and easiest way to just get started.
The benefit of a product is that it can become many things and the hours put into it can be easily won back with more sales.
EBS unit: Don't worry about this one, they just mean that it's something you can buy from AWS that pertains to EBS.
IOPS: I/O operations per second. If you pay Amazon for Provisioned IOPS, they will guarantee that you can fetch at least N contiguous blocks of bytes per second, for at least 99% of seconds.
Striped 1000-IOPS EBS volumes: Two volumes, each with 1000 provisioned IOPS, arranged in RAID-0 to get roughly twice the bandwidth of a single volume.
Memory warmup time: From the time you start a long-running task (a database process in this case, from the sound of it) until your memory contents have reached a steady state. At this point, everything you need frequently is loaded into memory, so your I/O traffic will be representative of steady state, rather than an artifact of loading in a bunch of stuff at the beginning of the task/process.
Unfortunately Apple have adopted a philosophy of rejecting any app that loosely competes with iOS native apps - we for example had an app rejected for allowing users to share apps on Facebook/Twitter... the reason given was apparently it didn't provide any additional functionality over the native app (even though it did!)
What now is an API call that counts towards your quota? An API call to the Cloud Code from the client, or each call to a Parse method within the Cloud SDK?
I find Richard Feynmanns accounts of hacking (non-computer) systems at Los Amos to be fascinating - I was hoping once the cheating was revealed we were going to be treated to a story of how someone cleverly found a loophole in the system that was then closed, improving the system for everyone. Rather we got a smear article...
Is this at Rands? That's not what I gathered at all. To me, Rands was concluding that Apple is secretive to surprise the whole world, not Apple employees.
I don't think it's possible for a company the size of Apple to have all employees know the secret and not have the world know the secret. Google proves, time and again, that when most employees know what's going to launch that it leaks. I wish it weren't the case, but it is.
Interestingly, the journalist who wrote this article also wrote a terrible review of the Nexus 7 when it first came out slating the device with multiple inaccurate statements. He was roasted in the comments & had to append the article with a justification for his viewpoints.
