Status of the Project @ 2022-09-05

Greetings everyone,

Let's say it as it is: with just 11 commits in over 3 months, the project has slowed down considerably.

TL;DR: Things are hard, the project is going really slow and I'm totally lacking the drive to continue it, as of now.

I have a lot of personal stuff going on, among them is my day job, which is really driving my energy into the ground.

It is only right that I keep you all informed about what is going on with the project, so I decided to compile some things I'm fighting against/trying to solve.

The "honing mania"

Since reaching 5000 downloads, I convinced myself that the book should be of higher quality, the tone should be clearer and more serious, things should be explained as clearly as possible, space should not be wasted.

That's what dragged me into a process of not bringing any new content and just try to fix, hone, polish and try to make what it is better. Trying to achieve some perfection that does not exist.

This also includes reworking my toolkit many times, hoping that some things may be easier for me or whoever will one day want to help.

Smashing my face against my tools' limits

This book has been written using a variety of tools that work (somewhat) together to bring this product to life (maybe I should make a technical long form post one day). One of those tools, and the one that is the sap of the project itself, is Pandoc.

Using its extended markdown, the book is quite easy to edit and read, even in its "raw form", and when I wanted to add something (like swappable listings or the tip/pitfall/note boxes) I would just write (read "botch together") some Lua code in the form of filters.

I have been thinking about reworking the Engines Appendix to make it more compact and easier to read, but all the formats I've been thinking about use tables that need column and row spans (cells that span more than 1 row or column), and Pandoc currently does not support that.

Having to convert math formulas into SVGs that are included in the EPub version is not hard, but it's a bit fiddly nonetheless and I fear it may break at any moment.

I have been pondering switching to other tools and languages, like RestructuredText and Sphinx, but that would mean having to reformat everything, as well as remaking the template and I'm not even sure that the final product would be acceptable. (I'm not even sure if the product is acceptable right now!)

Lack of drive

This summer has been inclement, the heat has been absolutely relentless, my vacation was totally ruined (so I'm running on empty, like I've never even taken a vacation at all), I have been overworked to the bone and then some.

I'm completely lacking the drive to sit, study a topic, reinterpret it, understand it and then re-explaining it into the book. Lots of code examples that I wanted to include are missing: I am a software developer by trade and after a (sometimes very frustrating) day of coding the last thing I want to see in front of me is more code.

Myself

I include myself as a problem here, because I am my own worst enemy after all.

I started this project hoping to "get the ball rolling" and hopefully end up with a community where everyone contributes to something that will help others, and some of those people maybe will help with the project too, keeping things in motion.

Besides a few issues reported here and there (for which I thank the people who still report them, your contribution is invaluable), I am the only one working on this project right now.

It's hard to deal with that feeling when things don't really go the way you hoped they would.

There is not much feedback either, so I feel a bit lost to be perfectly honest. I don't know which direction to take, if I even should take any.

That's how things are right now.

Thanks for reading, I appreciate it wholly. Take care everyone.

Penaz