You wrote a book! Well done! I have also been writing for the last seven months. I like writing very much but am not sure what will happen to my draft now! I am sending it to the literary agents in London tomorrow. Scary.

Good luck and if you need a reviewer, you can send me a copy.

Jamie

Some people in our biz say that the later you wait to fix a bug, the more expensive it is to fix. I have a story that refutes that.

I was on a project where a programmer let a sev 1 bug languish for 186 days. Every week in triage, he’d shrug when asked about a fix. He had good standing and reputation on the team as being a thoughtful, talented programmer, so everyone seemed to let it go (else, I think he would have been fired).

But one day, when it came time for him to shrug in Triage, he announced it was fixed! Turns out, it had become untenable for him to put off the problem because other emerging bugs seemed linked to it. When he finally sat down to face it, his first strategy was to search the company intranet to see if there were any solutions. Smart move. Turns out, just a few days earlier, an API was released internally that had promising code. The programmer tried it and it worked!

He was not ashamed about this. Instead, when given playful ribbing about it by the PM, he responded that his procrastination likely saved the project hundreds of hours of his time because jumping right on the problem from Day One would have meant building a complex fix from scratch, taking weeks.

I wish more programmers were this honest. It helped me see that procrastination does not have to connote an irresponsible or apathetic work ethic — but that there may be a good reason *not* to immediately devote time and effort toward a solution.

I am not sure how publishing houses work in the US but over here, basically you get a sum of money for writing a book and then you may get some additional money per book if you sell lots of it. When I decided to publish my book in Swedish I chose a small publisher, also a friend of mine, that took care of the setting, design and printing for a certain amount of money - something like 14 000 USD. Then I have the right to get as many books as I want to sell on my own at conferences, the part that is sold via the bookstores or on the Internet I get 8 USD a piece.

For the English version, that you were kind enough to write a foreword to, I used a no-label company that charged me a lot more: around 40 000 USD but then left me with all the rights and all future income. In this later case I get whatever the publisher normally gets from Amazon or the likes which is a lot more. However I will not have a large publisher advertising my book. So it really depends on your ability to sell the book , or really the books ability to sell itself. Almost all books I have bought were tips from you and other colleagues or friends. Then another thing is the distribution. I have a central storage for my books in Sweden and the Internet shops order from that storage. However for the rest of the world I am trying out a print on demand solution through http://www.lightningsource.com . This is not yet ready but will be, hopefully, in a few weeks time. So as of now you will have to mail me to get a copy. They promise that the POD version is almost as good as the real thing, we’ll see.

So there are plenty of ways getting published.

[James’ Reply: I want to try a traditional publisher, first. If that doesn’t work I’ll probably use Lulu.com.]

[James’ Reply: My son went to Montessori school until 7th grade. Since then we’ve been unschooling him.]

In fact, Holt is the father of the unschooling movement, where we literally take our children out of pre-defined cirricula and let them study what they want, when they want. We homeschool our own - with a slightly more rigid cirricula - and the local homeschool group has roughly one holt book per two families. I suspect the market is much larger than the testing book market.

Even within the system there are people fighting for education reform in this direction - people like John Taylor Gato (”A different Kind of Teacher”) and Rafe Esquith (”Teach Like Your Hair Is On Fire.”) Gato was a public-school teacher who basically asked his students to come up with their own education plan, and the just supervised them. IIRC, he had middle teen-agers and would actively support them in “cutting class” if they had something meaningful - like an apprenticeship, internship, or, say, summer semester trig class - to attend.

The difference with James’s stuff is he can reach an audience that isn’t parents frustrated with the public school system. He can reach parents who are happy with it - or, for that matter, people with no kids looking to improve themselves. In my book, that’s huge. This book has a chance to impact corporate America, with all of it’s flaws - such are hiring for specific skill and focusing on immediate results at the expense of long term health.

bravo, man. bravo.

[James’ Reply: Are you saying that based on the idea of it, or have you read the draft?]

Being an avid follower of ET and drinking the ET kool-aid regularly (specially via your Lessons learnt in software testing book), can’t wait to get my hands on your new book.

All the very best and hope to see this book all over India stores.

Well then I will change my mind It would be interesting to see what you have discovered and compare it with works of perhaps Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Further, it would be more interesting to see how your subjective learning experiences apply to others. Looking forward

[James’ Reply: My book is much lighter than his. But the longer it takes to get a publisher, the more I will add to it.]