Years Too Late

I’ve been unemployed for eight months now, and haven’t written as much as I thought I would. Middle-aged angst is one reason, but another is the realization that most of the projects I was thinking of doing are solving yesterday’s problems. I have a long history of doing this:

• The JavaScript and Python versions of Software Design by Example are the books I needed in the 2000s when I was teaching undergraduate courses at the University of Toronto. I’m proud of them, but they have essentially found no readers.

• Similarly, Research Software Engineering with Python would have been really useful if it had appeared in 2012 or 2013. By the time it came out in 2021, most of what it said was already online in a hundred places (thanks in part to Software Carpentry).

• By the time we shut down It Will Never Work in Theory I had learned enough to write an introductory textbook on software engineering that would show readers what we actually know about software development and (just as importantly) why we believe it’s true. I think that a course like that would have prepared people to tell whether AI is making them more productive or not, but as I wrote six years ago, the people who teach undergrad SE courses don’t seem to be interested in changing the curriculum.

Which brings me to the projects I’ve been noodling with since November: workshops on organizational change, project closure, and managing research software projects, and tutorials on debugging, Gleam, and a few things programmers ought to know about how society actually works. According to page views on Plausible, none of these have had more than a couple of dozen viewers a month, and when I ask people for feedback, I hear crickets. As someone who believes we ought to teach young programmers to pay attention to evidence, it’s hard for me to ignore these signals; as someone who has written several books that (to first order) nobody read, it feels foolish to do so.

So I’ve been trying to write fiction instead, which has its own frustrations. Publishers are drowning under AI slop, so most won’t accept unagented submissions any longer, but agents are drowning as well. (There is also the fact that my fiction might not be as good as I think it is: feel free to judge for yourself.) I’ve tried self-publishing a couple of times in the past; the results made sales of my technical books look stellar.

Which leaves me looking at two half-finished YA novels and a pile of non-fiction essays, and wondering if any of it is worth any more time. A friend suggested that I put it all aside and devote myself to Toronto Nature Stewards or some other volunteer work for a few months, if only to get off the screen and meet some new people. There’s also an election coming up; city councillors are always grateful for IT help, and working on a winning campaign has been on my bucket list for over thirty years. Right now, though, I’m going to take another look at the outline for one of those stories and hope that inspiration strikes.

Time for another cup of tea. If you came in peace, be welcome.