DEV Community: margareteldridge

Women in Tech: Elevate Conference by Girl Geek X March 7 and 8, 2024

margareteldridge — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 20:28:20 +0000

On March 7 at 2 pm PT (5 pm EST), Leemay Nassery, Danielle Barnes, and I will be giving a talk at the Elevate Conference. Learn what it is like to write a book--the challenges and possible benefits to your work life. The conference is aimed at women in tech, and as far as I know, all the speakers are women. Leemay wrote her first book last year on A/B Testing for The Pragmatic Bookshelf and is working on a follow-on book.

Image Credits

Cover image photo by Safar Safarov on Unsplash
Book cover courtesy of The Pragmatic Programmers

Programming books I'm working on

margareteldridge — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 15:00:53 +0000

Hello there, I'm a developmental editor at The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Some of the books I've been working on lately include:

Charged Bodies by Tom Mahon
A reprint of his award-winning 1984 book about the rise of the semi-conductor industry in Silicon Valley with an afterword by the author about where we are now and why this book is relevant today. I really enjoy Tom's story-telling style and the approach. He talks with artists, VCs, engineers, and even environmentalists. The ebook was released Feb 14, 2024. The print book will be available later in 2024.

Mockito Made Clear by Ken Kousen
This book is about using Mockito for testing Java apps. It's short, sweet, and to the point. It has been out for a year now, but I wanted to mention it for a few of reasons. One, I really like Ken and his highly entertaining newsletter (Tales from the Jarside). Two, I want to convince him to do another book with me. Three, Mockito Made Clear is a really good book, but it seems like not many Java devs have heard about it yet.

Text Processing with JavaScript and JavaScript Brain Teasers, both by Faraz Kelhini. Faraz is on a roll with short, useful JavaScript books. I worked with him in 2021 on Modern Asynchronous JavaScript and he had such a good experience he decided to come back for two more. He's one of the hardest-working developers I know, and he earnestly wants to share his knowledge. Faraz just made a move from Dubai to Hong Kong earlier this year. Talk about culture shock. The Text Processing book was just published this month. The Brain Teasers book is available in beta and will be out soon-ish in print.

Effective Go Recipes by Miki Tebeka
I started working with Miki on this book in 2021, shortly after we published his three Brain Teaser books. This Go programming book follows a cookbook style with a problem, solution, and discussion. We organized it in (hopefully) logical segments loosely following a release cycle. During the writing, life happened, things got busy, and the book stalled a couple of times. I always believed in Miki and the book, and we finally got it finished and out in beta late 2023. It should be in print sometime in the first quarter of 2024.

I also handle proposals at The Pragmatic Bookshelf, so if you are an aspiring tech book author with an idea, hit me up.

The cost of editing (or not)

margareteldridge — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 20:21:59 +0000

Whether you are writing a blog post or a full-length book, it helps to have another set of eyes. In a tech book, a typo can mean the example you wrote doesn't run or the instruction stumps a newbie. A real-world example: "so the dtype of out is not float64" where "not" should have been "now," -- a tiny typo of one letter that completely changed the meaning. So what does it cost to have your writing edited? The Editorial Freelancers Association just updated their Rates page based on a 2020 survey of all their members, which you can see here: https://www.the-efa.org/rates. In today's world, where so many authors are choosing to self-publish, you may want to use this resource (once you decide editing is important) to figure out what you should be paying for editing.