Getting Paid as a Technical Author

Last week I did something I've never done before. I was paid to write an article for the fine folks at scrapingbee.com. It's since been published and received a lot of praise from a number of different Pythonistas along with a lot of comments on Reddit. My twitter notifications have been pretty active - so I'm glad I've removed the app from my phone!

This represents somewhat of a departure for me, I've written my thoughts and opinions exclusively on my own site to date. I guess I didn't really think my articles were fit for the big time. I've written *a lot* in my history as a blogger, researcher and developer and it turns out I may actually be ok at it, perhaps even "pretty good". Given I write articles on my own site and enjoy doing so, why not try doing it for someone else, with the added benefit of getting paid along the way? I enjoyed going through the process, learned a lot and I'm looking forward to writing the next one. Of course this is additional to my usual dev work, but it's a nice to have a variety in the types of work I do nonetheless.

In other news I've been busy working on my "product starter kit" for django. It now allows you to bootstrap a project from product details in Stripe to an application shell with registration, templates and pricing set up already. I still have a bit of work to do before inviting people to use it, but seems like it may be useful to developers who like me, just want to get on with launching something.

As always, if you have any comments on the links in this issue or content suggestions for the future, please feel free to reply to this email and let me know.

Until next time, keep on shipping!

Ian

Stories

You Are Doing Too Much: Focus On One Thing

Scotty Russell makes the case for not being a jack of all trades. I particularly need to heed the points of this, having wasted far too much time in my past project switching.

AMA Session with Ben Barbersmith

You may well of heard of Ben in Indie Hacker circles with as the author of SQL for Humans. This is the first appearance of Ben in a video I'm aware of and it's nice to hear the full story of his path from Google to consultant and author.

The cost to run a SaaS platform with a few million Annual Recurring Revenue

A thorough post detailing all the apps required to run a 18 person SaaS product.

Code

Who Pays Technical Writers?

With my new found technical writing skills, I considered writing up all the sites that will pay you to write articles for them. Turns out, there's a site for that already.

Django for Startup Founders

An in depth article from Alex Krupp on how startups can maximise their success through architectural decisions. Lots of ideas here and packed with great django examples.

Ness · Deploy web sites to your AWS account effortlessly

What with AWS being so complex these days even pushing a site live is a pain. Ness aims to make it dead simple with a CLI that deploys your site to your own AWS account.

A Favourite Tweet