Hello, Habr!
Long time ago we did not get out of our publishing cellar and did not communicate with you about the painful, right? It's time to fix it! And for starters, we want to share the latest news about what happened in the life of our printing press.
The most significant of the recent ones is the Highload ++ conference held in Skolkovo. There, in partnership with Ontiko @ oleg-bunin and Oleg Bunin, we made a gift to all participants: in addition to the usual notebooks, brochures, catalogs, pens and business cards, visitors received our first book - “Designing Event-Oriented Systems” .
This was a special edition for the conference. And, to admit, we were worried: yes, the book is cool (otherwise we would not have taken up its publication in Russia), but we were objective people and understood that this was a rather niche story. I really didn’t want books to remain, which then would have to be taken back with me.
But the fear turned out to be completely groundless: 90% of the books were dared on the first day of the conference, the remaining 10% by the afternoon of the next day. So, you know, what was the circulation of the special edition? - 2200 copies! That is, two thousand books went into good hands on the first day!
The event as a whole left extremely positive impressions: a lot of people, many interesting stands. The most complete surprise was the clogged halls at 10 am on the second day - a day, usually quite difficult after an excessive evening networking of the first day. But not at this time:)
Well, and we at the publishing house’s stand not only handed out the first book, but also played certificates for the next one - “I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59”. The draw on business cards may not be the best mechanics possible, but you could just leave them in the drum and then check the mail: we wrote to all 30 lucky ones. And the vast majority (those who came for the certificate) in April will receive our new book as a gift.
And we also listened to your suggestions on what should be translated and published later - and brought home a huge amount of impressions and new ideas :)
So, we would like to discuss one of them with the community today. In the world, places that won “Ok Google,” and “Hello, Alice” are walking around the country, audio interfaces (again) become relevant. Moreover, not only input interfaces, but also output. What to do with a “smart” column, except forcing to tell the weather and dictate recipes? (Hussars, keep quiet!) Of course, listen to podcasts and audio books!
But it’s true, we thought, why not experiment with the audio format? After a summer acquaintance with the bomb-voiced book “Blood, Sweat, and Pixels,” I was tempted to understand how well the technical literature would fit into the sound format. And for clarity, I decided to read a little from our "kafka":
It is clear that hardcore technical things in this form will probably be difficult to perceive, being somewhere on a walk, in the subway, in the gym. But even they can be useful for listening against the background of some monotonous activity, so that in the process periodically switch to the attached images and code listings. Well, things that are less hardcore and generally become as accessible as possible.
In this connection, the question is: how do you feel about the auditory perception of information? Do you often listen to technical podcasts? Perhaps even had to deal with voiced technical literature? Do you think this format is useful, will it make information more accessible?