Yeah we have the same coworker. He diminishes other people’s result and make it impossible to scale the team by taking over work than others could do and learn from. When he’s expressing his opinion that nobody seems to be able to do the work, it’s pretty much that he’s not willing to train the other engineers to do the work. What does the company do? They either listen to him, fire people, and waste indefinite time trying to hire someone who can match the 10x engineer’s skills, or they try to remove the 10x engineer as the bottleneck that prevents the team from growing (also, if they don’t act fast enough everybody has left except the 10x engineer)
I’m a security engineer and nobody knows what’s best practice. Everyone is making it up at this point, and security is still a nascent field. Most companies don’t even have a security team.
I think it’s still not clear how you should build a security org, and if you should at all (should security be part of normal workstreams of your devs?)
If it’s interesting to someone I have a similar pipeline I used to write and deploy my book The Security Engineer Handbook [1].
I basically wrote everything using markdown files, and a pdf/epub/mobi is automatically generated from the folder using a Github Action. The action will also modify the date of the last update on the webpage, which gets deployed via cloudflare pages (although github pages could have been used). On the other side Stripe handles the payments (No server side code for me) and zapier detects new customers and sends the artifacts by email.
It’s magical :) the next time I want to write a book I’ll focus purely on the content and everything else will be taken care of automagically.
I sold around 300 in my first year (which ended recently), which is much less than the other book I wrote via my publisher. Yet, even though it is sold at a lesser price, my self-published book made almost more money. This is essentially because the percentage I make on every sales with my publisher is really low (10%). So for my next book, I'll self publish as well.
- Create a landing page via Github and use Github pages or Cloudflare pages to automatically update your domain when you push to your repo
- set up stripe checkout on the client side only (so you dont have to deal with server logic)
- simply send the book by email when you get a customer
This was my MVP as I didn’t get the time to automate things on the server side. As it’ll get more tedious I’ll find the time to implement that, but so far it’s worked well!
Indeed. Royalties are the issue. I just published a book with a well-known editor and I’m making 10% per copy (ebook or print). The book is priced at more than 50$ and yet I’ll only make this amount by selling 10 copies (of course this is before tax).
Interestingly, if your editor has an affiliate program you can make as much money by advertising some link that leads to purchases. So as a writer, if you do both you end up getting 20% on these. It’s still not that much.
Recently, I wrote a small handbook about security and the mindset you need to care about security in your company (https://www.securityhandbook.io) and I self published it for 20$ using stripe checkout. Every purchase yields me a bit more than 19$, which feels amazing every time as I directly get the money. I actually made more money selling this self published book than with my big editing company.