I’m now one and a half days in to the book sprint I referenced in this blog. It’s been a lot of fun and a lot of work. The first half of the first day was spent doing intros, talking about concepts we wanted to cover in the book, and then covering white boards in post-it notes filled with those concepts.
(Just an example of one of the whiteboards…)
As we tried to make sense of all the post-its and put them in some sort of logical order it became increasingly apparent that there were a bunch of engineers in the room. It seems our moderators from booksprints.net are used to dealing with the likes of us as they’ve figured out the delicate process of herding cats.
However, by the second half of the day all you could hear was quiet conversation between partners and the clickity-clack of everyone’s keyboard. We typed away until the early evening hours and found that we had written over 20,000 words as a group! Now the process continues as some of us take on more topics, others start editing, and still others try to put the book together in a comprehensive way.
Though the process is a bit exhausting, it’s still better than the 6 months I spent writing the vCenter Operations Manager Essentials book by myself. Not to mention the expertise available all in one room. If we can’t find the documentation immediately we can walk over to the other side of the room and ask someone about it.
The process continues…