Firenze

The last week end my wife and I took the chance to visit her sister in Italy. It was nice going from 10 dgC and rain to 20 odd dgC and sun. Not to mention the feeling of vacation - even though I spent quite a few hours writing. I produced some twelve pages on how to provide help in Qt applications.

The writing is for my book that is more or less official now that it has an ISBN and all. You can even find me if you search for authors on Amazon. Kind of fun - but also stressing. For me, the project is far from done. Many pages to write - and the stress of having to keep the quality.

I have been writing for quite a long time. It all started with the independent Qt tutorial for Qt 3. That got me some jobs writing for the Swedish computer magazine Datormagazin. Since then I've written white papers and an Qt Quarterly article and since the summer I've been working on "The Foundations of Qt Development".

In parallel I've changed jobs and will now try to get closer to the hardware. For the moment I'm building uClinux kernels and configuring Spartan and Virtex FPGAs. Great fun! I've also been assigned to do seminars on this - I recently spoke at FPGA World in Kista/Stockholm. What I'm trying to say that there is quite alot of writing-ish tasks at work too.

Anyway - over the last four or five months I've developed a working process that gets me fairly productive. It starts with an outline, pinning down the important issues to cover. After that I design examples to cover everything that I need - and adding details to the outline from doing the examples. Finally, the exhausting part is converting five-six pages of outlines into twenty-twenty five pages of quality text with the right parts of the example sources included. The last phase is best to do in one go - or at least as few gos (goes?) as possible. That means that after that I need to relax, work less for a day or two and just let the brain have some leasure time.

This brings me back to Saturday evening, Firenze - the last minutes of a warm summer evening.