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Author: Chris Minnick

Chris Minnick is an author, trainer, web developer and co-founder of WatzThis? (www.watzthis.com).

He has authored and co-authored books and articles on a wide range of Internet-related topics. His published books include: JavaScript All-in-One For Dummies, Coding All-in-One For Dummies, Mastodon For Dummies, Beginning ReactJS Foundations, Adventures in Coding, JavaScript For Kids For Dummies, Coding with JavaScript For Dummies, Beginning HTML5 and CSS3 For Dummies, Webkit For Dummies, CIW eCommerce Certification Bible, and XHTML.

In addition to his role with WatzThis?, Chris is a winemaker, painter, novelist, swimmer, cook, and musician.

Why I’m Live-streaming My Next Writing Project

When my latest book, Mastodon For Dummies, was released, several people on social media commented that it was “probably written by AI.” These comments infuriated me much more than a bad review ever has. Bad reviews often contain information that can help me to do better next time, and I’ve been lucky (or good enough) that the number of truly bad reviews I’ve gotten on my writing is fairly small. If people start to assume that any book on a currently hot topic was written by AI, it might be time for me to hang up my keyboard.

None of the people who commented that the book was “probably AI” even looked at the book. If they had, they would have found that it contains humor, subtlety, good writing, and sensitivity to emotions and frustrations that human learners frequently have. AI isn’t capable of authentically reproducing any of these characteristics of a good “For Dummies” book.

Suggesting that a book I wrote (or co-wrote in this case) wasn’t written by humans discounts the hundreds of hours of difficult and creative work that’s informed by over 20 years of experience (for each of the authors in the case of this book) and the meticulous and exhausting editing process the book receives after the first draft of the manuscript is finished.

Most book authors don’t make a living from it. We have day jobs, and writing a book is often at least 40 more hours of work per week on top of a 40 hour work week at a job we wish we didn’t have to do. I’ve calculated that my average book has earned me less than $10 per hour — and I’m a somewhat successful author.

As a response to anyone who would question whether my books are written by me, I’ve decided to live stream the entire process of writing my next book. In each exciting episode of “Watch Chris Write a Book” (working title), you’ll get to see me at my desk from 2am to 7am (at least) every day for 6 months. In each gripping episode, you’ll get to see a real person doing some or all of the following things: typing, researching, planning, outlining, coding, and drinking a lot of coffee.

I don’t have another book project lined up at this point, because I need to make some money for a couple months to get ready. But, I have a couple proposals out and I’ll post an update here and on Mastodon with the link where you can watch me when I do have a new project. Unless some better solution comes along, I expect that live-streamed book writing may even become the norm for any (human) author.

Mastodon For Dummies: the most important book I’ve written.

From time to time, I get copied on mass emails from my agent looking for an author for a book on a specific topic. In early November 2022, I got such an email. Wiley was looking for someone to write Mastodon For Dummies.

I wrote my proposal that night, in spite of being in the thick of writing a 900-page programming book that was pretty much consuming every waking minute of my life. My proposal was accepted, and I was teamed up with Mike McCallister so the book could be written as quickly as humanly possible.

I jumped at this opportunity because I desperately want Mastodon to continue to grow and be successful, and this was a way that I could contribute to its success. I wrote my part of the book in two weeks, and the book was written, edited, published, and in stores in under 3 months — a crazy fast turnaround in the world of book publishing. It’s a really good book, too — thanks to a great co-author, editor, technical editor, production editor, copyeditor, and a team of people that’s far larger than I even know.

When I wrote my proposal and outline for the book, Elon Musk was in the process of destroying Twitter, and people were looking for an exit. Mastodon became the most popular option for “Twitter refugees” who wanted a social media site where they could post and read short messages, but without the negativity and extreme manipulation of their feeds that’s come to characterize Twitter under Musk.

Unlike Twitter, Mastodon is open source, completely free to use, and not controlled by a billionaire. In fact, Mastodon isn’t controlled by any single person or company. Instead, Mastodon is mostly built and operated by volunteers who feel strongly about creating a space where speech truly is free.

The problem, however, is that there’s a perception that signing up for and using Mastodon is more difficult than signing up for and using other social media sites. Mike and I and the team at Wiley were determined to do what we could to change this.

Mastodon For Dummies is the first book about Mastodon, and it gives simple-to-follow instructions for everything you’ll want to do on Mastodon. It starts with a quick overview of how Mastodon is different from other social media sites and then goes into a wide range of topics, including:

  • How to sign up for Mastodon
  • How to find your friends and make new friends on Mastodon
  • How to create posts, favorite posts, and boost other people’s posts
  • How to curate your Mastodon feed (because there’s no algorithm that’s going to do it for you!)
  • How (and whether) to conduct business on Mastodon
  • How to set up your own Mastodon server

What excites me most about Mastodon is that it feels like the World Wide Web I fell head-over-heels in love with in 1993. It’s a community of people who are having conversations and sharing their interests and ideas in an advertising-free environment without having their actions monitored and tracked. For the most part, people on Mastodon are friendly and aren’t trying too hard to sell you on themselves or something else. Every post by someone you follow shows up on your feed — in the order in which they were posted. It’s simple, but liberating, to be in complete control over what you see and don’t see.

The best part is that the creators of Mastodon aren’t going to sell it or suddenly start charging $8 per month or sell your personal information to make money off advertising — and they couldn’t if they wanted to.

The book is now in every store and on every website that sells computer books. If you want to support and become part of an authentic community on the Internet without being at the mercy of a mega-corporation or eccentric billionaire — please check out the book from your local library, independent bookstore, or even Amazon.com.

If you have any questions about Mastodon that aren’t covered in the book, please email me (chris at minnick dot com), or direct message me on Mastodon!

It Doesn’t Matter What JavaScript Framework You Use

Keeping up with JavaScript libraries is a full-time job. Even if you pick one to specialize in, the constant stream of changes made to it is going to make you feel like you’re always behind the times. On top of this, people who write about JavaScript and Web Development or make YouTube videos about it will be constantly telling you that the way you’re doing things, the library you’re using, or the specific features of that library that you’re using are ruining the web, killing puppies, and worse.

If you’re working for someone else, the tools you use will be dictated by your employer, the client’s existing technology stack, the skills of your co-workers, and a ton of other factors. Dropping your current framework because of the prevailing sentiment among guys with crazy haircuts on YouTube isn’t a luxury most developers have.

The rise and fall of popularity among tools is a natural thing in an environment where no one really has the foggiest notion what the best way to make websites is. Web developers seem to be stuck in a loop from static websites, to server-side rendering, to client-side rendering, to some hybrid between the two, and back to static websites. We’ve been around this loop several times now. Each time around the loop, the tools get more sophisticated and more complex. In some cases, they even get better. Until we figure out something that actually works, we’re going to keep going around the loop.

So, what’s a web developer who wants to stay employable to do? Clearly, migrating to a new framework every few months isn’t going to fly with your employer or clients. But, it’s a legitimate concern that the skills you have from working with one framework may not be worth anything if you find yourself on the job market after that framework becomes unfashionable. And, steadfastly refusing to learn any JavaScript frameworks because you can do everything with HTML and CSS is a one-way ticket to being unemployable.

There is an alternative that will not only make you able to quickly learn and become an expert with the latest frameworks and tools, but also ensure that you’ll always be one of the cool kids. Are you ready for it?

The secret is to learn JavaScript and the Web APIs really well.

While it’s fully possible to use a library like React or Vue.js without fully understanding JavaScript, by doing so you’ll likely end up using the library incorrectly. There’s not anything inherently bad about today’s crop of JavaScript libraries — the problem is that a lot of people are using them poorly or incorrectly. Remember: every library is just JavaScript ,and you should know JavaScript well enough that you could write anything you write using a library without using that library.

If you know what your framework of choice is doing behind the scenes, you can write good code with the library much faster than without it, which is the whole point of using a library in the first place.

Okay, I’ll give you my thoughts on ChatGPT

It’s the topic du jour, and since I was the person who predicted the path we’re now on, I’ve been getting some requests for my thoughts about OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is currently busy cranking out thousands of poorly-written articles about itself for publication by every news outlet in the world.

I’ve ignored every request to comment on ChatGPT, including on whether it should be welcomed into schools or blocked, whether this means the end of Google, how it will change SEO, and whether ChatGPT will mean the end of human-to-human relationships as people find out they enjoy being lied to by a computer much more than by another person.

I’m not quite ready to write my thoughts on how ChatGPT will cause the end of the world or bring about a work-free future of leisure and bad novels that never end, but I have some observations about my reaction to playing around with it that I’d like to share.

Observation #1: I don’t want it

As someone who has just come off a year of writing and editing three books about computer programming, at a rate of approximately $10/hour, I hate that any reader or editor might look at what I’ve written and say, “Why did we pay Chris $10/hour to write about JavaScript when we could have had ChatGPT do it for free?” Or, even worse, I fear that the day will come when an editor or publisher says to me, “You write so fast. Are you having ChatGPT write your books now?”

To attempt to head off both things: Can AI make spelling and coding errors like I can? I don’t think so! I can type really fast (thanks 7th grade!) and I’m sort of dyslexic, so I don’t notice that I’ve reversed words or substituted “futon” for “function” (as in “JavaScript futons are objects”), and my writing not only keeps me employed, it also keeps a giant fleet of expert copyeditors, technical editors, proofreaders, and Amazon reviewers gainfully employed. Give my projects to artificial intelligence and you might as well kiss your job goodbye too.

Observation #2: I’m an old fuddy-duddy

As someone who tries to keep an open mind about things, I struggle with the following probabilities and conflicting feelings:

  1. A world in which someone can type any garbage prompt into ChatGPT and get back a grammatically correct, if not factually correct, response, or where someone can tell ChatGPT to express their half-baked ideas (or worse) in a coherent way will likely lead to a world in which learning to write is no longer valued.
  2. A world in which ChatGPT is baked into Gmail and MS Word is a world in which I won’t have to gag from seeing so much bad writing every day.
  3. Kids today are dumb and they’re just going to get dumber.

I never wanted to be the person who grows up to say that kids today have it easy, but there you have it. I’ve worked with people who think tracing a cartoon or otherwise copying someone else’s drawing is the same as making their own art. People have claimed to be “computer geniuses” in job interviews with me who list the fact that they know how to post on Instagram as proof. Arrg.

Observation #3: I could use this

If you know what you’re doing and how machine learning works, and how to distinguish truth from fiction, and how to write code, and how to write English, AI tools can actually be helpful for generating ideas or for triggering creativity.  There are plenty of possibilities that I’ve considered, and I’ve even used AI to assist me with writing the type of mindless code that counts more as typing than actually coding. It’s even saved me time. But, would I trust AI to write a computer program in a language I don’t know inside and out? Would I let AI write something I’d ever submit to a publisher? Would I ever accept that giving ChatGPT a prompt and pasting the result on your web site or into MS Word is in any way a creative act? No.

Conclusion

A lot of articles about ChatGPT today end with conclusions similar to “Well, it’s a great tool, but you can’t rely on things it writes to be factually correct. So therefore, we’ll all still have jobs forever.” That’s not the way I see it. The “factually correct” part is the easiest part to fix, and it will be fixed as soon as someone hooks an AI like ChatGPT up to Google.

Unlike every ChatGPT-generated article I’ve seen, I’m not going to tie this up in a neat little summary. I’ll write more and talk more about my latest end-of-the-world scenario soon.

Coding All-in-One For Dummies 2nd Edition

My Latest Book: Coding All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition

I’m excited to announce that the latest book I worked on, Coding All-in-One For Dummies (2nd edition), will be available in stores starting this week!

When I was asked to be the lead author for the 2nd Edition of Coding All-in-One For Dummies, I immediately said “YES!” It was thrilling to work together with so many great expert authors to update this important and successful book.

My first goal with writing the book was to make sure it accurately reflected the state of coding today. The first edition of Coding All-in-One For Dummies came out in 2017. Although the foundations of coding taught in the first edition are still the same, much has changed since then.

Important changes include the shift away from mobile web apps and towards cross-platform app development, JavaScript has evolved significantly, Python has been upgraded, cloud computing has become an essential part of coding, responsive web design has gone from being a good idea to a requirement for any web site, and much more.

My second goal with this book was to make it fun and accessible for anyone, regardless of their previous coding experience. There’s a lot of information in this book, but if you take your time and play with it, it will pay off.

My third goal was to stay within the page count limit set by my editors. Oops! I love coding and everything about it. There was so much I wanted to tell you about coding that I ended up going over my page limit by around 400 pages. The resulting manuscript would have been impossible to print in one volume, I was told. So, after some careful pruning, I was able to get down to just 200 pages over the maximum size. I begged for a special exception to the rule and even took out my usual long list of thank yous to my family and third-grade teachers to save a page. Finally, even in this time of skyrocketting paper prices, the wonderful people at For Dummies agreed that this book is perfect, and they’d figure out a way to print it.

I hope you enjoy this book! Thank you for beginning, or continuing, your coding adventure with me.

-Chris

 

Backpack Living – Lessons Learned

Prior to the pandemic, I used to travel a lot, and I traveled with a lot of stuff. I’d bring a large suitcase (to check) and a laptop bag and sometimes also a backpack for even a 3-day trip. When I got tired of checking and hauling the suitcase, I switched to using Dufl.com, which was great. The idea was that you sent them the clothes and other items that you travel with. Before you go on a trip, you’d let them know where you were going. They’d FedEx a suitcase with your clothes to your destination. When your trip was done, you’d throw everything into the suitcase, put the provided shipping label on it, and leave it at the front desk. Dufl would wash and store your clothes until the next time you traveled. I’d probably still use Dufl if they hadn’t gone out of business due to the pandemic.

But, alas, the pandemic has brought much change to my life. Earlier this year, I decided to get rid of nearly everything I own and see what that’s like.

I’m almost there. At the end of April 2021, I’m leaving my current home of Astoria, Oregon and I have a one-way ticket to Detroit. I plan to bring nothing but my backpack (an Aer Travel Pack 2 to be specific) and my saxophone (a Yamaha YTS-61, to be specific).

As a test trip, I just finished a 5-day trip to Sacramento. I’ve learned a few important lessons about packing and what to stuff in my backpack. I wanted to jot those down, and thus this post.

What I learned this week:

  1. My over-the-ears headphones are giant and take up a lot of space in my pack. They’re essential (especially when everyone outside is screaming all night long) so I’m thinking I should hang them from my backpack somehow rather than stuffing them inside it.
  2. I’m bad at counting. I brought too many t-shirts, and not nearly enough socks
  3. My laptop (2015 macbook pro) is heavy, and the charger takes up a lot of space that would be better used for socks.
  4. My shoes would be a lot more comfortable if I had brought toe nail clippers.
  5. I need a toiletries bag that’s small and doesn’t leak. Also, floss and a toothbrush cover.
  6. I need a bag that packs very small that I can use to hold dirty clothes so they don’t make my clean clothes dirty.
  7. Bring woolite.
  8. Buy socks that dry faster

Chris Answers Questions About Writing

People often ask writers about their daily schedules, hoping to get some nugget of advice that’s going to help them finally start or finish the novel they’ve been planning. I totally understand where this question is coming from, and I ask the same question of anyone who manages to exercise on a regular basis. Writing can be difficult, and a different perspective or the right advice can sometimes make it easier.

I’m the kind of writer who really likes to tell stories (often conflicting) about the things that I do and don’t do — so I have fun with this question. I never mean to mislead anyone or give out bad advice…I think the things I say make sense…for example: “write without pants on before 6am, edit with pants on after 6pm”. But, take everything I say on this matter with a grain of salt, because I’d be some sort of crazy robot if I actually followed my own advice half the time.

There was an article I read recently where someone tried to actually follow the routines that various authors claimed they followed…but he wasn’t willing to follow through with Hunter S. Thompson’s supposed routine and so the article was sort of lame.

At any rate, I make up stories about how I write, and here’s the latest installment, with some other fun questions and answers too. This is from Nancy Christie’s series of interviews called One on One: Insights Into The Writer’s Life.