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Ansible 101 live streaming series - a retrospective

Ansible 101 Retrospective

In late March, as the COVID-19 pandemic hit the US, I decided to make my Ansible books free to help people level-up their skills at home. That offer was generously extended by Device42 in April.

Something happened that I never expected, but in hindsight is pretty amazing: while the books were free, paid sales went up 400%!.

Anyways, in the midst of that, I also realized after getting my equipment in order for live streaming, I could teach a free 'Ansible 101' course on YouTube. So I asked people if they'd be interested, got a very enthusiastic 'YES', and tried to make a concise but somewhat entertaining live series on all things Ansible.

2020 Drupal Local Development Survey Results

tl;dr: Video from CMS Philly presentation, Slides from the presentation, and scroll down to see graphs of particular interest to Drupal developers.

On May 1st, Chris Urban and I presented 2020 Developer Tool Survey Results at CMS Philly. For the past few years, we've run an annual Drupal Dev Tool Survey (2019, 2018) and presented the results at DrupalCon and some local Drupal Camps.

Since DrupalCon went virtual this year, and Chris was helping make CMS Philly virtual, he suggested I join him at that conference and reveal the results at this session.

$25K in book sales, and I'm almost ready to publish

I started writing my first book almost two years ago. At the beginning of the project, I set an ambitious goal: Write a 90-page introductory-level technical book on some relatively new software, and sell 200 copies.

As a developer and dabbling entrepreneur, I calculated that if I sold the book for around $10-20, and wrote the book based on real-world scenarios I'd already encountered (meaning very little extra research/discovery required), I could make enough money to keep things interesting while helping a few hundred developers pick up the new software more quickly.

Almost two years later, Ansible for DevOps is almost 400 pages long and has sold over 2,000 copies—and I haven't yet published the book.

Books sold per month

What follows is an analysis of what led to this success, and some cautions for those considering writing a book.

3 million pageviews

Wow. Just glanced at stats for 2008-now on jeffgeerling.com, and it looks like I've passed 3,000,000 page views, with more than 1.6 million unique visitors (I didn't keep stats from 2004-2008, so I don't have data for that time).

Thanks for all your visits, and for helping me improve this site through your feedback! I've received over 1,500 comments and 1,000 emails over the course of 800 blog posts, 60 articles, 31 reviews, and 1,100 photos posted to this site. I've written over 40,000 words in the posts on this site (not yet enough for a novel), and I've written similar amounts for sites like Open Source Catholic and Midwestern Mac.

One of my greatest dilemmas is whether to consolidate sites like those into this site, or to try to keep Life is a Prayer more about personal things, marriage, family life, etc. Here's to another 40,000 words figuring it out!

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