Ashish Choudhary is the author of Effortless Cloud-Native Apps Development using Skaffold; we got the chance to sit down with him and find out more about his experience of writing with Packt.
Q: What are your specialist tech areas?
Ashish: Java, Spring Boot, Docker, Kubernetes, IMDG, distributed systems, microservices, DevOps and the cloud.
Q: How did you become an author for Packt? Tell us about your journey. What was your motivation for writing this book?
Ashish: The Packt team has contacted me to write a book on Skaffold. I have written a blog post on simplifying the inner development loop for applications running on Kubernetes with Skaffold. The blog got enough traction on various social media platforms. I am assuming they liked my writing style, familiarity with the tool and gave an initial offer to write a book. The journey itself was fun and challenging at the same time. Writing a book is not an easy task as you have to put in lots of effort as each draft you submit goes through cycles of edits and rework. Pro tip plan well if you have a full-time job; otherwise, you will end wasting weekends. It gives a sense of pride when you see your name on the book, and your work gets published by a famous publisher like Packt. That keeps the motivation high throughout the journey.
Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?
Ashish: Since I have already written a blog about Skaffold and used it for my projects, writing the whole book was not daunting. I verified my work by going through official Skaffold documentation.
Q: Did you face any challenges during the writing process? How did you overcome them?
Ashish: Writing a book during a pandemic was the only challenge as it gets difficult to spend time on writing when you have ill faamily members. The whole packt team was supportive throughout.
Q: What’s your take on the technologies discussed in the book? Where do you see these technologies heading in the future?
Ashish: Most companies know the benefits of containers and want to move their workloads to a mature container orchestrator like Kubernetes. Skaffold improves developer experience with Kubernetes, so it’s definitely a great tool and backed by Google. The future is great.
Q: Why should readers choose this book over others already on the market? How would you differentiate your book from its competition?
Ashish: There is no book currently in the market dedicated to Skaffold.
Q. What are the key takeaways you want readers to come away from the book with?
Ashish: By reading this Skaffold book, you’ll develop skills that will help accelerate your inner development loop and be able to build and deploy your apps to the Kubernetes cluster with Skaffold.
Q. What advice would you give to readers learning tech? Do you have any top tips?
Ashish: Have attitude to learn and adapt to new technologies.
Q. Do you have a blog that readers can follow?
Ashish: Yes. ashishtechmill.com
Q. Can you share any blogs, websites and forums to help readers gain a holistic view of the tech they are learning?
Ashish: skaffold.dev
Q. How would you describe your author journey with Packt? Would you recommend Packt to aspiring authors?
Ashish: Yes overall experience was great with the whole Packt team.
Q. What are your favorite tech journals? How do you keep yourself up to date on tech?
Ashish: I mostly read blogs and articles.
Q. How would you describe your author journey with Packt? Would you recommend Packt to aspiring authors?
Ashish: It was hectic and pandemic made it worse at times. I planned to go by the schedule agreed with the Packt team. They were kind enough to understand delay in submissions.
Q. How did you organize, plan, and prioritize your work and write the book ? Packt to aspiring authors?
Ashish: It was hectic and pandemic made it worse at times. I planned to go by the schedule agreed with the Packt team. They were kind enough to understand delay in submissions.
Q. What is that one writing tip that you found most crucial and would like to share with aspiring authors?
Ashish: Write daily and make it a habit.
