Taiji Hagino is the author of Practical Node-RED Programming, we got the chance to sit down with him and find out more about his experience of writing with Packt.
Q: What is/are your specialist tech area(s)?
Taiji: Mobile, Web, IoT, Blockchain
Q: How did you become an author for Packt? Tell us about your journey. What was your motivation for writing this book?
Taiji: Packt guy contacted me to become to the author of Node-RED tech book. I am recognized as one of leaders of Node-RED Japan User Community, and often talk about Node-RED at some conferences. So it is natural to become the author this time for me.
Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?
Taiji: I’ve leading Node-RED User Group Japan since 2015, and often contributing Node-RED project. So these activities are a kind of research of Node-RED, I think.
Q: Did you face any challenges during the writing process? How did you overcome them?
Taiji: It was hard to write how to make the flow (application for Node-RED) with IBM Cloud services. Because, Node-RED open source project and IBM Cloud services are changing services very fast, such as version up, sunset, and something like that.
Q: What’s your take on the technologies discussed in the book? Where do you see these technologies heading in the future?
Taiji: This technology ‘Node-RED’ is one of popular no-code/low-code programing tool. In the market for software developers, these days no-code/low-code approach is getting popular. So I believe that Node-RED will become the standard these kind of tools.
Q: Why should readers choose this book over others already on the market? How would you differentiate your book from its competition?
Taiji: Actually, there are not lot of technical books for Node-RED. It might be Japan is most popular for Node-RED, but we have few books of Node-RED in Japan. This book probabry be the first case worldwide for learning Node-RED basic and advanced tutorials.
Q. What are the key takeaways you want readers to come away from the book with?
Taiji: Actually, there are not lot of technical books for Node-RED. It might be Japan is most popular for Node-RED, but we have few books of Node-RED in Japan. This book probabry be the first case worldwide for learning Node-RED basic and advanced tutorials.
Q. What advice would you give to readers learning tech? Do you have any top tips?
Taiji: Let’s try to use any tools, languages, platforms you want to learn! That’s all!
Q. Do you have a blog that readers can follow?
Taiji: https://taiponrock.medium.com/ Here’s my blog, but almost articles I wrote are written in Japanese.
Q. Can you share any blogs, websites and forums to help readers gain a holistic view of the tech they are learning?
Taiji: Yes, also in this book has the same contents such as introducing forum, community, etc as an appendix at the end of it. Node-RED Forum https://discourse.nodered.org/ Node-RED Mailing List (only archives) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/node-red
Q. How would you describe your author journey with Packt? Would you recommend Packt to aspiring authors?
Taiji: It’s great experience for me as Japanese. I have ever published my books for only Japan. So I strongly recommend to collaborate with Packt for the people who want to write books!
Q. Do you belong to any tech community groups?
Taiji: Yes, the communities I belong to are below: Node-RED User Group Japan https://nodered.jp/ Node-RED Slack Community (Global) https://nodered.org/slack
Q. What are your favorite tech journals? How do you keep yourself up to date on tech?
Taiji: Mainly Japan tech website for me, but sometimes checking Tech Crunch, GDNet, and so on.
Q. How did you organize, plan, and prioritize your work and write the book?
Taiji: When I start to write this book, I was a developer advocate for IBM Cloud including OSS. So it was natural to plan to write this book with my main work.
You can find Taiji’s book on Amazon by following this link: Please click here
