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I've always been impressed by how much you focus on developer experience for your projects Alex. Bravo! Could you say more about why you decided to make this a

I've always been impressed by how much you focus on developer experience for your projects Alex. Bravo! Could you say more about why you decided to make this and your experience using Gumroad?

alexellisuk 6y ago
Hi Mark, this book is based upon faasd - probably the easiest and cheapest way to self-host functions whilst still being able to get the usual things like metrics, queueing (async) and most of the features of OpenFaaS. I wrote this guide because the audience for faasd isn't the same person that builds their own Kubernetes clusters at work, and runs them with a team of 10 SREs. It's for folks who want to stand up a few endpoints quickly and integrate and automate their workflows. Scrape webpages, generate social banners, filter Tweets using code instead of the crappy rules on IFTTT. Build an Alexa skill or home assistant in their home network on a Raspberry Pi. Scraping with faasd is much faster than Lambda - I wrote a blog post on that, and also much easier to deploy. It's worth trying both to compare. I've used Gumroad in the past to sell OpenFaaS merchandise, and I have to say print-on-demand integrates much better with Shopify. Gumroad does excel at collecting the right amount of taxes on eBooks - which Shopify cannot do, so this is one of the reasons for picking them. There's also a lot of Indie Hacker types who have had success self-publishing on Gumroad, so I thought I'd put my first ebook up there. With this first edition there's 44-pages of labs, advice and experience that you cannot get in the openfaas/faasd docs, and I want to see if I can generate value for users that way. It's a bit of a test for market fit. Alex
- mrmrcoleman 6y ago
  Thanks for the thorough answer Alex. I look forward to reading and hope this experiment works out.
  - alexellisuk 6y ago
    eBooks are relatively new to me - especially the tactics used by Indie Hackers to package and promote them. I'm learning a lot about that, but technical writing and tutorials is my forte. I hope I can bridge the gap and start giving more value to users, and support my open source work at the same time. It's only a couple of hours in and I've seen a sale on every tier offered!

I've always been impressed by how much you focus on developer experience for your projects Alex. Bravo! Could you say more about why you decided to make this and your experience using Gumroad?

alexellisuk 6y ago

Hi Mark, this book is based upon faasd - probably the easiest and cheapest way to self-host functions whilst still being able to get the usual things like metrics, queueing (async) and most of the features of OpenFaaS. I wrote this guide because the audience for faasd isn't the same person that builds their own Kubernetes clusters at work, and runs them with a team of 10 SREs. It's for folks who want to stand up a few endpoints quickly and integrate and automate their workflows. Scrape webpages, generate social banners, filter Tweets using code instead of the crappy rules on IFTTT. Build an Alexa skill or home assistant in their home network on a Raspberry Pi. Scraping with faasd is much faster than Lambda - I wrote a blog post on that, and also much easier to deploy. It's worth trying both to compare. I've used Gumroad in the past to sell OpenFaaS merchandise, and I have to say print-on-demand integrates much better with Shopify. Gumroad does excel at collecting the right amount of taxes on eBooks - which Shopify cannot do, so this is one of the reasons for picking them. There's also a lot of Indie Hacker types who have had success self-publishing on Gumroad, so I thought I'd put my first ebook up there. With this first edition there's 44-pages of labs, advice and experience that you cannot get in the openfaas/faasd docs, and I want to see if I can generate value for users that way. It's a bit of a test for market fit. Alex

mrmrcoleman 6y ago
Thanks for the thorough answer Alex. I look forward to reading and hope this experiment works out.
- alexellisuk 6y ago
  eBooks are relatively new to me - especially the tactics used by Indie Hackers to package and promote them. I'm learning a lot about that, but technical writing and tutorials is my forte. I hope I can bridge the gap and start giving more value to users, and support my open source work at the same time. It's only a couple of hours in and I've seen a sale on every tier offered!