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> found myself teaching other nuclear, mechanical, and electrical engineers these tools again and again, This is the very essence of teaching. You must have

> found myself teaching other nuclear, mechanical, and electrical engineers these tools again and again, This is the very essence of teaching. You must have something worth passing down. Something you have personally built-up, found valuable and can speak authoritatively on (the same root word as "author") That means "principles not products". In my experience only FOSS tools are stable enough for this to even be a possibility. Most proprietary products have very little worth passing down, because they change every six months, which they have to do to keep making money. > so I wanted to package them into book form. In the end, it's a > fairly eclectic set of topics. Like many technical authors, the first book I wrote started out as a book for myself, just a collection of notes to remind me, then to use to teach others, and finally to release as a guide for complete strangers. > You'll find full HTML, PDF and ePub versions (all built with Sphinx) at the link. Thank you (and on behalf of future students)

ozim 3y ago
Nitpick. Proprietary tools don’t have to change to keep earning money. They need to change to earn more money and grow profits. No one is investing in company that makes stable income and doesn’t have potential to grow 10x or 100x.
fragmede 3y ago
> Most proprietary products have very little worth passing down, because they change every six months, which they have to do to keep making money. I, too, got annoyed when Microsoft Office introduced the ribbon interface and moved everything around, but that's ridiculous. Entire industries standardize around proprietary software packages. Photoshop, Autocad, Resolume, Avid, Matlab, After Effects. Just because some stuff gets moved around doesn't mean people can't teach classes on how to do things with that tool. The screenshots just get outdated so you update the materials and keep on teaching.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  Yes I'll grant there are some stable proprietary products. Those that get dubbed "industry standard" are fixed in place because breaking things would lead to a huge revolt of paying customers. And, to be fair there are Free Open Source applications that are chaotic - forever being forked and losing maintainers or having petty internal political spats. But I think the comment below us by ozim nails it better; that there's a commercial incentive to keep changing stuff just for it's own sake, to lend the appearance of adding value.

ozim 3y ago

Nitpick. Proprietary tools don’t have to change to keep earning money. They need to change to earn more money and grow profits. No one is investing in company that makes stable income and doesn’t have potential to grow 10x or 100x.

fragmede 3y ago

> Most proprietary products have very little worth passing down, because they change every six months, which they have to do to keep making money. I, too, got annoyed when Microsoft Office introduced the ribbon interface and moved everything around, but that's ridiculous. Entire industries standardize around proprietary software packages. Photoshop, Autocad, Resolume, Avid, Matlab, After Effects. Just because some stuff gets moved around doesn't mean people can't teach classes on how to do things with that tool. The screenshots just get outdated so you update the materials and keep on teaching.

nonrandomstring 3y ago
Yes I'll grant there are some stable proprietary products. Those that get dubbed "industry standard" are fixed in place because breaking things would lead to a huge revolt of paying customers. And, to be fair there are Free Open Source applications that are chaotic - forever being forked and losing maintainers or having petty internal political spats. But I think the comment below us by ozim nails it better; that there's a commercial incentive to keep changing stuff just for it's own sake, to lend the appearance of adding value.