About the Guest

Baron is the CTO and founder of VividCortex, the best way to see what your production database servers are doing. Baron has written a lot of open source software, and several books including High Performance MySQL. He’s focused his career on learning and teaching about scalability, performance, and observability of systems generally (including the view that teams are systems and culture influences their performance), and databases specifically.

Links Referenced

• xaprb.com 
• High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, and Replication
• eBook: DevOps for the Database
• @xaprb
• VividCortex

Transcript

Mike Julian: This is the Real World DevOps podcast and I'm your host Mike Julian. I'm setting out to meet the most interesting people doing awesome work in the world of DevOps, from the creators of your favorite tools to the organizers of amazing conferences, from the authors of great books to fantastic public speakers. I want to introduce you to the most interesting people I can find.

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Mike Julian: Hi folks. I'm Mike Julian, your host of the Real World DevOps podcast. My guest this week is Baron Schwartz, the founder and CTO of Vivid Cortex and author of a book that I'm sure many of you have laying around, High Performance MySQL. Welcome to the show Baron.

Baron Schwartz: Thanks Mike. Great to be here.

Mike Julian: Baron some years ago, well, I also started writing a book in like 2015, I guess it was, 2016. And you've written a lot about your writing and I mean you are a very prolific writer on your blog, having also written the tome of High Performance MySQL.

Baron Schwartz: Maybe too much of a tome. Yeah.

Mike Julian: Right. It is a pretty sizable book. And I found this article that you had written about how you wrote, which I found absolutely fascinating. One of the pieces of advice I saw that I've used and have been regurgitating to everyone. How do you write the book while you outline? You start with an outline and then you keep outlining. And you keep and keep and keep on outlining until you're at the point where you should feel like you've stopped outlining long ago and then outline some more. Yeah, just a little bit more after that.

I thought that was incredibly insightful advice because most people, they do stop jotting down thoughts a bit too early.

Baron Schwartz: Yeah. I should use that advice myself. Every time I do it, I'm really happy with the results. The truth is I don't always, and then I'm like, "Why is this so hard?" It's just because I'm just slogging through not having outlined and now I've got ... So for folks who are not going to read this blog post, which I assume will be a lot of our listeners, the general idea that led me to try this approach was actually writing the second edition. So the blog post that you're talking about was written after the third edition of High Performance MySQL. And the second edition was an absolutely horrendous amount of work. I know because I used a timekeeping app and I basically spent like a half a year on it. So it was more than a thousand hours of really hard work.

And then afterwards I looked at what was most of that time spent doing and most of it was actually spent editing things that turned into pros too soon because pros has to have correct grammar. And if you don't feel right about the order of the ideas in a paragraph and you start fussing with it, then the grammar gets mucked up when you're sort of dragging things around or whatever. And so you try and fix that, but you're polishing something that is structurally bad and to fix it, you end up having to go back and restructure it and then re-edit it. But if you're re-editing for grammar and flow and everything the whole time, it's just an insane amount of work.

So the third edition, I did using mostly the outlining style that you're talking about, mostly after several years of having just collected notes, which is a part of the writing process that's largely invisible, just like filling files full of one bullet point URLs or quick little one liners or whatever. And I took that stuff, I sort of decomposed the second edition into its component parts, restructured it, put in the stuff that I wanted to update or new material, and then outlined and wrote. And the third edition was about 300 hours of work. Although it was a complete rewrite of the book and made it much larger. So it was a lot more material and a lot more accomplishment with a heck of a lot less work.

Mike Julian: Yeah. When I first started writing mine, I did actually start tracking time and then I stopped doing it after a while on the advice of one of the editors of the first edition of a friend of mine, Derek Balling, he gave me a piece of advice that do not ever under any circumstances, attempt to calculate your hourly rate of writing a book.

Baron Schwartz: Excellent advice. Yeah. If you do the math, what you end up earning from a book is almost always depressing in purely economic terms. However, I will say it's been a huge ... well, there's a couple of things. High Performance MySQL has been unusually best selling for a technical book and very few books ever strike gold that way, which is purely a function of just circumstances and luck and things like that. So I think if I calculated my hourly rate, it wouldn't be depressing, but that's-

Mike Julian: It would also just not be awesome.

Baron Schwartz: Yeah. It still wouldn't be awesome. But it's been good to get the royalty checks every now and then, which most authors never get. They never pay back their advances. And that's part of the publishing role. But yeah, even if you do, it's still ... But there's also a lot that you can't just reduce to an hourly rate about the benefits of writing a book, not only for example, the book lives on, and carries to many audiences, and reach as many people, and touches many lives that you never would have in other ways and that comes back and is very rewarding. People write me on a fairly regular basis and say something. I met with somebody a couple of months ago and he said, "I have to thank you for making me a millionaire." I said, "Well, can I get a finder's fee? Just 1%."

Mike Julian: Oh, wouldn't that be nice. It's always wild to me when I get the notifications that, "H...