Publishing the first ebook in Leanpub
I’m a big fan of Leanpub, If you want to start writing your book and don’t want to follow the rigorous (although necessary) process of working with a publisher, Leanpub becomes a great option.
Following the lean principles, the fundamental idea of this tool is that you can publish often as many times a day as needed, you only focus on the creative thinking process of writing and they do the rest.
The editor itself is based on markdown, a great markup language for writing content. It keeps things simple, it gives you the essential tools to get the job done. I have experienced that when a tool gives too many options for the end-user, it makes it more complex to get things done.
Last year I worked on very interesting security projects and in my role as a Security Engineer, I had to work building hardened container images to meet heavily regulated environments.
As I was working with other Security Engineers in the process, we agreed that state-of-the-art of container image scanning is still evolving, and the tooling itself is aligned to simply matching a running version of a library against an open database of vulnerabilities. In principle this approach is interesting, but as I elaborated in the book, it has its drawbacks.
Initially, I wanted to write this ebook as a Medium article; there is some weird beauty in this editor that makes the content look clean and simple. However, there are fundamentally two reasons why I choose Leanpub:
- I’m reading a good book called Show Your Work from Austin Kleon, and it recommends to start showing the work that you do in the background.
- I’m preparing myself to write a larger book, so making mistakes with short write-ups that can be distributed as ebooks are a great practice.
Lastly, being a native Spanish speaker poses really interesting challenges at the time of expressing written ideas in another language. I face that challenge every single day, yet I decide to write and that makes a difference.
If you are interested on reading the ebook please visit https://leanpub.com/containers-security-scanning-thegood-thebad-andtheugly.
