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scottlamblast Monday at 6:48 PM1 replyview on HN

> Certainly <umm> a book I wrote about the state of computing in the early 2010s--largely derived from things I had written over a few prior years--was hopelessly out of date within just a few years.

I could see it being obsolete quickly to the extent that when someone was trying to learn devops and saw a book on the (virtual) shelf that didn't cover containers next to one that did, they'd pick the latter every time. You probably saw this in your sales tanking. But I'm not sure many of the words you actually did write became wrong or unimportant either. That's what I mean by additive. And in the context of a CS program, even if their students were trying out these algorithms with ridiculously out-of-date, turn-of-the-century tools like CVS, they'd still have something that works, as opposed to fumbling because they have no concept of how to manage their computing environment.


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ghafflast Monday at 6:58 PM

I didn't care about sales :-) It was free and I did a couple of book-signings at sponsored conferences that other people paid for. A lot of the historical content remained accurate but the going-forward trajectory shifted a lot.

The way DevOps evolved was sort of a mess anyway but welcome to tech.

I sort of agree more broadly but I can also see a lot of students rolling their eyes at using outdated tools which is probably less the case in other disciplines.

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