Everything Open 2026 – Day 3 – Morning

Open source can have friends everywhere by Emma Davidson

  • Large Business Benifit a lot from unpaid open source volenteers
  • But when they burn out unmaintained open source becomes a risk
  • 0.3% of the AUKUS Budget ($1b) would cover 15,000 Open Source software Internships
  • Lots of other stuff in talk but I didn’t really get good notes

Books-As-Code by Alec Clews

  • https://books-as-code.gitlab.io/
  • Main Book “Staying Safe Online” is targetted at Seniors so will be printed and sold in bookshops
  • Start writing your book. Don’t delay
  • Planning and High Level Design
    • Who are your readers?
    • What will you book teach them?
    • How are they going to buy your book?
  • The reader
    • Experience and background
    • Problems
    • How do they consume knowledge ( offline for older people, online for technical readers)
    • Where do they find your book
  • Plan the book content
    • List is ever evolving
    • Just a list of all the comment and topics
    • Ask AI to create a high level outline to get yourself starts rather than a blank page
    • Can use a mind-map to do outline
    • Elevator Pitch. Needed for traditional publisher. Useful for others
  • How Wlll you Write?
    • Capture notes and research
    • Formats to create
      • epub3 for ebooks
      • Prepress PDF for print
      • Display PDF for screen
      • HTML Online
    • Need a toolchain to create
  • Docs as Code
    • Lightweight Text Format – eg Markdown
    • Developer Style workflow
    • Automation
    • Simple Publication tools and platforms
    • This is not new. “The Unix Programming Environment” was done this way in 1984
  • What does Alex use
    • Asciidoctor – supports all the formats. Markdown is not enough
    • M4 pre-processor
    • sed, pandoc, ripgrep, sheel scripts
    • Gnu Make plus scripts
    • Graphics editors. Freeplane, GIMP
  • Writing Style
    • Follow best practices
    • Simple English. Use US English
    • Make content accessible. Alt text, good colours
  • Web vs Books
    • Web is non-linear. Books are not
    • Structure Book for easy-of-use and discovery
  • Create the Best Possible Book
    • You can’t see you own mistakes
  • QA Tools
    • Vale or TextLink style guide
    • Link Checks – lychee
    • epubcheck
    • Unit tests for code examples
    • Ai can review and suggest improvements in text. Gemini Write Extension
  • Human QA Resources
    • Beta Readers. Not all will do a good job. Social networks, local writers group
    • Find professional copy editor service. Will cost $$$
    • Get human editors to raise tickets
    • Update linter to spot previous problems
  • Publishing
    • Check the IP is all good
    • Copyright and License
    • ISBN
    • Legal Deposit
  • Traditional vs Self-publishing
    • Check exact what trad will do. Varies
    • Trans looks good on resume but might sell more
    • They will take more money, will own some rights
    • Never pay a trandional publish. Asking for money indicates a scam
  • Self Publishing
    • Responsibility for everything
    • You need all the skills
    • Keep more of the income
  • Typesetting
    • Consistent style
    • KDP is cheap for preview copies
  • Sales Tools
    • Need Book Description and Back Jacket Blurb. Hook Sentence, clear value proposition
    • Book Cover
      • Self-designed for free book
      • DesignDusk Premade for $200 odd
      • Bespoke is $700+. Consider ROI
    • Keywords and Categories. SEO
  • Kindle Direct Publish – KDP
    • Amazon’s Print on Demand
    • No Distribution to bookstores and libraries
    • Supports ebooks
    • No standard colour printing in Au Market
  • Print and Distribution
    • Looks at other books and genre and size sell for to decide price.
    • Looks at overheads and costs
    • See try.books.by and bookvault.app
    • Ingramspark as POD allows Retails Bookstores
  • Online Marketing and Newsletters
    • Better to create a Book Specific profile on Social media
    • Maybe create a seperate persona
    • Worth the work if you plan multiple books

So You’ve Decided to Build It Yourself by Leesa Ward

  • Definition for “from scratch”
    • WordPress Plugins
    • Anything from a small script to a full plugin or library
  • The Seven Sins
  • Envy
    • Want a feature yourself
    • Or you “assume” your clients really want a feature
    • Focus and what is important. Talk to the client. What is essential.
    • Build things as requested. Don’t spend time making something have options unless client asks for them. At least don’t too early
  • Lust
    • Allow buffer time to explore ideas
    • Or maybe create time outside the project
  • Greed
    • Maybe there are better uses for your time
    • Try create something bit-by-bit rather than a long term project that doesn’t deliver till the end
    • Develop common patterns and conventions
  • Gluttony
    • Sometimes you have to say no
    • Make sure reusable. Automate things. Create change logs and release numbers
  • Sloth
    • Just build the MVP
    • Shipping something that is messy but “just works”
    • Create automation and doc manual steps so you can sorta work with it next time you see it.
    • At least have a decent README file
    • Future is going to forget why you have done something this weird way and if you document it you’ll learn it again the hard way
  • Wrath
    • Frustrated Developers. Was harder than we expected. Other delays. AI gets stuck
    • Add buffer time. Get better at predicting timeline. Communicate well with clients. Don’t rely too much on AI
  • Pride
    • Assuming your way is the best way. Doesn’t document.
    • It’s not about the code it is about solving problems
    • Accept that sometimes things are the way it is. Work with what the company uses and knows
    • Don’t get stuck with sunk-cost if you have gone the wrong way
  • Takeaways
    • Be Proactive in communication
    • Document everything
    • First milestone should be an extensible MVP. Start small but build to grow and build to last
    • Treat all {non personal) projects as those other devs will be using and working on them
  • github.com/doubleedesign
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