Ananya Simlai is the author of Mastering 5G Network Design, Implementation, and Operations we got the chance to sit down with her and find out more about her experience of writing with Packt.
Q: How did you become an author for Packt? Tell us about your journey. What was your motivation for writing this book?
Ananya: I have always taken interest to document my technical endeavors, sometimes in the form of blogs, white-papers, presentations and occasionally in the form of patents. Being an author helped take that a step forward as it gave me a medium to express my ideas better and more elaborately. I believe that I have been fortunate enough to gather rich and extensive experience and knowledge in the Telecom, Cloud and AI/ML space as a part of the various companies I have worked in, it is only fair to share it with others.
Q: What is the name of your book?
Ananya: Mastering 5G Network Design, Implementation, and Operations: A comprehensive guide to understanding, designing, deploying, and managing 5G networks.
Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?
Ananya: I have researched the 3gpp specifications extensively, combined with my experience and learning from building commercial networks from scratch helped with the research. I took around 1-2 months to complete the research as most of it was something I was already experienced on.
Q: What key takeaways do you want readers to come away with from the book?
Ananya: Readers will retain a wholistic understanding of 5G after reading this book. Right from what the technology is about, to the business cases, operations, design and automation.
Q: Can you share any blogs, websites and forums to help readers gain a holistic view of the tech they are learning?
Ananya: Cisco and Google Blogs.
Q. Did you face any challenges during the writing process? How did you overcome them?
Ananya: Most of the challenges were personal. I was pregnant during the entire writing process and completed the book when my daughter was still an infant. So managing time was a challenge.
Q. How would you describe your author journey with Packt? Would you recommend Packt to aspiring authors?
Ananya: The most important learning for me was to keep at it despite the distractions.
Q. Why should readers choose this book over others already on the market? How would you differentiate your book from its competition?
Ananya: This book simplifies the telecom jargons and makes it easy for the reader to retain the concepts.
Q. What is/are your specialist tech area(s)?
Ananya: Telecom, Cloud , AI/ML.
Q. What advice would you give to readers jumping into this technology? Do you have any top tips?
Ananya: It is a great thing to understand telecommunications, not just for technical folks but also for people from various walks of life, reason being there is a lot of potential to be tapped from this technology and entire businesses can be built around it.
Q. What’s your take on the technologies discussed in the book? Where do you see these technologies heading in the future?
Ananya: Telecom is a domain that will remain very relevant for the next few decades, we already see how we are introducing ML/AI in the play. Very interesting times are coming in this space. I am looking forward to contribute in the networks of tomorrow.
Q. How did you organize, plan, and prioritize your work and write the book?
Ananya: It was mostly about deciding on the flow of the book, once that was set, everything else fell in place.
Q. What are your favorite tech journals? How do you keep yourself up to date on tech?
Ananya: My favorite tech journals are Google Blogs on ML/AI and 3GPP/GSMA/ORAN for telco.
Q. Would you like to share your social handles? If so, mention them below.
Ananya: Sure, https://www.linkedin.com/in/ananya-simlai-75a00227/.
Q: What is that one writing tip that you found most crucial and would like to share with aspiring authors?
Ananya: It is very important to keep focused on the goals. One thing that helped me was to keep thinking about the content even when I was doing other routine work, that even helped to get some great ideas..
You can find Ananya’s book on Amazon by following this link: Please click here
