Mohamed Labouardy is the author of Building Distributed Applications in Gin, we got the chance to sit down with him and find out more about his experience of writing with Packt.
Q: What is/are your specialist tech area(s)?
Mohamed: DevOps, Software Engineering, Distributed Applications and System Design.
Q: How did you become an author for Packt? Tell us about your journey. What was your motivation for writing this book?
Mohamed: I have written my first book with Packt (“Hands-On Serverless Applications with Go“) it had a lot of success. So Denim Pinto approached me with this book idea. I have used Gin in production before and was one of the main contributor to the framework so I decided to jump in.
Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?
Mohamed: Almost two months preparing the outline and hands-on exercises/workshops.
Q: Did you face any challenges during the writing process? How did you overcome them?
Mohamed: I am a CTO & Co-founder of promising tech startup, and hence finding a balance between working on the book and launching a new startup was quite a task. I had to set daily and weekly deadlines for myself and followed through as much as I could with minimal disruptions.
Q: What’s your take on the technologies discussed in the book? Where do you see these technologies heading in the future?
Mohamed: Gin is currently one of the fastest growing and most used web framework.
Q: Why should readers choose this book over others already on the market? How would you differentiate your book from its competition?
Mohamed: The book is a hands-on guide for Go developers to build, deploy and scale distributed applications with the Gin framework.
Q. What are the key takeaways you want readers to come away from the book with?
Mohamed: The book will be the reader best companion in building scalable web applications with Gin framework.
Q. What advice would you give to readers learning tech? Do you have any top tips?
Mohamed: Have a couple of side projects on the go and keep trying to exercise what you have learned in the side projects. Also, make sure to keep yourself to date as technology is a constant change.
Q. Do you have a blog that readers can follow?
Mohamed: My weekly newsletter: https://devopsbulletin.com.
Q. Can you share any blogs, websites and forums to help readers gain a holistic view of the tech they are learning?
Mohamed: The official documentation can be a good start: https://gin-gonic.com/docs/
Q. How would you describe your author journey with Packt? Would you recommend Packt to aspiring authors?
Mohamed: The process was smooth and the reviewers gave great feedback and insights. I would definitely recommend Packt to aspiring authors.
Q. What are your favorite tech journals? How do you keep yourself up to date on tech?
Mohamed: Usually a multi-Reddit I composed within bunch of tech sub-reddits with an emphasis on Golang and Cloud.
Q. How did you organize, plan, and prioritize your work and write the book?
Mohamed: We setup a schedule with deadlines for the chapters. After that I made sure to work with the book in smaller chunks every day, continuously in order to avoid falling behind.
Q. What is that one writing tip that you found most crucial and would like to share with aspiring authors?
Mohamed: Write often. I won’t go so far as to say you have to write every day, but I do think you need to make this a part of the texture of your life, something that you do on a regular basis, like a workout schedule.
You can find Mohamed’s book on Amazon by following this link click.
