Meredeth Patterson (maradydd)1 commented on the preface to “Plumbing for the Arduino”:
This is how you write an introduction that makes people care about what your project does. This is how you take a specialty solution, heretofore useful to and understandable by only people who already understood process algebra and the pi-calculus, and present it as another tool for people’s toolboxes right alongside hammers and screwdrivers. If you want to drive a nail, get a hammer; if you want to do parallel tasks in real-time, get occam-π.
The hard thing about giving your work away is not knowing whether it has value. I know there are bugs in the book (Zoro Feigl already found one…), and I know it can be improved. That’s the nice thing about getting it out there for people to use—they can push back, and we can improve our software and our text.
And that really makes me feel good.
There’s a few other people who found our project in the past week or so and started exploring it. I’ll point to those over the next couple of days. The early adopters—people exploring something new—really are exciting to work with. You can see learning taking place as well as more work piling up, because you now know you’ve got more things to improve and more documentation to write. (I happen to think that’s a good thing.)
You have to pronounce “maradydd” in the Welsh. ↩