This series of article rambles about the book I’ve written, Building Your Mouseless Development Environment.

1. Building A Book 01 - A Story
2. Building A Book 02 - Interest, Passion, and Work
3. Building A Book 03 - Idea and Maturation
4. Building A Book 04 - Fear and Success
5. Building A Book 05 - Strategy
6. Building A Book 06 - Marketing
7. Building A Book 07 - Fun, Fear, Pain, and Accomplishment

Still here for the third part of my rambling about the book I’ve written, Building Your Mouseless Development Environment? You’re not only courageous, but you also have a lot of patience. You’ll go far in life, my friend.

The Million Dollar Idea

It’s end 2019. We were all young and innocent at the time, full of hope and dreams.

At that point, my development environment was entirely based on Arch Linux (by the way). My whole software development workflow was centered around the Linux shell. Let’s call it my Mouseless Development Environment. With capital letters, ‘cause it’s my baby, you know.

Before that, I used Windows (from 98 to 7), Ubuntu, Peppermint (a Linux distro based on Ubuntu), other Linux distro I forgot the names, and even MacOS.

When some colleagues showed me the power of this Mouseless Development Environment, I didn’t believe that they could work with these horrible, old, and unpractical stuff. Then, I tried it. Seriously tried it.

I’ve been hooked since then.

So, end of 2019, I had an idea. I asked on the Holy Reddit: “Hey brothers! Peace to you all! Is anybody interested to have a book describing how to create this Mouseless Development Environment, based on Arch Linux, Zsh, Vim, and Tmux?”

The answer: a big YES. It was easy, I was on the “command line” subreddit. To me, it was enough. I’ll write this book!

Travelling

I was speaking about dreams earlier. My biggest one at the time: travelling in Asia. For months.

If I stay at home, I’ll work on my 12093210879123 side projects, focused like a laser. Travelling is the only thing which push me to unfocus, to get creative again. But the most important: I love travelling, I love Asia, and I love to love. I could write a whole poem about it, but I think I shouldn’t, for humanity’s sake.

We came up with a plan, my girlfriend and me:

1. Quit our jobs.
2. Go backpacking in Asia for 4 to 6 months.

I planned to write the book when I’d come back.

We left Berlin, where we live, in January 2020, and you know what comes next: our good old friend COVID hit. Hard.

Pandemic!

We decided to come back in March 2020, because of the pandemic. All the borders in Europe were closing at that point. The only problem: we didn’t have a flat in Berlin anymore, because we were subleasing it till June.

We managed, somehow, to find a temporary place to live for a few months. It’s not like you can get a flat in Berlin super easily; we were lucky.

No job, no way to finish our travel, no way to come back to our flat, with only my immortal Lenovo x220 laptop I was carrying around in Asia, some clothes, and a COVID which could kill us all. That was my situation beginning 2020.

What a great time to write a book!

First, I had to decide what tools I’d used to build the book itself. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy:

• Vim
• Pandoc
• Make

I knew Vim, not so much Pandoc, even less Make, and I had no idea about Latex. I could have written the entire book in Markdown, but since I like to shape everything according to my craziest megalomaniac desires, I had to scribble some Latex, and more than once.

But I could do everything in my shell, and that’s what matter. Gimme a shell and I’m happy.

And, you know, I’m on a computer for a long time. Okay, time is relative, but still. It didn’t take me long to have a first setup to create a PDF, an EPUB, and even an HTML in one command line. BAM!

I don’t try to know everything. There is too much stuff. But I try to be able to learn anything quickly. It’s the whole goal of The Valuable Dev, too.

Anyway. That was the birth of my book!

Luck, Luck, Luck, and Success

All and all, I was incredibly lucky.

I wasn’t alone, we found a flat quickly when we had to (I never saw such a mess in airports, with so many flight cancelled), I didn’t get COVID to this day (as far as I know), I could keep a positive spirit enabling me to write a book in a dark period, I’m living in a rich country, and I’m a privileged white male. It’s not winning a lottery, it’s winning a dozen of them.

I take that as a success.

So, what’s success? Mostly luck. Of course, luck can be slightly helped: I love what I’m doing, so I do it long enough to get some fruits from the tree.

But there is a difference between my rational thinking above and my feelings. These freaking emotions do whatever the hell they want in my weird brain. I didn’t let them take over, however, and that’s what really mattered. Years of meditation help. It can help you too. Or something else. Find what help you.

You know. Try. Experiment. Fail. Learn. Try again.

Or just relax. We need to relax, sometimes. For me, it’s travelling, or writing, or listening to a good vinyl. For you, it might be something else. Be sure it makes you unfocus, though. We can’t spend our time obsessed by what we want. By our goals. We need to unplug. To plug better afterward. Who doesn’t want to plug better?

The western world is so crazy with its quest of results, success, hustling, and productivity. Let’s not forget: enjoying the way, focusing on higher goals, wondering, relaxing. Creating something without any expectations. Helping without expectations.

Relaxing might not be the direct way to achieve what we want, but indirect ways are often the best ways. Life is about the way, anyway. Whatever we do, we’ll try to do better, anyway. We’ll try another way. Way, way, way.

The way is a balance. A balance with enough productivity to make you happy, and enough relaxation to make you happy. Be happy! Now!

If it sounds too complicated, you can buy a hundred of my books and see if it gives you happiness. You can’t tell if you don’t try! Ah! The Ultimate Marketing Strategy™.

Did I have some expectation for this book? One: I would be happy if it would help somebody.

My expectations were blown away hundred of times. Low, honest expectations always win.

Is it success, then?