Here we are, another week later. Again, a few days have passed since I’ve published my last update on the book and shared some thoughts on inclusive pricing.

Since I’ve published that update, I’ve made some substantial progress. Overall, I consider the first six chapters of the book to be pretty close to “done” now.

A pretty big refactoring of the sample application made me rewrite a massive chunk of the chapters that guide the reader through implementing the sample application and writing tests against it. IIRC, I closed the lid of my laptop Sunday evening around 11:30pm with a slight sense of satisfaction.

A lot of hours went into refactoring and building the foundation to perform proper unit and integration testing in the context of the sample application without having the reader jumping forth and back between chapters and code segments.

I spent early morning hours working on the book before I switched my personal laptop for the work device. Working on the book with a fresh cup of coffee while others are still enjoying their well-deserved sleep ended up being way more productive than trying to push through late-night sessions.

Illustrations

Before I started working on the manuscript of the book, I did some expectation management with myself. I consider being brutally honest from the very beginning to be often underestimated. My plan was - and still is - to deliver something I could be proud of. A simple wall of text with a bunch of code blocks would not lead to a success given those expectations. Like every tech book, mine would also need some sort of illustrations. Knowing that my primary distribution format is going to be either PDF or ePUB, I sat down and started experimenting with different color palettes to figure out how they render on regular devices and e-paper-based readers such as the Kindle.

It took me a while, especially because I wanted to keep the primary accent color attached to the topic (the WebAssembly purple had to be part of the color palette). So I ended up with the following color scheme:

Custom Color Palette

All illustrations of the book are using colors from this palette only to ensure a consistent theme is used throughout the entire book. As an example, take the following illustration, which is used in the first part of the book to show the cold-start difference between virtual machines, containers, traditional FaaS, and WebAssembly components:

Cold-Start Comparison

I’ve also tried several tools and approaches for crafting those illustrations. My initial plan was to draw all illustrations manually on the iPad using apps like Procreate. I quickly realized how bad my drawing and sketching capabilities are, so I tried many different SaaS platforms for creating those illustrations. Long story short, I ended up using Figma.

Quick side note: At some point, I thought about creating all the illustrations in portrait mode. Although that would be beneficial when reading the book on devices like the Kindle, I went back to landscape format. It felt somewhat alien to create tech illustrations in portrait. Maybe that’s something I will change shortly before releasing the book, but for now I roll with traditional landscape illustrations.