Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Python concurrency has a super bad wrap (the gil) and I'm trying to help out even change opinions (e.g. work with it rather than throw it all out).

I write short focused how-to ebooks that on the different Python concurrency APIs in stdlib. Content marketing leads to email marketing to one-off sales. Doing about $2K/mo. Might expand into third party libs this year.

https://SuperFastPython.com



Congratulations for your side project! Probably quite similar to you, I'm also a PhD guy that uses Python for quite some time, and I've been lately interested in starting a side project like yours (courses, tutorials, books, etc.).

I see that you are mostly focused in processes/threads/etc., which is quite an interesting niche (for me, I teach those things in a Operating Systems class). It seems rather risky to pursue a niche as it may be too small! Do you have any tips, like why did you decide to focus on multiprocessing/multithreading? Also, any other Python niches that you think are valuable to focus (for courses, ebooks and tutorials like you do)?

I'm really interested in establishing myself an an online "educator", but I still do not know which kind of topics I should aim to. If I focus on introductory topics there's too much competition. If I focus on a too small niche, I may have no "spectators". Any tips would be greatly welcomed! :)


Thanks.

I chose the niche because 1) it was small, 2) underserved, and 3) because it was misunderstood.

It was a risk, sure, but it is a side project - a place for risks. No overthinking required. Plan, work, review.

I believe you could do the same thing for many modules in the python standard lib or most popular third party libraries. Python docs everywhere are not helpful and newer dev's think it's their fault. Help them. Serve.

Consider: "would o’reilly write a book on the module/lib?" If not, you can stake out a monopoly. If so, then there's probably already cashflow there and you can join them.

Hmm. I think of my self as a collaborator not an educator, if that helps. A peer that has a few more years (decades) in pointing some stuff out with working code examples.


Just wanted to say thanks for your work on SuperFastPython - it helped me out a bunch at work recently (new to Python concurrency) - and also for your previous work at MachineLearningMastery (helped me out with a university project a few years back).


You're very welcome, I'm happy to hear that! Thank you for the kind words and support. Message/email me any time if you ever have any questions, I'm eager to help.


Great to hear. How did you "get the word out" about your content? Was it mostly inbound?


Good SEO for the tutorials which rank well in the SERPs. Competition was mostly blog spam compared to my hand-crafted human (me) written stuff. Took ~6 months to escape the sandbox.

Then massive "complete guide" posts on major topics like "multiprocessing" "threading" and "asyncio" that rank well in the SERPs and did okay to well on /r/python.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: