Since I usually work as a software engineer, I often read technical books. There are things that are useful at work, and there are things that I want to learn from pure interests about unknown technologies. That is the fun time to read technical books always. Of course, there is no doubt that someone wrote the technical document, but for me it was something that I read, not write. And I thought that I would make use of the knowledge gained there to make a new product and use it for my work.
However, I got the opportunity to write a technical document several times. Moreover, in English.
Table Of Contents
- Surprising News
- Books I involved
- What Technology Gave Me
Surprising News
I am contributing to open source software and I was involved in developing a framework for distributed systems such as Hadoop and Spark. I mainly expanded the distributed file system called HDFS and machine learning library which runs on Spark called MLlib.
About a year after the development continued, an email from a publisher editor called Bleeding Edge Press arrived. She invited me as an author of their new book which would describe Spark internal and use cases.
Although contents were decided beforehand, it was difficult for me to write English book. I’ve been doing it at the level of “just conveying” until now, but I felt that writing a book is somewhat above the level of “conveying something well”. Indeed, there is no book that is merely listing the contents of books published in Japan, and there is a way to make it read properly. In addition to writing English, it is required to write ‘good English’.
Feedback on my draft was often related to expressions and sentences. It points to my error in grammar, vocabulary, generally my poor English. I solved feedback one by one. Regardless of how much I looked into my dictionary, no matter how good proofing tool it is used, there are many strange expressions (even when I am writing in Japanese) It was a good thing that I can receive such indications for my English learning. On the contrary, there is not much to say about the content itself, so I have a little relieved.
Books I Involved
Finally this is the first book I was involved. “Spark: Big Data Cluster Computing in Production
Fortunately, I got several chances to write books continuously. “Professional Hadoop
Last year, I completed to write a book about deep learning technologies running on web browser. “Deep Learning in the Browser
Since I’m so interested in deep learning technology, it was a great experience for me to be involved in writing a book about deep learning and artificial intelligence technology. The involvement in this book was also achieved by my open source contribution to TensorFlow.js. So I realized that technology and the internet itself helps me pursue my dream.
What Technology Gave Me
I wrote several books in this way, but again I was amazed at the progress of technology. Everyone can make up one book without meeting directly from the state of “Nice to meet you”. In modern times there are technologies that enable us to write, review and editing without actually meeting them.
I am somewhat skeptical whether the Internet and its supporting technologies have enriched our lives. It seems that the number of unnecessary advertisement and the misleading fake news has increased every day. Our lives are becoming more complicated.
But it is also a fact that technology can give us a big opportunity especially for the people who think that they will use it well and try it wisely. If it was ten years ago this was impossible. Because of advances in technology and the Internet, it is possible to access global knowledge and to transmit it to the world as our own output. Probably I may be a man who was given the opportunity by technology. Even though my job is to support technology, I am supported by technology itself. I would like to continue to study as a software engineer and continue to support and advance these technologies.
Thanks!