I'm happy to report that the rough draft of The JHipster Mini-Book has been finished! I completed it on Friday, October 9. I meant to blog about it last week, but never found the time. When I finished, the book weighed in at 125 pages. Since then, I've been working with the tech and copy editors to fix bugs, improve grammar and add tips. Today it's around 130 pages.
I wanted to write a real-world application for this book. After passing some ideas back and forth with Julien Dubois, founder of JHipster, and Dennis Sharpe, a technical editor for this book, I decided on an app I'd been wanting to develop for a while. Here's an excerpt from the book.
It's basically an app that you can use to monitor your health. In late September through mid-October 2014, I'd done a sugar detox during which I stopped eating sugar, started exercising regularly, and stopped drinking alcohol. I'd had high blood pressure for over 10 years and was on blood-pressure medication at the time. During the first week of the detox, I ran out of blood-pressure medication. Since a new prescription required a doctor visit, I decided I'd wait until after the detox to get it. After three weeks, not only did I lose 15 pounds, but my blood pressure was at normal levels!
Before I started the detox, I came up with a 21-point system to see how healthy I was being each week. Its rules were simple: you can earn up to three points per day for the following reasons:
- If you eat healthy, you get a point. Otherwise, zero.
- If you exercise, you get a point.
- If you don't drink alcohol, you get a point.
I was surprised to find I got eight points the first week I used this system. During the detox, I got 16 points the first week, 20 the second, and 21 the third. Before the detox, I thought eating healthy meant eating anything except fast food. After the detox, I realized that eating healthy for me meant eating no sugar. I'm also a big lover of craft beer, so I modified the alcohol rule to allow two healthier alcohol drinks (like a greyhound or red wine) per day.
My goal is to earn 15 points per week. I find that if I get more, I'll likely lose weight and have good blood pressure. If I get fewer than 15, I risk getting sick. I've been tracking my health like this since September 2014. I've lost 30 pounds and my blood pressure has returned to and maintained normal levels. I haven't had good blood pressure since my early 20s, so this has been a life changer for me.
You can read more about my sugar detox experience in The 21-Day Sugar Detox. Today, I'm proud to announce you can find the app I built, 21-Points Health, at www.21-points.com. I've been using it for a couple months now and it's been cool to see the 30-day trailing charts of my health. The week I finished the book, I'm proud to say I achieved 20 points! You can see a screenshot of that week's points and the charts below.
When will the book be published?
There's a bit more copy editing to do, and then it's onto layout and publishing. To make it easier to publish
updates for the book, I'm trying to customize the PDF output from Asciidoctor to look like an InfoQ Mini-Book. This involves configuring
custom styles for different sections, which I haven't figured out how to do yet.
Update: I'm happy to report that I figured out how to customize Asciidoctor PDF. I also learned how to customize Asciidoctor EPUB3 so the book's headers look better in that format.