People occasionally ask me why I haven't written a book about JIRA. I wrote Practical Development Environments for O'Reilly a few years ago and enjoyed doing so. I have lots of ideas for what would make a good book about JIRA. So what's the problem? Well, here's the gist of a reply I sent to a publisher recently:
I'd love to write that book! My problem is that I don't want to spend a year working 8pm to 2am for minimal pay. That's horribly destructive to family life. Nowadays I'm in a consulting position where I could probably do it as a day job in around 6 months, but who's going to pay me to do that? Atlassian might consider it taking it on as marketing expense but my understanding is that what it would cost them is far larger than what they might ever expect to make.My sense is that technical books are created because their authors felt "it just needed doing" or "because it's there", but not for rational financial reasons. Yet if this blog ends up containing a useful number of articles I wouldn't object to publishing them as a book.
Yup, Its certainly there to be done but the effort involved is huge, and payback, to be honest, not huge. If I ever win the lottery and dont need to work for a living, perhaps we can scratch that itch, the subject is huge, and ever changing :)
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