How I over-engineered my book

A new post from ben.balter.com · Read it on the web →import BookCta from ’../../components/BookCta.astro’; My book has a linter that yells at me for hyphenating “open source.”1 It runs ~5,500 automated checks, rebuilds five formats on every git push, and fails the build if I so much as imply I still work at a job I left. For a book. That one person wrote. I didn’t set out to do this. Most people start a writing project by firing up Word or Google Docs, and I started down that same path. I even tried some purpose-built authoring tools, but every tool felt inferior to the ones I used as a developer every day. I did “the only reasonable” thing and threw all of them out, writing the whole book on Git, Markdown, and a CI build pipeline. If you’ve read how I over-engineered my home network — twice — none of this will surprise you. I’ve been making websites for decades, so the leap was short: the same tools that build websites could build books, no last-minute magic-trick reveal required to…