SE Radio 695: Dave Thomas on Building eBooks Infrastructure

SE Radio 695: Dave Thomas on Building eBooks Infrastructure

Author: SE-Radio Team November 19, 2025 Duration: 1:02:49
Dave Thomas, author of The Pragmatic Programmer, The Manifesto for Agile Software Development, Programming Ruby, Agile Web Development with Rails, Programming Elixir, Simplicity, and co-founder of the Pragmatic Bookshelf, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about building infrastructure for eBooks. They discuss what an eBook is, the various formats, what infrastructure is needed to build them, how an author writes an book, the history of the Pragmatic Bookshelf, how they have evolved, how to handle links within eBooks, why humans are so important in the writing process, and why AI can help with your writing -- once you've written your content. Thomas discusses PDFs, eBooks, Mobi files, ePub files, CI/CD pipelines, WYSWYG, Markdown files, Pragmatic Markup Language, embedding code, AI agents, images, printing PDFs, JVMs, Java, jRuby, and how Markdown won the plain text writing format wars. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

For developers who think deeply about their craft, Software Engineering Radio-The Podcast for Professional Software Developers offers a steady, thoughtful conversation about building software. This isn't about chasing headlines or quick tips; it's a deliberate exploration of the principles, patterns, and hard-won insights that define lasting work in the field. The SE-Radio Team creates each episode as original, standalone content, ensuring you get focused depth rather than recycled conference talks. Every ten days, a new installment arrives, alternating between detailed tutorial-style deep dives on specific technologies or methodologies and candid interviews with influential voices and practitioners from across the industry. Tuning in means joining a continuous learning journey where complex topics are broken down with clarity, from system architecture and language design to team dynamics and career development. This podcast serves as a reliable educational archive, a resource you can return to as your experience grows, always anchored in the realities and challenges faced by professional developers every day.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 100

Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers
Podcast Episodes
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