Episode
SE Radio 695: Dave Thomas on Building eBooks Infrastructure
- Published
- Nov 19, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 3769
- Processing state
failed- Canonical source
- https://se-radio.net/2025/11/se-radio-695-dave-thomas-on-building-ebooks-infrastructure/
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Summary
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.