Interview With Author Jacob Oxman
Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I am not a writer by training and I am not a programmer by training. For most of my life I believed that building software was something other people did. I had no degree in it, no course, and no background of any kind. I sat on one idea for two years without writing a single line, because I was waiting to feel ready.
Then artificial intelligence arrived and the wall I had been staring at simply fell over. I started describing what I wanted in plain English, one small piece at a time, and months later I had a working automated system running on its own while I slept. It made money. It lost money. Some months it did nothing at all.
I kept honest records the entire way, and that record became my first book. This is the only one I have written so far.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
How I Turned a Dream Into Code, and Code Into Money. What inspired it was frustration, honestly. Everything I read while I was building was either a tutorial that stopped exactly where the hard part began, or a success story with the losses quietly removed. Nobody wrote down what it actually cost. So I wrote the version I wished someone had handed me before I started, with every real number in it, including the ones I would rather not have published.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I write immediately after something breaks, not after it works. The morning my system lost money was the day I got the clearest pages in the book. If I wait until a problem is comfortably behind me, I sand off exactly the details that would have helped a reader.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
The books that shaped how I write are the ones that show their working rather than their conclusions. I would rather read someone’s build log than their manifesto. That is the standard I tried to hold myself to.
What are you working on now?
I am still running and improving the automated system the book is about, and I am keeping the same kind of honest records on it. Whatever the next book is, it will come out of that log rather than out of a plan.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
So far the thing that has worked best is being genuinely useful in communities where people are building the same kind of thing, and letting the book come up only when it is actually relevant. Direct self-promotion gets removed and ignored, and it deserves to be.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Make the first version absurdly small. Not a book and not a system, but one page, one function, one number printed to the screen. A small finished thing gives you a real problem to solve, and a real problem is something you can actually get help with. A big vague plan gives you nothing to work on.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
That the gap between where you are and where you want to be is almost always smaller than it looks from the outside, and that the only way to find out is to start something too small to fail at.
What are you reading now?
Mostly documentation, forum threads and other people’s build logs. It is not glamorous reading, but it is where the honest details live.
What’s next for you as a writer?
Keep building, keep the records honest, and write the next one only when I have something real to report.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
Something practical I could actually use, something long enough that I would not finish it in a week, and something I have already read once and know is worth a second pass. On an island I would want depth over novelty.
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