By The Numbers

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

So what next for Software Carpentry? One possibility is to turn the scripts for the episodes, the examples, and the diagrams in the slides into a book. Let's crunch some numbers to see how feasible that is:

Topics	24
...mostly done (say, 80%)	18
...not even started	6
Words per topic	5,000
Words to write	48,000
Words per day	1,500
Days required	32
Editing, diagrams, etc.	×2
Total days	64
Code complete	July 15, 2011

That completion date assumes I start this coming Monday (April 11, 2011). The schedule assumes a 5-day rather than a 7-day week, but that's because the longer hours would actually be less productive (see Evan Robinson's "Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work" for a summary of the research). 1500 finished words per day, and the factor of two for editing and diagrams, are both based on my experience with several previous books, so there's not much give there.

Unfortunately, mid-July two and a half months past the end of my funding. So close, and yet so far...