It’s text-debt.

1. It took me two tries to realize there is more than the table of contents and find the Unlabeled links on the left. Just make the text in the TOC clickable.

2. Maybe text navigation didn't work the first time because I did not select the correct option on the popup about interaction. This is a distraction from reading irrespective of what I picked.

3. Advice: make the reading experience work like readers expect. There are conventions. Trying to be clever doesn't benefit your readers...and will annoy at least one of them.

4. Nobody likes popups. Nobody. Nobody.

Good luck.

That means I can't find an interesting chapter, and just blindly picking one leaves me with a stream of consciousness to sort through.

I don't get the sense that this is coherent enough to be the book or guide people expect. It really does feel like a collection of loose blog posts. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you change how this is presented.

If you want to tell stories that's fine, but don't then organize this as if each chapter is a lesson. That's misleading because there's not enough conceptual meat on the bones there. Organize the chapters by the stories you want to tell, not by the concepts you hope the reader sees in them.

Distilling and organizing the knowledge you think you have in your blog posts would mean an entire rewrite of this book and more careful analysis than just labeling each as its own chapter and adding a few sentences to fill gaps. The book people want would probably be 10% narrative and 90% instructional. This is 100% narrative in its current form.

https://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Michael-Fe...

Honest question expecting your honest response. How much of it's written by AI? Recently, I noticed I am liking thoughts of real people over the super structured, emdash-y, zero grammar mistake AI texts.

I want to support authors who share their experiences, rather than guiding AI to write thoughts

I once wrote a book (about 400 pages, after editing). No one read it, and rightly so. It covered a topic in a preachy, dictatorial manner. It’s long buried in a deep, unmarked grave, in the desert.

It was accurate, well-written, well-structured, relevant, and useful, but assumed a tone that was pure poison. It was aimed at an audience that did not respond well to the tone.

It was extremely valuable education for me, though. My mother was a scientific editor, and edited the book. It was brutal, and quite humbling, but her work ensured that the book was absolutely perfect. I don’t think I’ve ever shipped anything as close to [unpopular] perfection as that book.

Even though I have never been particularly interested in writing book-length stuff, since then, I continue writing to this day[0]. Here’s the latest thing I did (released a few days ago)[1]. I don’t really write for others; I write for myself.

Good luck.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/

[1] https://littlegreenviper.com/series/passkeys/

[EDITED TO ADD] I typically get some downvotes, when I link to my postings. Long ago, I favorited a comment that I made, explaining this[2]. I don’t expect anyone to actually read it before hitting the down arrow, but I figured that I’d add it here, for elucidation.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860143

You seem to be writing about other concepts and just redefining them as tech debt.

I left more detail in comments, but if I had purchased this book I would be seeking a refund, because I would be expecting a detailed exploration of technical debt, not just a focus on bad coding practice.