Learning Susy Update Is Going To Be Delayed

I mentioned that Learning Susy will be updated with more content by 31st January. Unfortunately, I’m afraid I have to disappoint. I’m sorry.

Letting you down sucks, but it just doesn’t feel right to apologize and shrug it off. I want to be honest about my failures and learnings to make sure that I won’t fail to deliver again. Hence, the reason for this blog post.

UPDATE: The new Learning Susy Book is now live at http://learnsusy.zellwk.com.

Why I Failed

The very reason why I failed to deliver the update was because I set the date to 31st January tentatively. I have already set myself up for failure with the word tentative.

Because the date wasn’t fixed in stone, I had the possibility of postponing whenever I need to. That gave me too much wriggle room to play around with.

I gave in to my fears of doing interviews and screencasts because I have never done those before. I’m afraid the interview will turn out to be shit. I got paralyzed so much with fear that and I didn’t even dare to draft the questions I for my interviewees.

And because the date wasn’t fixed in stone, I was able to rationalize that something else in my life was more important and urgent right now. I shifted house recently and I’m planning to get married in February. I allowed my marriage to be the convenient excuse to run away from my fears.

That is why I have failed this time.

How I Can Do Better

Failing to commit to the date I declared breaks my integrity and makes me feel like shit. I have also realized other parts of my life falling into shambles just because of this one decision.

The guilt, shame and regret I had from this episode fueled my fears and my avoidance. I ran away from what I was supposed to do. I even ran away from posting new content onto this blog.

Ironically, I have failed terribly in the planning of my marriage as well even though it was my excuse for not writing the book.

I learnt that every commitment I make is not to be taken lightly. Breaking more and more commitments to myself eventually breaks my own trust in myself, and I must never let that happen.

So in future, I will deliver everything that I say I will deliver by the date I said I am going to deliver. All my commitments will be set in stone so I don’t wriggle my way out of them.

After apologizing and making these commitments, allow me to give you an update on the status of the book, and also when I will deliver.

The Progress

I realized that there was more work to be done as I was working through the book chapters. The language was horrible and contained numerous passive voices that make the book difficult to understand.

Chapters also started to get disorganized right after chapter 7. There were many duplicated mentions that signaled a lack of proper planning in the book.

Since I’m going through this again, I wanted the book to be the best reflection of my current ability and that resulted in almost a full rewrite and reorganization of the book.

The table of contents now look like this:

1. Introduction
2. Installing Susy and creating your first project
3. The Scss syntax
4. Understanding the Susy map
5. Creating your first layout
6. Understanding Susy context
7. Creating a complex layout (part 1)
8. Creating a complex layout (part 2)
9. Learning to write mobile-first Media Queries
10. Learning to create responsive breakpoints
11. Understanding the Susy grid background
12. Building a responsive website
13. Understanding gutter positions
14. Understanding the Isolate Technique
15. Creating an asymmetric layout (part 1)
16. Creating an asymmetric layout (part 2)
17. Other useful Susy map settings
18. Other useful Susy functions or mixins

Chapters 1 - 15 are now complete and ready to be shipped anytime.

I also mentioned templates for the premium package of the book, but didn’t go further than that. Here is a breakdown of what templates to expect:

1. How to make a sticky sidebar
2. How to make gutter-less grids
3. How to make static-width grids
4. How to make off-canvas layouts
5. How to make non-responsive grids
6. How to make grids with square blocks
7. How to make magic grids (old Susy 1 grid)
8. How to make self-adjusting grids with Susy
9. How to make a grid where items a floated “center”
10. How to use more than one Susy layout on the same page
11. How to change gutter settings on different layouts on the same page
12. How to use different grid layout settings with different breakpoints

I’m also mentioned that I will record videos for building 5 different websites with Susy in the full package. I’m currently out of ideas on what sites to use for these screencast and it’ll be great if you let me know what sites you like to see featured :)

Conclusion

I learnt a hard lesson from this failure and the importance of keeping to my word. I have failed and I’m sorry for not being able to deliver.

I’m going to be completely honest with you and let you know that I’m not able to commit to a delivery date right now. I can promise you that this update is definitely going to happen, but I need to direct all my attention to fulfilling my promises to my partner regarding the wedding first.

Right after that is cleared, I will come back to this book and I will give you a date that I will deliver.

Hope that’s cool with you.