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I am avid movie buff. For training, I would highly recommend reading Story by Robert McKee and look up information on how to do script coverage. There are plenty of information on that. I am happy to answer in more detail through email. saby83 at gmail

A small bit of feedback - The only issue I have with this style is offline reading: I tend to print every webpage I'm interested in to PDF files for offline reference. Story Glass doesn't really work very well for that - the PDF I got was not formatted and not usable.

I used it years ago and as a machine-based software I'd likely agree. I seem to remember trying to load it again and seeing it wasn't freeware, or had a 30 day trial. Might be a distorted recollection, but I was looking quite intensely before selecting Story Writer. Even like Word .dot files for formatting. Nice to see competition in the space, IMO.

Story by Robert McKee seems to be the classic.
The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne looks promising as well, though I haven't finished it yet.

Story Dice - iOS / Android app for young writers

http://thinkamingo.com/story-dice/

My field (programming) has been well covered so I'll share books about my side-field, writing.

- On Writing - Stephen King

- Bird by Bird - Anne Lamott

- Story - Robert McKee (screenwriting)

- Do the work - Stephen Pressfield (he's more famous for The War of Art but I haven't actually read that one yet)

Also there are some great blogs out there

- Terrible Minds by Chuck Wendig

- The Creative Penn - Joanna Penn

- Mary Robinette Kowal's blog

- John August (screenwriting)

Robert McKee wrote an incredibly famous book called, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting [1]. I've had multiple people stop me on the street as I was carrying it and remark of how great a book it was. It should answer most of your questions.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Story-Substance-Structure-Principles-...

Ugh. Let's talk about media.

Commercially speaking, media has one goal - procuring eyeballs. Just because eyeballs aren't fixated on a particular story doesn't make it sad, it just means it's not a compelling story.

So why is WhatsApp a compelling story?

1. Broke conventions - company only had 55 employees and valued at $19b. This isn't normal for us. A telecommunication company selling for $9.5b makes sense.

2. Story of triumph - the founder of WhatsApp was "from a small village in Ukraine". You can't get any more American than this my friends.

You see, America is quite possibly the greatest marketing engine in the world. This is what separates itself from the rest of the world. We are engrained story tellers, not because of some magical gene inherited, but rather because we know good stories sell well.

Unbroken - Laura Hillenbrand.
Story of human grit and survival in the Pacific WWII theater that I hadn't heard of before. I was blown away by the story, and about what I learned about the War that I didn't already know.

Creativity Inc. Re-read it this year, re-inspired.

The Outsider - Stephen King.
Well written, engrossing but a typical Stephen King novel

Shoe Dog - Phil Knight.
Story of Nike. Phenomenal.

Bad blood - John Carreyrou.
Story of Theranos. Absolutely crazy read.

7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy - Hamilton Helmer.
Good insights on strategy

I have no shame in saying that the MySQLgame was definitely part of the inspiration for the Schemaverse, my own little SQL project.

There are some main platform differences, as many have pointed out, but those who like one of the other generally fit into one of these two reasons:

1) Botting/AI vs Human Interaction only - When people started writing bots to play MySQLGame, others seemed to get furious. If you want to do well in the Schemaverse, you likely have to write some form of AI at some point, either in SQL or any other platform you wish.

2) Story vs no Story - People who like MySQLgame really appreciate the fact that the story is simply the numbers. I think that does make for a pretty unique game on its own, even outside of the SQL aspect of things. The Schemaverse is a space battle.

Shameless plug, if SQL games interest you and you will be at DEFCON 21 in Las Vegas this year, there will be another Schemaverse championship. Start getting ready now and it will take up very little of your conference time but you could win some great prizes and sweet sweet SQL game street-cred. https://forum.defcon.org/forumdisplay.php?f=690 for more information

Most writers knows about the different kind of plots and structures, the problem is that the market wants and expect a specific type and writers needs to eat.

If you are interested in story structures I recommend this books
-Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting bt Robert McKee
-Invisible Ink: A Practical Guide to Building Stories that Resonate by Brian McDonald

They are both easy to train if you have trainers who are thinking about it as craft. That being said, if you are working in the technology field, you are more likely to work with individuals who actively learned engineering but passively learned writing.

Alternative example: early on in my career, I was a software developer for a PR agency and then a news organization after that. At these organizations, solid writing and editing is drilled just as much as good code review or test coverage is taught in engineering organizations. Their lunch-and-learn sessions aren't about new JavaScript frameworks; they analyze how a particular piece of text was created and find ways to improve it.

My single largest "level-up" in this domain was when I started reading more on character creation in fiction. It forced me to think about how I'm telling stories, which then meant I had to think about how I constructed paragraphs, which then... you get the idea. Some great books I read:

- Robert McKee's "Story," which analyzes how great screenwriting is constructed. You will view action movies in a totally different way after this.

- Corbett's "The Art of Character," which focuses on how characters are created

- Roman/Raphaelson's business writing book, which was recommended by PR legend David Ogilvy

- the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff manuals (https://www.jcs.mil/Library/CJCS-Manuals/). These are rigidly structured texts with strange language that forced me to consider writing for a different audience than I normally would (military officers versus tech engineers)

- "Rationality: From AI to Zombies" - probably the most influential book I've read in my life, profoundly changed the way I think. It's a collection of LessWrong essays on science and rationality.

- "On Intelligence" and "I am a Strange Loop" - how mind works.

- "Rework", "Zero to One", "Start Small, Stay Small" - insightful startup advice.

- Fun autobiographies: Ghost in the Wires (Kevin Mitnick), iWoz (Steve Wozniak), Catch me if you can (Frank Abagnale), Just for Fun (Linus Torvalds), Elon Musk, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

- How companies work: Creativity Inc (Pixar), In the Plex (Google)

- On writing: Art of fiction/nonfiction by Ayn Rand, Story by Robert McKee, Save the Cat, Step by Step to Standup Comedy.

- Other: The Selfish Gene, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Serious Creativity, Hackers & Painters, Hacking Growth, Angel (on angel investing, by Jason Calacanis).

Also collections of essays by Paul Graham [1] and Scott Alexander [2]:

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/2no0sqybnxurpcd/Paul%20Graham%20-%...

[2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/i43lqpdyd4qa255/The%20Library%20of...

For someone who didn't read at all for the longest and started a couple of years back, I'm glad I read 20 books this year. Here are the few that stuck with me -

Bad Blood (John Carreyrou) - Story of Theranos, its founders and the conception of terrible ideas. Great record of their actions based on subjective ethics and morals, how they can lead you to going insane.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking (Susan Cain) - Fun read for functional introverts like myself.

Stuff Matters (Mark Miodownik) - I wish every science lesson is taught like this

Em and the Big Hoon (Naresh Fernandes) - Fiction, but based closely on the author's mother, her control over the English language, poetry and the mental illness' control over her and their family here in Bombay.

Born a Crime (Trevor Noah) - A biography of the Daily Show host. He's seen a lot of terrible situations and come out unscathed!

Being Mortal (Atul Gawande) - Hospice care - all its good and bad.

A Man Called Ove - Fictional and funny book about a man with a strict code, who lost his beloved wife and still dislikes everyone.

These might be too difficult but just for fun here are some ideas for mostly backend.

Personal Music Tracker - You can get new music ideas by scraping content from a community radio station playlist like KCMP (https://www.thecurrent.org/playlist). Run it against a personal database of songs you already know and have the system send you a daily/weekly/monthly list of songs you haven't heard. It's fun to build.

Phone Proxy - Set up a disposable number for yourself on Twilio that will proxy incoming calls against a whitelist of approved numbers. You could do Twilio Studio to build an IVR that prompts the caller to press one to route the call. If they stay on the line you could do fun stuff like transfer to an It's Lenny server or something. It's not difficult to program and will teach you about some phone technology.

IoT Blog Reader - Follow blogs that you like and have them read to you via common IoT devices like Alexa/Google Home. Like an RSS reader but built for speech. Use an RSS reader to pull articles, run transcriptions of the articles with trained ML TTS models, and store the data with SQL. De-dupe the transcriptions based on URL. Use pre configured ML models for text to speech like AWS Polly or GCP Wavenet. Probably way too hard...

TextToSpeech for books - Upload a book. Get emailed the audio transcription. Use pre trained ML models for TTS conversion. Maybe use a SASS company like mailgun for the email part so you can just focus on extracting text from different file formats? Could start with plain text files initially.

Story Point Estimation - Use ML (or basic statistics) to estimate how long JIRA tasks or projects will take to complete. Use a general corpus of data to train an ML model, then feed it a team's data so it can adapt accordingly. There are some whitepapers on it like https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.00489.pdf but you could look around for easier statistics algorithms to use instead so it's easier to build.

Technically, that book was not "self-published," rather it was published by my company, breadpig (which also publishes xkcd, SMBC, and some other fun things like Story War!).

If you're inspired, you can buy the book here: http://breadpig.com/products/to-be-or-not-to-be

It'll be available in bookstores nationwide soon enough!

I've been trying to think through something called Story-So-Far which is supposed to be an IDE plugin which logs user keystrokes with timestamps and saves it to a local file .ssf . This file should be replay-able in the IDE which essentially means other developers can literally see how the software was made by the original author. This aims to replace tutorials and also increase open source contributions once you see for yourself how the software was written. I know there are security risks involved. But one problem at a time. Haven't started on the actual implementation yet.

I use Goodreads to post my reviews of books I've read.

But I'm looking for a way to post reviews for individual short stories found online or in fiction magazines, anthologies, etc. The reviews should automagically pop up whenever the story appears in any other place. But I haven't found any sites that does this.

For example, I read and review Story X in anthology Y. If the story appears or appeared online at Z, printed in magazine F, etc, my review for it also appears if I look it up there.

Looking for recommendations for sites that do this.

I read Story by Robert McKee after I read The Story Grid and I found Shawn's explanations and descriptions more precise and to the point than Robert's. I also really like how Shawn, for the most part, uses a single story (The Silence of the Lambs) in his examples and how he keeps going back to it. Using a single story, I felt, helped me better grasp the context of each example and allowed me to 'grow' with the dissection of the entire story. The grid itself was also extremely useful as it provided me with a framework, a cheat sheet that I could reference at any time to understand where I was in his overall analysis of the story.

Most of them are really good. Here's a partial list of the ones I've enjoyed:

- Machiavelli in Context (probably the best course of theirs I've listened to)

- Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity

- Conquest of the Americas

- Early Middle Ages, High Middle Ages (same lecturer--one of the best)

- Foundations of Western Civilization I and II

- History of Ancient Rome

- Birth of the Modern Mind

- Story of Human Language

- History of Science from Antiquity to 1700

  > The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne is an absolute must-read

I just read it. Story, by Robert McKee, is much better. All the useful insights in The Story Grid are lifted from Story. To Shawn Coyne's credit, he credits McKee. But he lifts a lot and presents it less clearly.

The things that aren't lifted from Story, like the grid itself, are less useful. Some things, like the labyrinthine requirements he trots out for genres, are harmful.