C# Smorgasbord is now Free

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 02 Apr 2018

C# Smorgasbord was first published on July 30, 2012 and was the start of something that I certainly could not have anticipated. At the time I had barely started doing any public speaking at all, nor had I been around the world to lots of interesting conferences.

What initially sparked the idea of writing a book, was when I applied for a job at Spotify, which I didn't get. Just like many others I've always had a hard time proving my skills during interviews, especially when having to code in notepad. As I felt sad having lost the opportunity to work for an extremely interesting company, something sparked inside me, I wanted to prove, not to others, but to myself that I was in fact pretty good at what I do.

As I started to look over the material that I had already produced, and thinking about how I could best put this into a better format, the idea of a smorgasbord came into mind. I had a lot of different topics spread across different formats and being a Swede, it felt rather natural collecting lots of different things and serving it to your friends and family.

I reached out to a few publishing companies and pitched my idea, a few of them liked it and wanted to proceed, but I finally decided: I want to do it all on my own. Which is why I decided to self-publish with CreateSpace (Amazon). I didn't really do it on my own though, I really couldn't have. I had so much great support not only from my beloved partner, Sofie, but from friends and family. I had countless of friends helping me with reviewing content and giving me great ideas. I had friends help me with graphics and covers and finally I had something ready to publish!

After the book was published, I certainly felt a lot more confident. Having worked countless of hours, probably more than 1000-1500 hours on the book, I certainly felt like I had to continue spreading my knowledge. Which lead me into a lot more public speaking!

I did mention that the book opened for a lot of opportunities, and it certainly did. Soon after having published the book, I had the pleasure to meet up with Pluralsight, as they coincidentally were in town for a conference. We started to chat about my book, and my goals, and soon thereafter I produced my first course: MSIL for the C# Developer!

Writing the book, producing courses for Pluralsight, doing a fair bit of public speaking got me the MVP Award, and when attending the first MVP Summit, I met a really nice fellow from a place called Readify in Australia, which lead me to apply for a job on the other side of the world.

The rest is history.

Being turned down from a job isn't always a bad thing, I certainly got loads of energy from it, after being sad for a while, which changed the course of my career.

It's now almost 6 years since I published the book, and during these 6 years I've travelled the world, lived in a different continent, and I'm now the father of a beautiful daughter; my journey has just begun.

To celebrate all the above, I'd like to give everyone C# Smorgasbord for free, you can still purchase the paperback copy, or buy me coffee if we're ever in the same city!