How I over-engineered my book
Summary
Ben Balter details how he over-engineered a book project by treating it as a software project: storing content in Markdown in a Git repo, running thousands of automated checks, and building using a Pandoc pipeline. The approach includes a real-time and CI test suite, a CSS/HTML-to-format pipeline, Lua filters, and a reproducible toolchain in containers, all aimed at ensuring consistency across EPUB, Kindle, print, and web formats. The article also reflects on the trade-offs and lessons from applying developer practices to publishing.