A small firm made by international freelancers permanently living in the sunny island of Phuket (South of Thailand). dp – Phulet Web Design, (also known as digital print) has an assortment of creative people to count on and takes care of a wide spectrum of projects that encompass the front end design and development for websites, the design of logos and graphics and also audio and video editing.

Download Tech Kids: Understanding Technology by Daniele Pais

1.) First of all tell us a bit about yourself, we know that you have just wrote an e-book and that is why you are here today on this interview, but what about you as Daniele the real person behind the book, and what do you do in life?

Sure. First thanks for having me here today, it is a privilege for me and it feels great. As for who I am in life, I’d like to call myself a “Digital Designer”, more than anything else as I do a lot of different design related works always on my PC, online, on a local machine and anyway these are obviously “digital” as they reside in the ether for the most part. You could probably argue that I am a “freelancer” as I do not work for a specific employer but I sell my services in the realm of web and graphic design business, but, I personally do not normally use that term a for some clients or potential clients the term “Freelancer” implies that you do that particular job as one off, or you have a main job and in your spare time you do that. Which is not my case. I am at my desk for at least 10 hours almost everyday.

2.) What elements and/or characteristics made you say to yourself that you wanted to write this e-book?

It all started when my daughter was about 7 years old, at that time we used to live in London – United Kingdom and I started to teach her the very basics of computing, we also used to do about one or two hours per week in coding, mainly HTML / CSS. When interacting with my daughter and her friends I had noticed that despite this new generations of kids are very much integrated in the digital world, their knowledge lack in the understanding of the hardware and how this interacts with the software that we run on everyday PC and other devices. From there I have started to take notes every now and then and I would jot them down in a notepad until one day that notepad was full and that is when I decided to go digital and made this e-book that we have today.

To answer to your question, I did not write it to make a living, I have contacted several non profit organizations here in Thailand and offered the e-book for free. A few of them have accepted the offer. That is already a a great achievement, if the e-book can help, especially people in need, that’s all it counts. To be honest we have listed the e book in Amazon so that if we do sell a few copies every now and then we can at least repay for the research, editing, design and all the time we have put into it.

3.) Why write a book? You have been writing on blogs every now and then for quite sometime. What made you choose to take the jump and go into something so much more challenging than just blogging?

This question may seem very simple or easy to digest now, but in reality I did not ask it to myself at the time I decided I wanted to write the book, and honestly, I don’t think I would have known how to give a clear and honest answer. Today I can say that answering the question “Why do you write?” it means determining what your goal is in writing. So as for me, writing is my passion, I cannot do without, I feel in a certain sense “called” to this task.

I love reading other people’s books and listening to podcasts, eventually I have developed the idea of writing my own book. I love the fact that writing is a solitary act, that in order to write I have to isolate myself, concentrate, maybe have a little place all for myself that makes me feel like a “writer”. I love to immerse myself in the stories I write.

4.) To write a book of this kind you need to sit down and do quite an extensive research, read, compare, verify. What part of this chain have you found to be the most challenging and why?

The book must be pleasant for both the reader and the writer. Unlike a novel, an e-book like this is consumed in a short time, but this does not mean that it can afford to be inconclusive, uninteresting or superficially treated. Many books by great writers have gone down in history. If you are not passionate about the topic that you are writing, it is very likely that the book will also not intrigue the reader. So to answer to your question, when writing about computers to an audience that can span from 7 years old to the late teens you have to find the right recipe in order to avoid being too technical and to allow you to write in a way that doesn’t look as if you are lecturing the reader. Still you need to report important facts that indeed contain loads of technical stuff in it. So a good balance of simplicity and “human readable” content is what you want.

5.) If you could give a bit of advice to anyone who is starting now on writing books what would it be?

To use a nautical metaphor, whoever wants to write a book is like a sailor who is about to set sail. If he leaves without knowing where he wants to go or without inquiring about the weather report, in the best case he will take a stroll off the coast, keeping sight of the coast and then return to the port; in the worst case it will go too far, lose orientation and drift around. In some rare cases, with luck winds, it will arrive in a new port. If he knows where he wants to go, he can set the helm, wait for the best wind to leave, and settle the route on the way.