This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.

It has been two years since my first book, Deep Learning Illustrated, was published. The years I spent writing the book were filled with persistent darkness and anxiety.

I had a sense of dread that when readers got their hands on the book, they would find catastrophic errors or humiliating gaps in my writing. I feared that some unidentified issue or collection of issues with the book would be so massive that the book would be perceived as a joke or that I would be perceived as a fraud. (I've learned since that such fears are common amongst authors, particularly whilst penning their first book.)