Books I've Written
I've written five books. They're currently all available here: Thomas Hunter II's Books on Amazon Author Central
Backbone.js Application Development
I've always been into technical writing and had amassed a few hundred blog posts by the time Packt reached out to me with a proposal. For that project they had a table of contents and a title already picked out and it was up to me to fill in the content. That project was Backbone.js Application Development in 2013. While it wasn't the best writing experience, involving emailing a Microsoft Word document back and forth, it certainly kicked off my love of book writing.
Consumer Centric API Design
For my second book I wanted something that was based on concrete code and more based on higher level ideas and best practice. I also wanted to publish a book using LaTeX and wanted complete control of design and distribution. That turned into my second book, Consumer Centric API Design in 2014. This one was self published and while copies are available for sale online it's also open source. Sales sucked.
Advanced Microservices
I completely revamped the content from my second book and added a few new chapters and removed some fluff and started shopping around for a publisher. Essentially I had a completely finished book, still written in LaTeX, and a PDF export. This became my third book, Advanced Microservices in 2017. Apress took the PDF that I provided, copied and pasted it into their templating system, did some editing, and called it a day.
Distributed Systems with Node.js
For most of this time my real love was building Node.js services. But ironically I hadn't written a book on it. I wanted to take all of the knowledge that I had gained in the area and create a book about it. I also wanted to get published by O'Reilly. So this time I filled out a copy of their book proposal form, filled in the table of contents I was planning on using, and provided a lofty anticipated page count. They accepted the idea and this became Distributed Systems with Node.js in 2020. Weighing in at 350 pages I consider this my magnum opus.
Multithreaded JavaScript
While still on the high of a published O'Reilly book I wanted to make another one, and for whatever reason I thought it was a good idea to start a new book without taking much time off from the last one. I knew the perfect title, and all I knew was that I wanted to write a lot less content than with my previous one. So I pitched the title to my good colleague Bryan English and we worked on a table of contents. O'Reilly picked it up, we set out heads down to writing, and this became Multithreaded JavaScript in 2021.
Thomas Hunter II is a staff Software Engineer with 18+ years building scalable, production-grade systems. Deep expertise in Node.js, observability, and developer tooling, with a strong track record of driving architectural decisions, mentoring engineers, and improving customer facing technical documentation. Author of 5 books (including O'Reilly), certified by the OpenJS Foundation, and frequent international conference speaker. Passionate about delivering reliable, maintainable software at scale.
