From Code to Kindle: How I "Hacked" the Reading Challenge

Published on January 26, 2026

Usually, this blog is about memory management, pointers, and my interpreter jdBasic. But this week, I applied my developer mindset to a completely different problem: The Gamification of Reading.

We live in a world of progress bars. As developers, we know exactly how these work—we build them. But I noticed that even in my downtime, I was stressing over my "Books Read" statistic in my reading app. I was optimizing for the metric, not the enjoyment. In software engineering, we call this Goodhart's Law.

The Project: The +n Series

Instead of just complaining about it, I decided to "patch" the system. I wrote a satirical book series designed to act as a "Cheat Code" for annual reading goals. I treated the book creation process like a software deployment pipeline:

Core Logic: The content focuses on the psychology of "completionism," "sunk cost fallacy," and "opportunity costs."
Localization (i18n): I used LLMs to "transcreate" the German originals into American English (planned for later).
Deployment: Used Kindle Create to generate the binaries and deployed via Amazon KDP (German Market).

The Release Notes (Changelog)

The first three versions are now live on Amazon.de (Deployed), with the final patches coming in Q2 (April):

Das +1 Buch (v1.0): The panic button. A quick read to hit your target. [Status: Live]
Das +2 Buch (v2.0): A Dopamine Detox. Addressing the addiction to the "check" mark. [Status: Live]
Das +3 Buch (v3.0): For the "Completionists" and digital hoarders. [Status: Live]
Das +4 Buch (v4.0): The "Refund." A short book to balance out that 1000-page epic you read. [Coming: April 2026]
Das +5 Buch (v5.0): The "Inflation Adjustment" to keep up with that one friend who reads 100 mysteries a year. [Coming: April 2026]

Conclusion

It was a fascinating experiment in Social Engineering via KDP. It proves that whether it's code or prose, understanding the underlying algorithm (in this case, human psychology + Amazon's ranking system) is key.

Now, back to fixing bugs in the SOUND.SEQ module of jdBasic.