Tales from the jar side: A Groovy Podcast, Marketing my new book, and Reader feedback
Dad joke I ran out of room to include: I recently started a dating app for chickens. It's not my normal day job. It's just to make hens meet.
Welcome, jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of June 6 - 13, 2021. This week I taught a course on What’s New In Java on the O’Reilly Learning Platform and a course called Beyond Managing Your Manager as an NFJS Virtual Workshop. I also recorded a Groovy Podcast, with co-host Sergio del Amo this time.
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Feelin’ Groovy
I always enjoy making a new edition of the Groovy Podcast. You’d think I’d do it more often, but the pace of change in the Groovy ecosystem isn’t all that high anymore, and scheduling is always an issue. It turns out that my regular co-host, Baruch Sadogursky, is taking a very European-like vacation, meaning he’s out of touch for several weeks if not months.
I therefore reached out to Sergio del Amo, who is a good guy and:
Is a member of the technical staff at OCI, who funds development on the Grails and Micronaut projects, and some work on Groovy itself as well,
Has (or rather had) his own podcast which died after a few posts,
Also has (but seemingly had) an excellent newsletter called Groovy Calamari, which is on its own extended hiatus, and yet
Loves to give us a hard time when too much time goes by between Groovy podcasts.
Yeah, irony is not dead, so he agreed to be on the podcast. I tried to use YouTube Live for the podcast, but apparently there’s no way to add a presenter to that. Or, if there is, I still haven’t found it. Therefore we started over with a Zoom call, which I then uploaded to both YouTube and Podbean. Here’s our regular announcement, from the groovypodcast Twitter feed I set up long ago:
Here’s the actual YouTube video. I wish I hadn’t said anything about it being Part 2, given that we pretty much ignored the attempt at a Part 1, but if you have essentially zero production values, that’s what you get sometimes:
The show notes, as always are in this GitHub repository. The Podbean people have a dedicated player, and they have a website for our podcasts.
That reminds me that our logo (which I commissioned from my artist friend John Swanson) looks like this:
Cute, right? That’s based on the Duke mascot from the Java world, with the added mic, headphones, and Groovy logo. It still makes me smile. :)
We have literally tens of listeners, so maybe we should get onto a more regular schedule again. I hope to do that now that my book Help Your Boss Help You has gone into production (more about that below).
By sheer coincidence (maybe?), a day after we did our podcast I got an email from an obvious spammer that looked like this:
Oookay. Good news? I guess? I chose to publicize it this way:
Marketing Is A Thing
This week Help Your Boss Help You went into the actual production process. From what I understand, in a week or so I’ll get the pages back from the copy editor and will have to fix whatever they find. That reminds me of what is apparently known as Gaiman’s Law, which Neil Gaiman himself tweeted in response to a post by J. Michael Straczynski:
So there’s that. Anyway, I’ll fix all the issues found by the copyeditor, and then apparently there will be feedback from a layout editor, which I’ll have to approve without making any text changes, and then it’s time to be printed.
According to the editor I talked to last week, that means the book may actually exist in physical form by the end of July. Whoa.
While I’m very excited to see the book in print, I’m also mentally preparing myself for a certain level of disappointment. This book may involve ideas I’ve been revising and processing for nearly a decade and formulated over an entire career, but it’s only about 150 pages long. The first time I hold one in my hand, I’ll be surprised by how thin it is.
Back in 2013, my first book, Making Java Groovy, came out just in time for the SpringOne 2GX conference that year. I had the publisher (Manning) send a box of them to the conference so I could give them out to attendees. Even though according to the website that book is 368 pages, I couldn’t help feeling shocked at how thin it was. It’s hard not to think, “Five years of my life, and this is it? What took so long?” That’s probably as extreme a case of judging a book by it’s cover (or, in this case, its thickness) I can imagine. And my new book is half that length. Sigh.
While Manning cared somewhat about marketing, and the O’Reilly people largely acted like marketing is a good idea that somebody else ought to handle, the people at the Pragmatic Bookshelf really, really care about it. Their author’s guide and associated author wiki have multiple pages on everything from Amazon pages (and videos!) to setting up book signing events to GoodReads and more.
My favorite quote in the entire Author’s Guide is this one, about arranging for a book signing event at your local bookstore:
The dirty little secret is that no one, and I repeat no one, will show up. If you get a half-dozen to a dozen curious then you’ve done well. Nevertheless, you should do it anyway. Why? Because your name and book will get promoted in the conference literature, in the bookstore’s ads, and so on. You can tweet and blog it. It gets your name out there for the event, even if the event itself is largely ignored.
I’m hoping they won’t mind that I’m adding that quote to this newsletter, but it’s great and incredibly insightful. I’m trying to decide now whether I should contact my local Barnes and Noble or my local independent bookstore, which is River Bend Bookshop in Glastonbury, CT. Maybe both. I guess it will depend on how well I can handle nobody being there or caring, but at least I’ve been warned.
Hey, I just searched for my name on the River Bend Bookshop website, and my book is in fact available for pre-order. I presume that’s the same info that you can find on Amazon’s pre-order page as well:
The release date says October 5, but I as I mentioned above I think it will be out before the end of July. Also, from that page I now know what subcategory Amazon thinks my book falls in: Books -> Business & Money -> Business Culture. Makes as much sense as any. At the River Bend site, they put it in the categories “Management - General”, “Business Communications - General” and “Business Ethics”. Hmm. I have questions, but I suppose those work too.
I mentioned in an earlier newsletter that I talked to the awe-inspiring Johanna Rothman about a month ago. She strongly advised me to get onto some podcasts, and was kind enough to give me a referral to the Engineering Culture podcast from InfoQ. I had a nice talk with Shane Hastie, the host, over the weekend. They actually care about production values, however, so that episode won’t be available until the end of the summer. I’ll mention it when it arrives.
(BTW, time zones are such a thing. The host for that podcast lives in New Zealand, which is GMT+12, and I’m in Connecticut, currently GMT-4 while we’re on daylight saving time. We had the interview early evening my time, which was early morning the next day for him.)
Another thing I’m planning is to write a few short blog posts for Medium. Not Medium, exactly, but rather the The Pragmatic Programmers publication there. I’m going to try to write a series of short posts for that publication and see how it goes. Again, I’ll mention those here when they are ready.
To conclude this section, let me just say that it didn’t take long for me to be completely overwhelmed with tasks and goals and resources and more, at which point I put it all aside. That reminds me of one my favorite tweets this week:
I’ll try to take all these new activities in some moderation and see how they go.
I Got Feedback
Last week’s newsletter actually resulted in a few readers contacting me. Interestingly enough, each contact was about a different issue. One person (Hi John!) had some thoughts about the “I got this” and “I got your back” messages discussed in the book. He’s like me, in that he’s an independent trainer and deals with clients, which is related to having a manager in a company but with some differences as well. Unless I misunderstood him (possible, but hopefully not), I pretty much agreed with everything he said. My answers were more fleshed out in the book itself, but my comments about company culture seemed to resonate with him.
I’m really glad he contact me, mostly because he’s a friend and maybe we’ll actually be able to get together again sometime. We’ll see.
Another person contacted me about the example I used about property-based testing in jqwik. First, he reminded me that the author of that framework is Johannes Link, whose website has much more information about that type of testing.
He also really liked the tool I use to embed code here and in presentations. Here’s an example from from my Java Latest GitHub repository:
The tool I use is called Codye and it’s great. I was very happy to buy the app and I use it more than I thought I would.
Finally, after publishing this newsletter every week for nearly two and a half years, I finally got my first rage quit! Remember how I told the story about the guy condemned to be executed by the king who argues that given a year he’ll teach the king’s horse to talk? His reasoning is that now he has a year, and a lot can happen in a year: he may die, or the king may die, or the horse may talk.
Last week I applied that story to Facebook’s banning of Trump for two years, and included the line:
The company may die, or Trump may die, or Trump supporters will lie and claim the horse is chatting up a storm, because they lie about everything else so why not that?
That’s the sort of edgy comment jarheads subscribe here to read, right? Apparently, not everybody. One person interpreted that to imply that I was accusing them of lying (?) because they were a Trump supporter and honest about it, and after sending me comments in every way possible, they supposedly unsubscribed.
It took me a while to figure out exactly what they were upset about, but I get it now. I’ll just say this in response: No, I don’t think you’re lying and I’m sorry if you thought I meant that. I may think you’re clueless, foolish, disconnected from reality, hate US democracy and are eager to see it destroyed, and (on a related note) possibly even stupid beyond belief, but no, I don’t think you’re lying.
BTW, the best ever non-apology apology I ever saw on TV took place in The Closer, season 1, episode 13, Standards and Practices. Here it is:
Best moment of the whole first season. My wife and I look forward to it every time.
I’m hitting my email length limit now, so I’ll just wrap this up and say that I’ll see you all (or rather whoever is left after the next round of rage quits) next time.
As a reminder, you can see all my upcoming training courses on the O’Reilly Learning Platform here and all the upcoming NFJS Virtual Workshops here.
Last week:
What’s New In Java, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Beyond Managing Your Manager, an NFJS Virtual Workshop
This week:
Basic Android Development, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform