Tales from the jar side: Android codelabs, Older employees working for younger managers, and Yes, sometimes I'm a cat
Three rings for the elven kings, seven for the dwarf lords, nine for mortal men, and one for the Dark Lord. Oh, and seven for Tom Brady, because of course there are.
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of Feb 7 - 14, 2021. Happy Valentine’s Day to those who celebrate it. This week I taught an NFJS Virtual Workshop on Modern Android Development and an O’Reilly Learning Platform course on Java Testing with JUnit 5.
A Surprisingly Good Android Course
I taught a Modern Android Development virtual workshop to an excellent group of students this week, which went quite well. Frequent readers of this newsletter know I’ve been trying to retrain myself to use the newer approaches to developing apps. That means writing in Kotlin, using the new Jetpack components, and following Google’s Guide to App Architecture:
That means I’ve been digging into topics like the ViewModel, LiveData, and the Room database, and other components like navigation and data binding. I’ve been struggling, partly because they all tend to involve a lot of code, but also because the examples given in the documentation go out of date very quickly.
I finally did what I should have done long ago, however, and started working through the codelabs in the Android Kotlin Fundamentals course. While dated in many places, they are surprisingly helpful. I’m about halfway through now, and hope to finish most of them in the next few days. That’s ambitious, but I already know a lot of this stuff and seeing Google’s own training materials is proving to be helpful.
More about that when I’m done, assuming I get there this week.
HYBHY
That title is an abbreviation for my upcoming book, now called Help Your Boss Help You, formerly known as Managing Your Manager (yeah, I know — I liked the old title better too). This week I received a set of possible cover images for the book and voted for the ones I liked. Apparently several other people at the publisher will do the same soon, and I’ll have an actual cover to show you. Not yet, though.
In the meantime, I’ve decided to add a section to the “miscellaneous” chapter, which is actually called Special Cases. The new section discusses the situation of a large age difference between you and your manager.
This question often comes up in my classes, and it’s almost invariably asked by an older person working for a “kid”. This doesn’t surprise me at all, given the statistics I quoted recently about how about 80% of all IT workers are age 40 or younger.
My response is usually along these lines:
What older developers bring to the table is experience, but their real value isn’t necessarily their technical background. They know the company, and that knowledge is hugely valuable. Often it’s not clear why a particular system evolved the way it did, and a veteran employee can explain what was going on at the time and why the team made the decisions they did.
In my experience, one of the biggest differences between young people and older ones is consistency. An actual kid (teens or younger) is practically defined by inconsistency. They can be amazing one minute, and hopeless the next. Even in college sports, a favorite expression among coaches is, “the best thing about freshmen is they eventually become sophomores.” That’s partly about understanding the game, but it’s more about being able to produce at a certain minimum productive level on a regular basis.
Older people are far more consistent, but that doesn’t mean they can’t dazzle occasionally. As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned this truth: older people can usually do what they did when they were younger, just not as often and for not as long. For example, Tom Brady’s quarterback rating may have fallen from its peak, but in any given game, without too much pressure, he can do just fine, thank you very much. So if you’ve got older developers on your team, expect them to produce on a regular basis, but not be willing to spend 100 hours a week on your project just to make a deadline.
The new book section is written with those points in mind. If you have other ideas, or want to suggest another approach, please let me know. Oh, and speaking of Tom Brady…
Super Bowl Follow-up and Other Tweets
If you read my newsletter last week, you know why I never bet on Super Bowls. I correctly diagnosed that Kansas City’s damaged offensive line was going to cause them trouble, but I picked them anyway because of course I did. After the game, a few sportswriters I follow grudgingly admitted that Tom Brady is actually pretty good and maybe not evil incarnate, but despite everything this was still my favorite tweet:
That was a surprisingly weak Super Bowl, more in the style we had in the 80’s and 90’s where bad games were the norm. Oh well. At least we had our annual party — oh wait, no we didn’t. There’s supposedly this pandemic going on. Sigh.
This year also marks the first time in over 20 years (seriously) that I haven’t had to prepare my annual Super Bowl FAQ list, which I need to make every year because most people who come to our party don’t even know who is playing. At least I got last week’s newsletter out in time instead.
Moving on to other tweets, my friend Mark Heckler finished his O’Reilly book, called Spring Boot Up and Running:
It did very well right away, which I couldn’t help being just a bit snarky about:
That book wound up #1 at Amazon in Java Programming and a couple other categories, too. The only thing I don’t like about it is that he started writing well after I started my current book, yet somehow he managed to finish way before me. It’s possible I might be a tad jealous.
Here is his book on the O’Reilly Media Platform and at Amazon. I would buy it, but I have access to it via O’Reilly so I’ll dig into it that way.
Meme Watch: I’m Not A Cat
If you were on the internet at all this week, you probably saw this video, which I’ll include here via a tweet rather than the YouTube video:
So many times the responses to a meme are as good or better than the meme itself. I loved this security check:
This advertisement also made a good point:
Here is a link to a New York Times article about the whole phenomenon. It also appears that someone at CNET tracked down that filter and wrote an article showing how to add it to your next Zoom call. I haven’t decided whether to try it or not.
Who am I kidding? Of course I tried it:
That’s my (adorable) wife Ginger on the call with me. The conversation prior to the call went something like:
“I need you to jump on a Zoom call with me.”
“Really? Why?”
“Oh, no reason.”
(I probably should have said, “I tawt I taw a puddy tat,” but I didn’t think of that until now.)
The real question is, will I remember to turn this off before my next online course?
On a totally unrelated note, I saw this story about George Harrison going to extraordinary lengths to prank Phil Collins:
Finally, Happy Valentine’s Day:
Snicker. Someday soon I hope to get vaccinated. Not yet, though.
Next week is the dreaded reappearance of The Groovy Podcast. You’ve been warned.
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:
JUnit 5 Testing, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Modern Android Development, NFJS Virtual Workshop
This week:
Basic Android, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Groovy Podcast, on Tuesday afternoon via YouTube and Podbean