Tales from the jar side: DevNexus, Null Pointers, and Hunting the Wild Kotlin
Tastes like chicken
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of Feb 16 - 23, 2020. This week I taught my Managing Your Manager class online and had an active week at the DevNexus conference in Atlanta.
Selling A Book At B&N
In previous newsletters, I’ve described the futility of trying to sell one of my books through my local Barnes & Noble bookstore in Glastonbury, CT. I’ll get to that, but in what may have been an omen, I participated in one of those autocomplete memes on Twitter. The idea was to type “I am <name>, patron saint of …” into Google and let autocomplete provide the rest. My result:
Whoa, Google, that’s way harsh. Still, back in December, I went to my local Barnes & Noble and said that since I was a local author, I would appreciate it if they would carry a few copies of my newly released Kotlin Cookbook. The manager I talked to was very friendly and ordered five (!) copies. What they didn’t know (and I “accidentally” forgot to mention) was that I’ve done this for my previous books too, but none has ever sold a single copy through the bookstore. Still, it’s nice to see your name on a bookshelf, and you never know.
In the immortal words of Edna Mode:
And call me when you get back, darling. I enjoy our visits.
A couple of newsletters ago I mentioned how I visited the store, signed my books, and put them back on the shelf. Last Sunday I dropped by to see how they were doing.
That’s not a picture of a Kotlin, despite the title
If you look closely, you’ll see there are only four books in that stack, rather than the five that were ordered. One was missing. Could it be that it actually sold?
I went by the information desk and asked. Sadly, no, none of them sold, so where was the other book?
After a bit of searching, I found it.
The extensive Kotlin section at B&N
There it was, right between PHP and JavaScript, and not far from books on Python and Minecraft.
That’s when I got that tingling feeling I get when I’m tempted to do something silly. When I originally posted the cover of my book on Facebook, one of my non-technical friends had no idea what Kotlin was, so he assumed the animal on the cover was a Kotlin and that my book was about cooking them. He was probably pulling my leg, but it was hard to tell.
I therefore decided that it would be amusing to move a copy of my book to a different section of the bookstore.
If you need to (humanely) hunt down and eat free-range Kotlins, have I got the book for you
In my Groovy Vampires story (described in that earlier newsletter), my Making Java Groovy book actually had a section about finding vampire movies with Groovy. Unfortunately, there’s nothing in my Kotlin Cookbook related to cooking. But hey, I got a chuckle out of it. Soon I’ll visit again and see if the book is still there. I’ll let you know.
(As an aside, I have a few friends who would probably love that Bacon Bible on the lower shelf. I’ll have to keep that in mind when their birthdays come up.)
Hey, O’Reilly Media Did Some Marketing!
Did you know that O’Reilly publishes a programming newsletter? In their latest issue, which I received on Saturday but isn’t yet available on the web (more value-added for subscribers, then), you’ll find the following section:
Hey, I made the newsletter! How about that? I’m the sort of person who complains in a restaurant if I get bad service, so I feel obligated to tip well and tell the manager all the other times when the service is really good. So credit where credit is due — thanks for including my book in the newsletter. My immediate reaction was that the blurb here isn’t exactly right in all the details, but that’s too petty. I’m very happy to be included.
(I’m pretty sure I know who at O’Reilly pushed for that, too. I’ll thank her personally later.)
Regarding that Synk report, I saw it when it appeared. Two thousand responses is a relatively small sample size, and was skewed by being a self-selected group of participants largely from Europe. Still, it’s an interesting read, and my own admittedly anecdotal evidence agrees with their conclusions about Kotlin’s growing popularity.
One might even say the Kotlin market is heating up. Maybe it’ll reach the level where it really cooks. At which point maybe you’ll need a way to serve them for your company. Rumor has it they taste like chicken…
… okay, that’s enough. I’ll be here all week. Don’t forget to tip your waitstaff.
(One other newsletter-related item: My friend Dan Vega publishes an excellent newsletter called Coffee And Code. If you’re at all interested in the JavaScript MVC framework called Vue.js, you should take a look, though it goes beyond that. He also maintains an excellent YouTube channel that’s well worth watching.)
The Nexus of Devs At DevNexus
The DevNexus conference is an enormous developers conference held every year in February in Atlanta, GA.
(I mean it’s an enormous conference, not a conference of enormous developers. I should probably add an apostrophe to that statement somewhere, but everywhere I tried looked funny.)
At the conference, I gave a Kotlin full-day workshop and two talks entitled Functional Programming in Java, Groovy, and Kotlin and Kotlin Recipes: Interesting Features of the Language. All three attracted good audiences of developers, both enormous and otherwise.
Rather than get into details, I’ll mention a couple of alternate items.
Women In Technology Breakfast
I decided to attend the Women In Technology breakfast, partly to be supportive and partly because I contributed four copies of my Kotlin Cookbook to be given away. I did that partly to support women in technology, but also partly to support the next generation of developers. At my age, at my stage of my career, it’s time to think about the next group coming up as much as whatever I have left to do.
The meeting featured a panel of three women:
I’ve known Ixchel (pronounced “ee-shell") Ruiz for several years. She and her husband Andres Almiray (who also attended) are good friends who I met through the Groovy community. Ixchel talked about how she adopts a different persona when she’s speaking which is quite different from her true nature as an introvert, which I found quite interesting. Mala Gupta is an Indian developer and Java Champion I’ve known about for some time, but finally got to meet. Emily Jiang is based in London, and spoke about the challenges of not only speaking in a language that isn’t your native one, but the difficulties of getting selected to speak in the first place.
One big question they were asked was about mentors they had in the past, particularly women. That got me to thinking about the same question. In my case, two women have had a significant impact on my career:
Nancy Golden was the president/owner of the Golden Consulting Group, where I worked for five years. She gave me my first job as an instructor, right after I left United Technologies back in 2000. She was more my boss than a mentor, but in a ten-person company (I was employee number 11), we were all friends as much as anything else.
My wife Ginger is a real estate lawyer who started her own independent practice soon after I first met her. When I was deciding to go on my own in 2005, she helped me with all the related business issues. Though she’s not in my field, she has been my first and most important sounding board on all professional decisions I’ve made over the years.
I also talk about technical and other issues with Trisha Gee and Annyce Davis, but I put both of them in that “younger generation” category I mentioned above. I only hope I’m as helpful to them as they have been to me.
Interviews
While at the conference, I also participated in a few short interviews. One was with my Groovy Podcast co-host Baruch Sadogursky, on the so-called DevOps SpeakEasy. Below is my lame attempt at a selfie.
I also spoke to a person in the Oracle Groundbreaker Ambassador’s program, and with a friend who works with IBM Developer Relations. Assuming they remember to send me links when the videos are posted, I’ll add them to future newsletters.
Null Pointers Jam
The last couple of years at DevNexus, the Null Pointers — the rock band of Java developers — has been asked to perform at the reception. This year was the exception.
(Hah! NullPointerException? Get it? If you’re a Java developer, you’re laughing so hard right now.)
Still, we decided to rent a studio ourselves and go jam anyway. We took a group photo, but I don’t have it yet, so here’s a picture of just three of us. From left to right, that’s César Hernández, me, and Frank Greco. César played drums that night, but can also play guitar and do vocals. Frank is an awesome guitarist and the leader of the band. He’s also the head of the New York Java users group, where I’m speaking in March.
We were delayed going to the studio because another member, Freddie Guime, was recording his own podcast. Unlike my Groovy Podcast, his podcast, called Java Pub House, has actual production values. We therefore asked him to bring along his recording equipment (Imagine that? Actual recording equipment) to the studio. That means that shortly there might be a real, live recording of the Null Pointers available online.
If and when it appears, I’ll post the result here. Consider yourself warned.
The Speaker Dinner Was Fishy
The speaker dinner for the conference was held at the Georgia Aquarium. I made the obvious joke about selecting our dinner from the fish we could see, until I saw this monster.
Feeds a family of four for a month. I mean me, not the beast behind me.
I tried standing in front of the window to give you some sense of how enormous that creature is, but this really doesn’t show it. Suffice it to say: Yikes.
This critter was a lot more friendly and a lot less intimidating.
The buffet menu did include seafood, which felt a bit disrespectful and a bit scary, assuming the fish in the tanks could see what we were doing. Still, a good time was had by all, including, presumably, the fish that weren’t on the menu.
(Insert your own Kotlin-related food joke here. I promised I was done. Like those overcooked Kotlins.)
Last week:
Managing Your Manager, online at Safari
Multiple events at the DevNexus conference
This week:
Functional Java, online at Safari
Spring and Spring Boot, online at Safari
First No Fluff, Just Stuff event of the season, in Madison, WI