Tales from the jar side: End of NFJS season and a new blog post
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of November 3 - 10, 2019. This week started and ended with No Fluff, Just Stuff conferences in DC and Seattle, so I went from Washington to Washington (ha). In between I reviewed the index to my Kotlin Cookbook, so the book is almost done. I also finally added a new post to my blog at https://kousenit.org, which has been idle for quite some time.
Regarding the indexing, I'm amazed how much effort that entailed. I didn't have to do any of it (thank goodness), but the amount of detail included was amazing. My only task was to point out any entries that should be removed, and they all looked fine to me. I couldn't help but be impressed by the amount of work invested in producing that index, though. I did make a couple of minor edits to the text, but it looks like we're really close to being done. I'm not sure what will be left to review when QC2 hits my email in the coming week.
I've been thinking about how to market the Kotlin Cookbook once it appears. As usual I had big plans to try several things this week, but between the travel complications coming back from Reston and the fact that I left on Thursday for Seattle meant I had precious little time at home. I'm afraid that time was less productive than I would have liked, which is an awkward way of saying I'm trying not to feel guilty about not accomplishing anything.
Fortunately while in Seattle I managed to add a new post to my blog for the first time a very long time. My blog is hosted on wordpress.com, because I when I created it I didn't want to deal with the hosting myself. At the time my own site was on a laptop in my office, too, which had a very spotty uptime record. The downside to letting WordPress host my blog, though, is that you can only install additional plugins if you upgrade to a business plan, and I really didn't want to do that. I needed a plugin to do some Kotlin syntax highlighting, however, and in the end I gave in and upgraded. I even consented to let them spend a half hour convincing me how wonderful they are next week. Given my general antipathy for sales people, that's a risky move, but maybe they'll actually have some good suggestions. We'll see.
I wrote a blog post entitled A Deep Dive Into the KotlinVersion Class, based on a couple of recipes from the book. It turns out that getting the version of Kotlin programmatically from within a script is easy, but the real discovery was digging into the KotlinVersion class itself. That short, simple class is a great example of how to generate a property, implement an interface, add some constants, and even implement an equals method in a class with nullable properties. I felt that digging into it was quite a serendipitous discovery, and I was glad to write about it in the blog.
My tweet about the blog post has garnered about 20 likes and a few retweets, and it's only been up about 24 hours. I'm hoping it'll get picked up by one of the Kotlin newsletters I follow. My goal, other than sharing the basic information itself, is to establish myself as a minor name in the field ahead of KotlinConf in December. After all, I do have a book to sell, and I'd like some basic credibility in the area. I'm already a certified training partner with JetBrains for Kotlin, but I really haven't pushed that at all. I'm still disappointed that I'm not speaking at the conference, but I'm looking forward to meeting many of the key people in the field. Ideally they will be vaguely aware of me when that happens. :)
I hope to add a few more blog posts before the conference, at a rate of roughly one every week or so. We'll see. That may be ambitious, but the book has some good content in it and I should be able to extract material for the blog from it. Keeping up that pace will largely be a matter of stamina, but I think I'll be able to do it.
Of course, if there's one thing I don't really need, it's another writing project. I already have this newsletter (hi!) every week, plus I'm starting to dig back into my Managing Your Manager book. If I can do it, I'm also considering recording some short YouTube videos around both books, but I'll have to see about that. This next week is going to be pretty busy already.
One of the events coming up this week is meeting my new editor for Managing Your Manager. Unfortunately my current editor (and friend) is leaving for a wonderful opportunity, so I have to transition to someone new. Our initial meeting is not yet confirmed, so once again I have to be vague about everything, but the new person sounds really promising. If the new editor is who I think it is, I've already bought their major book and am working my way through it. It's rather like pulling a Good Will Hunting (Will: "I read your book last night." Sean: "So you're the one."). Seriously, it's a rather famous book (I'd heard of it, though I hadn't read it) and it's a pretty fun read so far. Again, more about that next week.
This week was notable in that the Seattle show was my last No Fluff, Just Stuff conference for the year. I'm not scheduled for any of the December events (Progressive Web Experience, ArchConf, or Tech Leader Summit), so I'm now done for the season. My first talk on the tour was in 2007 and I joined as a regular in 2009, so this makes ten full years I've been on the tour. That's starting to feel like a lot. All I know for sure is that I'll be back again next year.
I'll keep things short this week because I'm between projects, and at the moment I'm flying home from Seattle. I expect I'll have more to share next week.
Last week:
Complete NFJS event in Reston, VA
Speak at NFJS event in Seattle, WA
Add a new Kotlin-related post to my blog
This week:
What's New In Java course online at Safari
Introduction to Gradle online course for Gradle, Inc
JUnit 5 course online at Safari
Reactive Spring course online at Safari