Tales from the jar side: Groovy Podcast, Fibonacci numbers, and KotlinConf
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of November 24 - December 1, 2019. This week I added a blog post that got picked up by the Kotlin Weekly newsletter, recorded a Groovy Podcast, and worked on the Prisoner's Dilemma chapter of my Managing Your Manager book.
The Groovy Podcast was an offshoot of the older Grails Podcast, which I used to listen to over a decade ago. The overall subject may have been the Grails Framework, but even at the time Glen Smith and Sven Haiges talked about Groovy as well as Grails, Gradle, and other projects from the Groovy programming language ecosystem. I appeared as a guest on it once or twice, but despite my efforts to join on a regular basis ("But then we could be Glen, Sven, and Ken!" I used to argue, to no avail), they went on for a few years without me. :)
Eventually Peter Ledbrook took over. Peter was the co-author of Grails in Action, along with Glen. Peter did an excellent job, and was kind enough to let me join him now and then. I think it was during the SpringOne2GX conference (the 2GX stood for Groovy, Grails, Gradle, Griffon, or any other Groovy-related technologies that started with G) in late 2013 that Peter met with me and Baruch Sadogursky and asked us to take over. We started recording podcasts together some time in 2014 and have been doing so ever since. The frequency at first was every two weeks, but frankly the Groovy world doesn't change that quickly. Now we're fortunate to do one every month.
Of course, I hope to do more. I really enjoy doing the podcast. I had a friend of mine, John Swanson, put together a logo for us:
That's based on Duke, the Java mascot, and the regular Groovy logo. I asked for the mic, and my friend added the headphones and cape. I think it looks great.
You can see the logo and listen to any of our podcasts at the home page I asked the NFJS people to host for us. If you do ever decide to listen to one, be warned -- we have essentially zero production values. For most of our existence, we started up a Google Hangout and talked for about 30 - 45 minutes. When the hangout ended, the system automatically added it as a YouTube video (see our channel here). Then we extracted an audio version and uploaded it to PodBean, which you can listen to here. Our show notes for each episode are available on this GitHub repository. We even have our own Twitter feed, which we use to announce new episodes.
I just realized that the logo shown on our YouTube feed is this one:
I don't remember why that's different. To be honest, I forgot we had a different one at all until I looked at the Twitter feed again while writing this newsletter. Go figure. I hope that's not a bad sign.
The other activity I completed this week was to add another post, called Fibonacci in Kotlin, to my blog. That one got far more involved than I intended at first, but that's a good thing. The additional depth was no doubt why it got included in the latest Kotlin Weekly newsletter. The post got long (no, really?) so I had to leave the tests for the next post. I was planning to do that next week, but that may not happen.
Next week is going to be quite busy, you see. On Tuesday I'm flying to KotlinConf, in Copenhagen, Denmark. Right now I'm a bit nervous about going, mostly because it's a long flight and I don't speak the language where I'm going. What's really weird, though, is that this may be the first time I've attended a conference where I wasn't speaking in at least 15 years. It's not helping that we're in the midst of a snowstorm at the moment, too, with snow followed by sleet (what it's doing now) followed by more snow. I'm flying out of Logan Airport in Boston, which is also always a bit of an adventure.
Expect pictures from the event in next week's newsletter, and I hope to have some decent stories to tell as well. If everything goes as planned, over a dozen copies of my Kotlin Cookbook will be at my hotel the day after I arrive, which I can give out on pretty much any decent pretext. So if you fit in the intersection on a Venn Diagram of "People who want a copy of my book", "People who actually read my newsletter", and "People who are attending KotlinConf", be sure to let me know, or just find me at the conference.
Here's that Venn Diagram to make that easier to remember:
Finally, I did some work on my Managing Your Manager book, which is coming along. One of the main chapters implies applying the classic iterated Prisoner's Dilemma problem to the employee/manager relationship. One of the fundamental successful strategies that wins that game is called Tit For Tat (TFT), and I discuss how to apply that formula to training the boss without threatening the loyalty relationship you need.
I have to tread carefully there, partly because I don't want people to see their relationship with their boss as an adversarial one. Instead of couching responses as "cooperate" or "defect" as they are in the literature, I'm using the terms "go along" and "push back". It's a small change, but an important one, and makes it easier to play the game without putting the overall relationship in unnecessary danger.
I'll have much more to say about that, too, in future newsletters. Right now, though, I think I'll end this one a bit earlier than normal. After all, last week was a long holiday weekend (at least in the U.S.) and I even tried to take a break, more or less successfully.
If you do read this newsletter and you are at KotlinConf, please come by and say hello. I won't know many people there when I arrive. I hope to have changed that significantly before I leave.
Last week:
Added a post called Fibonacci in Kotlin to my blog
Recorded a new Groovy Podcast. Really and for true.
Worked on the Prisoner's Dilemma chapter of Managing Your Manager
Next week:
KotlinConf, and whatever else gets driven by that experience :)