Tales from the jar side: KotlinConf and the release of Kotlin Cookbook
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of December 1 - 8, 2019. I spent this week at KotlinConf in Copenhagen, Denmark, where I signed and gave away 20 copies of my new Kotlin Cookbook.
In other words:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VkrUG3OrPc
Yup, it's alive. Last week when I checked on Amazon, the Kindle version was available but the paperback version was not. This week, the paperback version was available, too. Yay!
That's not the funny part. Here's the funny part:
Used? Already? I had no idea. Yeah, they better be "like new" since they're as hot off the presses as it's possible to be. I'm still not sure what to make of this, but okay I guess.
KotlinConf is what I'm calling the first stop on my Kotlin Cookbook World Tour (KCWT). The JetBrains people (hosts of the conference) were kind enough to let me borrow a table at their booth at lunchtime on the second day to hold the signing. There was even a photographer, so expect some pictures in an upcoming issue of this newsletter.
At the signing, I was debating how many to keep in reserve. I tweeted at the time that I wanted to give at least half of the books to women or underrepresented minorities, with a strong preference for women of color. Unfortunately, you can't do that at a signing where it's always first come, first served. On the other hand, I couldn't think of any way to just walk up to a woman at the conference I didn't know and say, "Hey, you don't know me, but I happened to notice you're female or underrepresented minority so here's a copy of my book." Yikes. I imagine most women at conferences have been approached with worse lines than that, but still.
Instead, I talked to a few women I knew or at least followed online. I'm not going to mention them here because I didn't ask for their permission to do so, but at least that felt like some progress.
One person I did finally get to meet was Svetlana Isakova, who is one of the Kotlin programming language lead developers and the co-author of Kotlin in Action. She kindly consented to a picture, as you can see here.
I'm still not great at selfies, but this one hopefully is decent enough. I think she was pleased I pronounced her last name correctly (with the accent on the second syllable), which I learned how to do because of Commander Susan Ivanova on Babylon 5. I also knew that the natural abbreviation of her first name is Sveta, because years ago the UConn women's basketball team (juggernaut that it is every year) had a star player named Svetlana Abrosimova and that's how she abbreviated her first name.
Oh my goodness. I just looked her up and it turns out Svetlana Abrosimova is 39 years old. I remember her as an UConn player like it was yesterday. The years really go by, don't they?
The conference itself was very good. The sessions were only 45 minutes long, so they packed in a lot of them -- there were eight the first day and seven the second day, including the keynotes. Some of the talks appealed to me more than others, but every speaker I saw was well prepared and did a solid job.
As I mentioned in some earlier issues, I proposed a couple of talks for this conference but neither got accepted. Since I'm basically a professional speaker, I often have a hard time going to other speaker's talks. They say doctors make the worst patients, and I get that. I have very high standards for talks, and get impatient when they're not met. I was worried that I'd be resentful if I attended a talk I didn't think was up to my standards, thinking that could have been my opportunity. Fortunately, that didn't happen. Not every talk was to my taste, but all the ones I saw were solid and worthy of inclusion.
Rather than dwell on individual talks, I'll just summarize a few reactions here:
"Multi-platform" was all the rage, but I'm still not convinced it's for me. In order to understand it well, I would need to learn iOS development in Swift, or JavaScript, or both, and I don't have the time or energy for that now.
I wish I had had time to add a section on asynchronous flows in Kotlin to my book. That really does look like the future. I will add an example to the GitHub repository, though.
What is it about Google that encourages their speakers to adopt that "aren't we all having so much fun" style in their talks? If you've ever seen a Google presentation about one of their products, you know what I mean. It's relentless. "Yes our jokes are corny, but we don't care because life is so wonderful!" Ugh. Please relax and just tell me what I need to know.
My friend Mark Heckler was sick as a dog but managed to give his Kotlin and Spring talk anyway, even live coding all the demos. Nicely done, but poor guy. Then Lufthansa messed him up going home again.
I attended one talk by a Curmudgeon. That's the term I apply to a developer whose attitude is "seen it all, done it all, and unimpressed". This one approached the whole science of A.I. and machine learning as a form of curve fitting, i.e., given the data, work out a function that predicts it. He claimed everything in Computer Science had already been investigated by mathematicians 100 years ago. The insight was clever (especially because I knew a lot of that math), but the subtext of "these people think they're so smart when in reality it's all been done so really they're idiots" is annoying, at least to me. You can draw knowledge from the past without making fun of people who are trying to do their best now.
The second day keynote featured an Entertainer, which is the term I use for someone who is much more concerned with dazzling you than presenting good content. The topic he chose was space travel, which had nothing to do with Kotlin. That's okay, I guess, for a keynote that was presumably meant to be inspiring. The problem I had was that it was all emotional appeals that went for the jugular, but without what I considered sufficient justification.
I really shouldn't dwell on that last one, but it's stuck with me. He had lots of video clips. He started with astronaut Chris Hadfield aboard the ISS singing David Bowie's Space Oddity, which is fun if you haven't seen it. He then went to President Kennedy's speech about landing a man on the moon before the end of the decade. He also had a clip from the Apollo 13 movie, ending with the failure is not an option quote. The bulk of the talk was about the two major NASA disasters of my lifetime: the space shuttle Challenger blowing up in 1986 and the Columbia disintegration on re-entry in 2003. He painted them both as completely avoidable and the products of a culture that had gone seriously wrong, and claimed that all the astronauts could have been saved in a better organization. I've read a lot about both, and it's still hard for me to talk about them, or even hear about them. I knew what he meant, but it felt very oversimplified in order to generate an emotional response.
I'm sensitive to being manipulated like that. Sometimes it's okay. I love It's A Wonderful Life as much as anybody, and that's about a subtle as a brick through a window. But still, if you're aiming straight for my emotions, it had better be worth the journey.
He pivoted after that and started praising Elon Musk and SpaceX, showing videos of their reusable boosters landing on the drone ships in the Atlantic. He also spoke of Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin and how they were revolutionizing space travel.
All well and good, but what was the point? Dream big, but don't get trapped in a hide-bound bureaucracy that wound up killing people? Space travel funded by private business is better than the government, even though business learned from government funds that dwarfed anything business could do? Does it matter that Blue Origin shouldn't even be mentioned in the same breath as SpaceX, but that SpaceX is now launching literally tens of thousands of satellites that may bring the Internet to the world but will also ruin observational astronomy while filling the sky with space junk?
I don't know. I love the space program as much as anybody, but what did any of that have to do with a conference on Kotlin?
Okay, maybe I'm too much of a curmudgeon too.
I did find the conference rewarding and I'm glad I went. I'm ready to come home now, however, and move on to other things.
Oh, and speaking of needlessly emotional appeals:
Last week:
KotlinConf
Signed and gave away a bunch of Kotlin Cookbook books :)
This week:
Spring and Spring Boot course online at Safari
Basic Android online at Safari. This one is going to be challenging, because it's finally time to move it primarily to Kotlin
Finish at least one chapter in Managing Your Manager book