Tales from the jar side: Marketing, Moving Machines, and More
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of October 27 - November 2, 2019. This week started and ended with No Fluff, Just Stuff events, and in between I worked on proposals for new training courses and concentrated on both my current book and the next one.
In case you wanted to know how dedicated I am to delivering this silly newsletter every week, you should know that it's currently 2 am and I'm sitting in a hotel room near Dulles airport, because my flight home from DC last night was delayed twice, changed gates twice, and then cancelled. I'm currently scheduled to go back to the airport in the morning and leave on a flight at about 8:20 am. We'll see if it actually happens. This is why (1) I have a Clear subscription, because now I have to go through security again on a Monday morning, and (2) on every trip I always pack an extra set of underwear and socks for just such an emergency.
Despite everything, I'm going to finish this @$!*# newsletter, by golly, for no reason other than the fact I haven't missed a week all year and I'm not letting United break that streak. Just don't expect awesome quality or any profound insights this time (assuming you do any other week).
First, let me talk about the Kotlin Cookbook. The book is essentially done, other than indexing (which is ongoing) and a final read-through to make sure everything is set before going to the printers. It occurred to me this week that I probably should have included in my bio that I'm one of only six JetBrains Certified Training Partners for Kotlin:
https://www.jetbrains.com/company/partners/kotlin/
(Go ahead, you can say it: Ooohh, Aaahhh. As Dudley Moore said in Arthur, "Don't you wish you were me? I know I do.")
That's world-wide, btw, so it actually is pretty cool. To be honest, I haven't gotten any work from that, but that may be because I haven't pushed it at all. As I've said many times, I'm not good at self-advertising. Heck, links to this newsletter still don't appear on my company home page. Sigh.
Speaking of that, my home page is in serious need of a redesign and update. I could do it, at least in principle, but it seems like the sort of small, straightforward project that an inexperienced developer might like as a short contract. If you are interested in that (or if you know somebody who might be), please let me know. It's a very small job (after all, I'm only a one-person company), but I'm willing to pay somebody to do it. I'm especially interested in talking to non-traditional (for whatever reason) developers. Basically I'm looking for someone who is as different from me as possible, and who would like the opportunity.
I'm now starting to think of ways to market the Kotlin Cookbook. For example, it occurs to me that these days everybody and their sibling has a podcast. Heck, I'm cohost of the Groovy Podcast myself, and I'll probably bring it up, assuming we do another session any time soon. A week or so ago I appeared on Hadi Harriri's Talking Kotlin podcast, but that episode hasn't been released yet. I'm hoping it comes out before KotlinConf, but that will depend on Hadi's backlog at the moment.
I'm thinking, though, that all podcasts need content, so I should contact a few others and see if I can appear on them. I know of a few that are at least tangentially relevant, but I haven't done a big search for a while. If that works out, I'll put the details in this newsletter and no doubt tweet about it as well.
I'm also planning how I might do a series of short YouTube videos based on various recipes. This weekend at the NFJS event in DC I gave Dan Hinojosa my "Kotlin on Graal" demo, because he was doing a Graal talk (which is hard to describe so I'm not going to do it tonight) and I already used a Gradle plugin for it in the book. It occurred to me that the process might make a nice short video. There are probably at least a half dozen or so other short videos I can make, too, if I try. I'm not great at the video software, however, so if that requires much editing -- or frankly anything in the way of serious production values -- then I probably won't do it, but if I can basically wing it and turn out something reasonable, I'll try it in the next few weeks.
In the meantime, however, I plan to switch my primary focus back to my Managing Your Manager book. I'm only home for three days this week (now less, since I'm still stuck in DC for at least part of Monday), but I hope to make some progress cleaning up the existing chapters. Then I head to Seattle for my final NFJS event of the year, leaving Thursday and coming back Sunday.
One additional note. I always tell my boy that if you find yourself in a good situation, be sure to stop and enjoy it, because you'll change, and the people around you change, and the world changes. If things are good for a moment, it's worth noticing. Even with all the chaos and misery in the world at the moment, it's okay to be happy for, say, ten minutes.
Why bring this up? Partly because life is pretty good at the moment, and partly because a good friend of mine might be undergoing a significant career transition in the near future. I'm being intentionally vague about that because the decisions aren't yet final, but while I'm very happy for my friend, it means I'm probably going to lose them as a resource for at least a while. So I'm happy, but sad, too. More about that if and when it actually comes to fruition.
I heard about one other major transition this week. Professor Woodie Flowers (yes that's his real) name passed away this week. He taught the Introduction to Design course in the Mechanical Engineering department at MIT, and I dreaded that class. I've never been any good mechanically (yes, the irony of being a mechanical engineer is not lost on me), but that class was required so I had to take it sooner or later. I deferred it until my junior year, which was as long as I could wait.
The reason Introduction to Design was famous was because Woodie Flowers created a design contest as part of the class that wound up being one of the biggest spectator sports at MIT. Here's a link to one of the events that happened while I was there. Every year each student was given a task to perform and identical bags of garbage (or what seemed like garbage) that we used to build machines to do the job, in competition with each other. The contest was held in the evening, and always filled the auditorium.
My year we had to build a machine to navigate up an inclined board to a weight scale at the top, and whoever had the most mass on the scale at the end of the power interval (which I think was about 30 seconds) was the winner. There was a wavy track available, or you could go overland, trying to dodge some obstacles.
Because there was always an odd number of students, sometimes you competed against a placebo. The guy who built the placebo was in my dorm and was very gifted. He basically built a truck that zoomed up to the scale, turned around, and zoomed back down again. The idea of the placebo was that it was supposed to compete, but supposed to lose, too.
My "solution" such as it was, was based on the fact I knew I didn't know how to make a drive train, so I didn't think I could make a truck. As it turned out, all the successful machines were trucks of one form or another, but that was only obvious in retrospect. Mine instead was basically a catapult that threw a hook over the vertical board that backed the platform, and then a winch reeled in the rope, pulling my machine up to the scale. That design meant I didn't need wheels, either. Instead, I layered the bottom of my machine with what looked like plastic car windshields, so it could slide over them. I called them shuttle tiles, because they kept falling off.
As it happens, most machines failed during the competition. Far fewer than half move at all, and only about 20 percent actually accomplish the task. The one and only time my machine worked as designed was in practice, when the hook caught and pulled my machine up to the scale -- and then kept lifting it right off of it. Great.
In the competition, I gave up on it working as intended. Instead I just took a couple ounces of sand, wrapped it in some paper, and used the catapult to throw them onto the scale. That way I got credit for at least getting mass on the scale at all, which was a major victory.
As you might expect, the spectators loved the contest every year, and the students mostly hated it every year. One of the big pop songs out at the time was Billy Joel's "Pressure", and we played it over and over in the lab during the last week of preparations. The lab was total chaos during that time, with people desperately trying to accomplish anything, anything at all, to avoid looking foolish in front of everybody.
Btw, the famous MIT sense of humor still showed up. You were allowed "non-functional decorations" according to the spec, and in my year they ranged from a flag with the words Non-Functional Decoration on it to a paper mache model of a football kicker to an actual small cannon that fired during the run. That last one was only allowed once.
If all this sounds vaguely familiar, it's because the 2.70 contest (as we used to call it) eventually became the foundation of the U.S. First robotics competition. Now it's done in high schools, with teams of kids working with adults to build a robot to accomplish a particular task, with teams advancing to state and national championships. The competition has even gone global, and it all started with Woodie Flowers at MIT.
As a final note, while I was at United Technologies Research Center, one year I was invited to help out during the regional U.S. First championships, hosted by UTC. Did they want me to participate because I was an MIT-trained engineer with advanced technical degrees from some of the finest universities in the world? Of course not. These people knew me. They just wanted me to sing the National Anthem before the contest. Which I did, and did well, because back then I still had my high notes. Inviting me to do any actual engineering would have been ridiculous, so they did the right thing.
In fact, one of the best things about eventually switching careers to computer science was that when I got my degree, once I visited home and my dad told me something in the house was broken, and I was able to reply, "that's a hardware problem. I only know software." That moment, all by itself, justified the entire career change.
Last Week:
NFJS event in Chicago
NFJS event in Washington, DC
Submitted proposal for another online training class at Safari
This week:
Eventually make it home from DC
Work on Managing Your Manager book
NFJS event in Seattle