Tales from the jar side: No Fluff Stuff
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of June 16 - 23, 2019. This week I taught a few online classes and had a No Fluff, Just Stuff event in Columbus, OH.
For this newsletter, I'll focus on the NFJS event. The NFJS tour consists of a series of weekend conferences that take place in several cities around the U.S., along with a few "destination" events that occur during the week. The tour is unusual in that rather than a typical conference with a call for papers, evaluations, and acceptances, the tour employs a small group of regular speakers who travel to each event and give multiple talks. The topics are renewed annually, and occasionally people leave and new speakers join the tour, but in general it's a consistent group of speakers who see each other over and over again.
Before I was allowed on the tour, I used to attend the conferences on my own dime. I used to go to the event held in Framingham, MA, every fall. I attended for three years before I managed to join, mostly to talk about topics related to the Groovy programming language and the Grails framework. After a few trial sessions, I became a regular member and have been one for about nine years now.
The result is that at a typical NFJS event, I fly in, give about half a dozen talks, and return home. This weekend I was in Columbus, OH. Next weekend I'll be in Dallas. Later in the year I'll be in Chicago, and Des Moines, IA, and Seattle, WA. In a few months it'll be time to come up with new (or at least revised) topics for next year, so we're all driven to keep growing, learning, and developing new talks.
That pressure to continually come up with new topics can be quite stressful. Given the rate of changes in technology, however, there are always new things to talk about. The hard part is developing enough expertise in new topics to speak about them intelligently. After all, as far as the attendees are concerned, we're supposed to appear as though we're experts in whatever subject we're discussing.
As I mentioned, I started out talking about the Groovy programming language and the Grails framework. I then added talks about the Gradle build tool. Since that one is still popular, I've evolved my talks in that area and still give them, including one this weekend. Jay never schedules the Groovy and Grails talks anymore, because even though they are still active areas of development, they've fallen a bit out of favor, and the attendance at each talk has dropped accordingly.
Since then I've added talks on functional Java, and other topics related to that area. Last year I added talks on Kotlin as well, which is partly why I'm working on a book in that area (called Kotlin Cookbook, available in early access form on the O'Reilly Learning Platform.
To relieve some of the pressure, it's nice to develop a talk that doesn't have to change every year. I now have two of those. One is called Managing Your Manager, and is based on the lessons I've learned from all my years working in the business world. It concentrates on management from the technical employee perspective -- how to build a constructive loyalty relationship with your boss that lets you keep your self-respect and gives you the best chance to get what you need when you need it. That's always been one of my most popular talks, and as a result I'm also writing the upcoming book of the same name.
The other non-technical talk I give is called Mental Bookmarks and the Fractal Nature of Success. This is by far the riskiest talk I've ever developed, because it's quite personal and doesn't have an easily defined audience. In addition the "mental bookmarks" technique, I discuss what success really means, including false measures of success and how seductive they can be, and try to give some perspective on the true nature of success and how to find it.
I'll say more about the details in future newsletters, but I'll just say that this is my second year giving the talk, and each time I'm always approached afterwards by two or three people who find it very moving. That's quite gratifying, because it's very difficult for me to judge how it's going to be received. I generally give it in the last slot of the conference, when people are tired of talking about technical topics and are interested in hearing something different. Since I'm pretty good at holding an audience, they're often surprised how interested they become in topics that are not easily summarized.
I must admit that the personal nature of that talk makes it a challenge for me. I really don't like talking about myself or my own accomplishments, but my history is key to some of the topics I discuss. Heck, I'm uncomfortable saying anything in this newsletter -- the very act of having a personal newsletter seems to be in slightly bad taste, mixed with a bit of arrogance. I get through it by feeling that I really do have something to say, and that any reader can unsubscribe easily enough. I also have always had this drive to communicate with others, and the act of writing this newsletter helps that. I just hope you find some value in it, at least enough to keep reading.
There was one minor complication for me at this particular NFJS event. First, during my second talk on Saturday, my laptop died. We quickly realized that even though I'd plugged it into a power strip inside the podium, it turned out that the power strip itself hadn't been plugged into anything. Now I have backups for the slides, and backups for the code, and ways to deal with a lack of internet access, but if the laptop goes, I'm in trouble. Fortunately, I was able to find a wall outlet, plug into that, and get the machine up and running again after a few minutes (which felt a lot longer), but it was dicey for a moment there.
The NFJS tour is not my primary job, but it's been a big part of my life for about a decade now. Expect me to talk about it frequently in this newsletter.
A few other miscellaneous notes for this week:
I gave my Basic Android class on Safari, and as usual I tried a few different elements in the apps I developed. I wound up with more to talk about that I could fit in the available time, but I think the class went well anyway.
I taught my class on the Mockito mocking framework and the Hamcrest matchers, and this time has been the best one so far. I think I've evolved a really good set of examples by now. I really should update the slides to explain things better, but it's a relief to know what I'm talking about and have a good story to tell.
I also did my Kotlin Fundamentals class, which still not organized very well. My understanding of the issues has gotten much better, but I'm still not quite where I need to be. By the end of the summer my Kotlin Cookbook needs to be done, and the act of writing it and giving that same talk should produced something good by late in the year.
Speaking of Kotlin, I still haven't heard back from the KotlinConf people. I don't know what the time frame will be for when they send out acceptances, but I'm hoping it will be in the next week or so.
My editor got to read the revised Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma chapter for my Managing Your Manager book, which I discussed last week, and she really liked it. She said this was the chapter where the book really started to come to life for her. That's a really good sign.
All the travel during the No Fluff tour has brought about a group of spouses called the Fluff Widows. Every year they go on a crafting retreat and hang out together and do whatever groups of women do in those circumstances (I find it best not to ask). This week my wife left on Wednesday for that retreat and will be returning Monday. I left for the NFJS event on Friday, which meant my son had the house to himself over the weekend. Let's assume nothing went wrong, but if so, I'll talk about it in next week's newsletter.
Speaking of my son, Xander recently joined a band called Undeclared. During high school he was in an excellent band called The Tension, who recorded an album that I still really like. What's different this time is that he's the drummer, while in the previous band he was a guitarist and lead singer. This week on Saturday night he had his first gig with the band, which hopefully he'll tell me about when I get home on Monday.
The following link is for a totally different style of music from what he plays in the band, but here's the recording of the two of us performing together at the Music in the Meetinghouse concert back in April.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS8a_kgQ0jY
The song is My Valentine by Paul McCartney, which is one of very few McCartney songs written low enough to be in my voice range.
This week:
Basic Android on Safari
Mockito and the Hamcrest Matchers on Safari
Kotlin Fundamentals on Safari
NFJS event in Columbus, OH
Next week:
Functional Java on Safari
Managing Your Manager on Safari
Hope to release the latest update on the Kotlin Cookbook
Hope to submit some new proposals for future training classes on Safari
Hope to prepare the "three chapter review" for the Managing Your Manager book
NFJS event in Dallas, TX