Tales from the jar side: Podcasts and Panels and Performing with the Null Pointers
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of September 15 - 22, 2019. This week I attended the Oracle Code One conference. In addition to being on one panel, I recorded a Groovy Podcast with Graeme Rocher, and performed with the Null Pointers. I also taught online courses in What's New In Java, Java Testing with JUnit 5, and Mockito and the Hamcrest Matchers.
Party first. On Sunday we (the Null Pointers, the hastily assembled band of Java developers) booked a recording studio and had an extended rehearsal, running through pretty much everything. There were two challenges:
1. We walked from our hotel to the studio, and if you've ever been to San Francisco, you know some of the streets are essentially vertical. I did more walking this week than I normally do in a month, and my legs hurt for days. Yeah, I deserved that. I really do need to exercise more.
2. The temperature in the studio was around 100 degrees, and by that I mean Celsius. Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration. It just seemed that way.
Our performance was Monday evening at the JCP (Java Community Process) party. The only complaint we got was that we were too loud, but since we're rock stars, we took that as a compliment. Here's a picture of the band.
Your truly is the chubby one in the middle. I was the lead singer for almost all of the songs, which is good both because I can sing and because I can't really do anything else. Yes, we're a rather motley crew (as opposed to crüe), but somebody had to rock, so it might as well be us.
Seriously, that was fun. I wish we were able to play more than once a year. It's looking likely that we'll get a chance to perform at the DevNexus conference in February, though, so maybe that'll make twice.
As for the conference itself, I only had one "talk", which was really just to participate in a panel discussion called Your Project, Brand, and Career: Bring Attention to Your Project or Blog. I finally met Donald Raab there, who I only knew by reputation. Also on the panel were Yolande Poirier, who organized everything, and Alexa Weber Morales, a director of developer content at Oracle.
I'm ashamed to admit that as we were introducing ourselves, as soon as I finished my intro, I turned to my left and said, "Alexa, please tell us about yourself." Yes, she's heard every possible variation of that joke, but I couldn't resist. I feel bad about it, but not so bad it kept me from doing it.
The panel went well, but that's probably not a big surprise. As a No Fluff, Just Stuff speaker, I'm used to being on panel discussions, and we all had a lot to say. The panel took place Thursday afternoon, which was the last day of the conference, so I didn't expect many people to attend. I was pleasantly surprised that we filled 2/3rds of the room.
Here's a picture from the panel:
From left to right, that's Yolande, Don, me, and Alexa. Yes, I kept my hat on during the panel, mostly because I didn't want to blind everyone with the reflection off of my bald head.
On Tuesday I managed to sit down with the inimitable Graeme Rocher, who created both the Grails and Micronaut frameworks, which is frankly more than enough for anyone's career. He was awesome, as always, even though, as you can see, he looks like a pirate.
The podcast itself was a bit of an adventure. I didn't realize until I met with him that I'd only brought my Surface Pro, so I wound up having to install Zoom and record that way. I say record, but as we discovered to my horror after talking for the better part of an hour, I'd forgotten to hit the record button.
(Protip: when software says it records automatically, don't believe it.)
Graeme was kind enough to make time to do it over. If you're interested, the YouTube video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcSUpb8N3vk . The home page for the Groovy Podcast, as always, is at https://nofluffjuststuff.com/groovypodcast, which contains links to the podcasts themselves as well as the RSS feed if you want to subscribe.
As I mentioned last week, I wasn't originally intending to go to the conference. I therefore scheduled three one-day training events on Safari for that week, taking place on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Unfortunately, we scheduled the classes for 8 am Eastern time, so the fact that I wound up on the west coast made for another challenge. If possible, I'd like to avoid getting up at about 4:30 am again for a while.
Travel was decent enough, though I had flight delays on both ends and rescheduled connection coming home. Nothing too remarkable, though.
While at the conference I also met with Zan (sort for Suzanne) from O'Reilly about the final stages of the Kotlin Cookbook. Let's just say I have too much to do in too little time and leave it at that. I'm trying desperately to add the recipes I feel the book needs before it is finished. We'll see how close I get to something I consider good, or at least acceptable.
Since I'm still recovering from the trip and still have way too much work left to do on the book, I'll stop now. I expect my readers will appreciate a shorter newsletter every now and again, especially if it has pictures in it. :) Don't get used to it, though -- my history suggests I'll be writing too many words again all too soon.
Last week:
Oracle Code One conference in San Francisco, CA, where I did one panel discussion
Performed with the Null Pointers at the conference
Recorded a Groovy Podcast with Graeme Rocher
Taught What's New In Java on Safari
Taught Java Testing with JUnit 5 on Safari
Taught Mockito and Hamcrest Matchers on Safari
Lots of recipes for the Kotlin Cookbook, mostly involving Kotlin and the Spring framework
This week:
Teach Kotlin Fundamentals on Safari
No Fluff, Just Stuff event in Boston (actually, Framingham, MA)
Another day with the bootcamp students
Flurry of effort to finish up the Kotlin Cookbook