Tales from the jar side: State of the Newsletter, SpringDoc Open API, and our O Holy Night duet
It's been two full years, but honestly this year should count at least double
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of December 20 - 27, 2020. This week I taught a private class on Spring and Spring Boot, but that was my only class. It was, and is, time for a holiday break. I took care of some business-related stuff, because Kousen IT, Inc is what they call an S-Corporation, and I need to pay corporation taxes this time of year. That wasn’t fun, but at least my business did well enough during the pandemic for that to be doable.
State of the Newsletter
Depending on how you count it, this is my newsletter’s second anniversary. The first issue of Tales from the jar side was emailed the last week of 2018 (specifically, December 31, 2018), using my old site on TinyLetter.com. I used that site every week from then until the January 19, 2020 edition (just over a year), at which point I switched over the Substack-hosted version you’re reading now. The first newsletter went out to 41 subscribers, which felt like a lot at the time. When I finished with TinyLetter, the last edition went out to 214 subscribers. According to that site, I sent out 57 issues, but one was sent twice to fix some embedded links, meaning the total was actually 56.
My first edition on Substack went out on January 26. I had to count the issues myself, but I believe this is the 49th issue to go out on Substack, making for a total of 105 overall. I meant to say something when I passed 100, but apparently I missed it.
Those early days on Substack caught a rising wave of newsletter subscriptions. By the end of February, I had just over 300 subscribers, but a typical issue got more views than it had subscribers. That’s because some people were (and presumably still are) reading it from my posting on Facebook and LinkedIn. The open rate was very high in those days, though I had no idea what that meant.
By May, the email boom had calmed down, and my numbers grew a lot more slowly. They did keep going up, however. I passed 500 subscribers in the middle of May, 600 by the end of June, 700 by the end of July, 800 by the end of August, but I didn’t hit 900 until the beginning of November. Last week’s newsletter went out to 974 recipients. I hope to hit 1000 some time in January, after which I’ll stop paying attention again.
Here is graph that Substack provides to show subscribers over the last 90 days:
The last three months, as the email newsletter market saturated
Note the flattening of the curve in December, for whatever reason. Note also that substack says I have no subscribers at all, since this newsletter is still free and shall remain so for the foreseeable future.
My sense is that email newsletters made a huge comeback about a year ago, but that you don’t need to subscribe to very many before you hit your limit. All I know for sure is that all the subscribers to this newsletter are brilliant, good looking, and incredibly awesome individuals, which puts an upper limit on how many subscribers I can have. After all, how many people like that are even available?
The most surprising part to me is that somehow I’ve been able to put out an issue every week for two full years. I really thought I’d run out of things to say (don’t laugh). Maybe that will happen soon. If you don’t get a newsletter next week, you’ll know why.
I know I’ve said it before, but I have to admit I’m still in awe that so many people are interested in the company newsletter for my little one-person company. Thank you all for being here. I really do appreciate it.
SpringDoc Open API
I must admit I was sluggish this week as I dragged myself to the finish line, but I wound up learning something despite myself. A couple of my students were asking about documenting a Spring application’s REST API. My standard answer for that is to use Swagger, which I’ve heard people talk about but never used myself.
As it turns out, there’s an even easier way. The GitHub repository called springdoc-openapi hosts the springdoc-openapi Java library and can be added trivially to an existing Spring Boot application. For my Spring MVC course, I create a simple shopping application that really only manages a single Product class, but illustrates both annotated controllers and what they call functional endpoints. It turns out that all I had to do was add the following dependency to my build.gradle file:
When I rebuilt and restarted my application, all I had to do was navigate to http://localhost:8080/swagger-ui and all the documentation for my app was there:
I must admit, I had no idea it was that easy, or I would have added it to my course long ago. It looks like they have Kotlin and Groovy support as well, plus demos and more. See the full documentation for details.
O Holy Night
And now for something completely different.
For over twenty years, my wife and I have performed a duet version of O Holy Night during the late service on Christmas eve at First Church in Glastonbury, CT. Obviously this year that wasn’t going to happen, so we had to put something together at home and send it in.
You’d think by now I’d be good at making those sorts of recordings, but I still fumble with it. We wound up recording our parts separately to a background piano track, and then making a video along with the result. It’s not bad, but personally I think we’re better live. Still, during this pandemic year, doing anything at all counts as a win.
If you’re interested, our duet starts at 26 min and 28 sec into the service. I tried to set the embedded YouTube video to that point, but I won’t be sure that worked until I send the newsletter. Feel free to watch any or all of the service, of course.
The duet arrangement is excellent. The only part I can’t figure out is who those old people are. When did that happen?
I’m going to keep the newsletter short and sweet this week, in keeping with the theme of taking a bit of a break. I wish all of you a safe and healthy holiday season. Hopefully we’ll all be vaccinated very soon and life can get back to something resembling normal.
Last week:
Spring and Spring Boot, private class
Assorted business-related stuff
This week:
No classes! (Cue Rodney Dangerfield from Back To School: “Call me when you have no class.”)
Writing my Managing Your Manager book