Tales from the jar side: The Start of the No Fluff, Just Stuff Season

"If a tree falls in a forest" and related existential questions

Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of Feb 23 - March 1, 2020. This week I taught online courses on Functional Java and Spring and Spring Boot, and had my first No Fluff, Just Stuff conference of the season in Madison, Wisconsin.

The No Fluff, Just Stuff tour plans out which cities and speakers to use on an annual basis. Those of us who are regulars on the tour propose new presentations late in the Fall, usually around October, for events starting in late February or early March. Over time the schedule develops a rhythm — several events in the late Winter / early Spring, then a bit of a lull during the Summer (with the exception of UberConf, one of the big “destination” events), then a burst of activity from September/October until the end of the year. Most of the cities are the same each year, so you expect to go to Madison in March and Chicago in October, for example. Some cities, like Boston, Minneapolis, and Reston, VA (outside of Washington, DC) you visit twice, once in the Spring and once in the Fall.

As a speaker, the first couple of shows each year are tough because that’s when you debut new talks. The subject matter might be new, or the style of presentation, or both, and you’re never quite sure how they will be received until you’ve given them a couple of times. Also, the timing is not set right away. All NFJS talks are 90 minutes, so speakers develop a feel for that amount of time, and after a few years you know how to plan a talk to fit a block that size, but still, the first few shows are challenging while you figure out the pacing.

Of course, that’s not supposed to be obvious to the attendees. The Madison, WI event is always one of the first shows each year, as it was this weekend. As far as the attendees know, it’s their only show, and we’re supposed to be at the top of our game. The fear associated with that provides a lot of energy, but still, producing several new talks the first weekend is stressful.

In Madison, I was scheduled to give the following talks:

• Latest Java Best Practices

• Java Testing with JUnit 5 and Mockito 3

• Kotlin Fundamentals

• Mental Bookmarks and the Fractal Nature of Success

• Key Gradle Concepts and Practices

• Beyond Managing Your Manager

If you’ve followed this newsletter for a while, some of those will look familiar. The Kotlin talk is just an update on the Kotlin talks I’ve been giving for a couple of years now, and since my Kotlin Cookbook came out in December, I have plenty of source material to draw upon for good examples. No problems there.

I’ve also given a JUnit 5 talk several times over the past year, and one of my semi-regular Safari online courses is a Mockito talk, so blending those was mostly a question of fitting the required time.

The Gradle talk was new, but it was based on my experience giving Gradle talks at previous NFJS conferences, as well as teaching the Introduction to Gradle course for Gradle, Inc. every couple of months (the next event being in March). Once again, some revisions were needed, but the real challenge was that I have more to talk about than time to deliver it.

The Java Best Practices talk was a distillation of all the major changes made to Java since version 8. I had to scramble for that one, because I decided to show them the new features coming next month in Java 14 (like the enhanced switch statement, text blocks, and records), and coaxing my IDE and SDK installations to work with those was more of a challenge than I expected. Still, I got everything to work eventually, so that one went well, too.

That leaves the Mental Bookmarks talk and Managing Your Manager. The former is the same talk I’ve given over the last year or two, but I did make some changes in how I covered the topics. At this particular show, however, I got the opportunity to deliver it as a keynote address after dinner on the first day. The keynote is only supposed to be an hour, and that talk was designed with that in mind, so once again I was in good shape.

Finally, I come to “Beyond” Managing Your Manager. I’ve been working on a book for Pragmatic Programmers called Managing Your Manager for over a year now, which has been interrupted by changes in editors and the fact I got wrapped up in my Kotlin book last year and had to finish that one before I could spend a lot of time on this one. Several years ago I gave my original Managing Your Manager talk repeatedly, both at NFJS conferences and others. In order to get it back on the schedule, I threw that word “Beyond” into the title, as though I had more to say on the subject now.

(Was it also a subtle Batman Beyond reference? Not officially, no. But of course that’s all I think about every time I see the title.)

I really struggled with it. I knew what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t seem to find a decent way to say it. In fact (and I really shouldn’t admit this), I didn’t figure out how to structure that talk until a few hours before I was supposed to deliver it. That’s when I finally realized what I wanted to do, and rewrote the whole talk accordingly. My only concern, once again, was length. I thought I had too much to say to fit the allotted time.

So when the last time slot in the conference rolled around — 4:30 pm on Saturday — I was ready, if a bit nervous about length. I wanted to start right away, but there was a complication:

The room was empty. Nobody was there.

(I was tempted to take a picture of the empty room to insert here, but I rather like the idea of asking you to imagine an empty room instead. Seems more appropriate somehow.)

The two-day NFJS events are intense, with five talks a day, plus a keynote and an expert panel, and people get tired. Plus there were five parallel tracks, so attendees had lots of choices. Finally, it was Saturday night in the big city, and for Wisconsin, Madison is a big city. They call it Mad Town for a reason.

For any or all of those reasons or possibly others, the room stubbornly persisted in staying empty. That means I gave the best talk I’ve ever done. It was awesome, at least as far as anyone knows, because I was the only one there.

If a speaker gives a talk in an empty room, does he make a sound? For invoicing purposes, absolutely. :)

For the record, in my ten years speaking on the tour, that’s only the second time that’s happened to me. The other was also the last talk of the conference, but it happened to fall on St. Patrick’s Day in Boston, so I wasn’t exactly shocked when that happened.

The good news is that I now have a lot more say in the book, so I can finally, at long last, get back to writing it. I’m sure my editor will be relieved to hear that.

Last week:

• Functional Java, online on the O’Reilly Learning Platform

• Spring and Spring Boot, online on the O’Reilly Learning Platform

• NFJS conference in Madison, WI.

This week:

• Reactive Spring, online on the O’Reilly Learning Platform

• Kotlin and Spring, online on the O’Reilly Learning Platform

• Writing more of the Managing Your Manager book