Tales from the jar side, Week of April 30 - May 5, 2019
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of April 30 - May 5, 2015. This week I taught an onsite Grails class and finally attended an annual get-together of I.T. geeks known as Hacker B&B.
In an earlier newsletter (from Feb 3, http://tinyletter.com/KousenIT/letters/tales-from-the-jar-side-week-of-feb-3-feb-10) I talked about my history with Grails and the Banner product, which is used to manage many academic environments. I spent that week in Pasadena, CA, teaching a class for a couple of local colleges. This week I got to re-visit another school where I'd taught the same class: Clemson University in Clemson, SC. They asked me back because they'd heard that Ellucian (the company behind Banner) was finally going to update their Grails implementation from version 2 to version 3. I now had a chance to talk about the changes that had been introduced in Grails 3, which came out a little over four years ago (March 31, 2015, to be precise).
Yes, Grails 3 came out four years ago. Yes, Banner as a product is way behind. In fact, the current version of Grails is the second release candidate of Grails 4, which I expect Banner to adopt sometime in the 2030s. Maybe.
The good news is that I got to visit my friends at Clemson. We spent three days talking about Grails. We wound up doing a lot more review than I expected, but that's because Banner does things its own way, and we needed to talk about what works and what doesn't in Grails 3. Of course, even before I got there they found out that the people doing the upgrade had run into problems, and that the tentative release date for the new modules isn't going to be until this Fall (if then), but I was still glad to go.
Like every visit I've ever made to the (American) South, the people were charming. The image of the south presented on television bears very little resemblance to what I actually encounter. Probably the best media example that comes to mind is the movie Doc Hollywood, where Michael J. Fox gets stranded in a small town in the south and basically falls in love with it. That's at least mildly close to what I experience.
(If you've never seen that movie, you're in for a treat. Michael J. Fox, Woody Harrelson, David Ogden Stiers with a very convincing southern accent, and many others in a great cast, with even a brief scene with George Hamilton. It's a bit too sweet and unrealistic, but fun.)
I can only image what people down there must think of New England, or worse, New Englanders. All brusque, abrasive, and constantly in a hurry I guess, which isn't true but maybe true enough.
Clemson is about as "south" as you can get, though it is a bit unusual in that it's a college town. Rumor has it they play a decent game of college football down there. Up here in Connecticut we really don't, but, then again, we do have an NFL team that's won six Super Bowls, which must count for something.
We also have the reigning World Series champions, who have actually won four titles since 2004 after going a rather long time without winning any. You might have heard about that, too.
Speaking of Connecticut, we have a women's college basketball team that's been a juggernaut for most of this century, though they lost (just barely) in the Final Four of the last three NCAA tournaments. That counts as a slump around here.
At any rate, I enjoyed my class in South Carolina as much as I always have. I have to admit that after doing all those half-day online classes, being in an actual classroom with actual students all day long was a bit of an adjustment. That group, however, is one of my favorites because they're good people with an excellent manager. The boss is an experienced woman from up north (mostly Michigan and New Jersey), who is very bright but also easy to underestimate. You only need to talk to her for ten minutes to realize how good she really is (especially for an academic environment, where the pace tends to be a bit more sedate), but I wouldn't be surprised if she'd encountered many foolish men who didn't realize who they were dealing with, at least at first. I'm very happy to say I'm not one of those idiots. :)
The only down side is that the same thing happened that seems to always happen when I teach Grails -- an exercise in my training materials I've been doing for years suddenly stopped working in the current version. Ugh. I know I say that a lot. Change is a big part of my business. Still, at least when Java changes or Android changes or even Gradle changes, they do a decent job documenting it. When Grails changes, they frequently don't tell anybody, at least not in any recognizable way.
I'm not a member of the core team, but I've been using Grails fairly steadily since 2008, and I wrote a whole book about Groovy (with a chapter on Grails). I even co-host a Groovy podcast where we talk about the latest developments in the Groovy-related ecosystem. My feeling is that if they're frequently surprising me by new things breaking, they've got a problem. Sometimes I really do worry about the future of the framework, but that's a question for another day. Fortunately I was able to fix the exercises where they ran into problems, and overall the class went quite well.
After the class, I flew from there to Raleigh, NC, to spend the weekend. A friend of mine has a house in the area and every year he and his wife host a big, multi-day party for many of their developer friends. I've never been able to attend, but this time my schedule lined up correctly, and I was already nearby (more or less), so I was out of excuses.
The event is called Hacker Bed and Breakfast (HBB), and the first rule of HBB is that whatever happens at HBB stays at HBB, so I really can't say much. Instead I'll comment on my own "issues", one of which is that while I've come to understand that I'm mostly an extravert, I still tend to avoid meeting with large groups of people.
At HBB, I knew I wasn't going to know too many people, and a few of the ones I expected to meet I find quite intimidating because they're so successful, not due to any interpersonal issues. I'm always reluctant to go to places like that. In fact, that's one thing I've always relied on my wife to help with -- she'll get me to go join a group of people when my inclination is always to say no and stay home. Unfortunately, she wasn't available this time.
The result is that even though my flight to NC landed on Thursday afternoon, I didn't actually go over to the party until nearly dinner time on Friday. It took me that long to work up the nerve to leave the hotel, even though I knew everyone would be friendly and I'd almost certainly have a good time. I just didn't want to face them.
The good news is I got a fair amount of work done on the Kotlin book during my procrastination. The better news is that when I finally made it to the party, it was as good as I knew it would be. Sometimes it's just hard to get out of my own way.
So of course on Saturday and Sunday I knew to just go right over in the morning, right? No artificial, unnecessary delays based on non-existent, unrealistic concerns?
Yeah, right. An old Jonathan Swift quote that comes up a lot these days is, "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into." I guess that goes for me as well. Then I had some "stomach issues" that meant I stayed in the hotel on Saturday, but I did manage to make it over there for all day on Sunday. I'm putting that in the win column. :)
I had a good time with the people there and I'll probably go again next year, but that's about all I have to say about it this year. Next week I get back to the online classes again, and work more on the book(s).
Last week:
Grails 3 class at Clemson University
Hacker Bed and Breakfast in Raleigh/Durham, NC
Next week:
Spring and Spring Boot on Safari
Reactive Spring on Safari
Mockito and the Hamcrest Matchers on Safari