Tales from the jar side, week of Dec 30, 2018 -- Jan 6, 2019

Welcome back to the Kousen IT newsletter, entitled "Tales from the jar side"! (I'll explain that title in an upcoming newsletter. This one is already long enough.)

No more going on Safari (Books Online)

One event that occurred this week will somewhat affect my life and possibly yours: Apparently there's no such thing as Safari Books Online any more. If you follow this link, you are now redirected to the O'Reilly Learning Platform, and the word Safari is no longer anywhere to be found.

(I'm just assuming it'll be called the O'Reilly Learning Platform -- I don't see that written down anywhere either.)

I haven't seen any formal announcement about this, and I don't really expect to. I've often felt that of all the online providers, O'Reilly is the worst at marketing, and apparently that extends to their own systems as well. I guess that's okay, as long as all the old links work...

... which they didn't. The links to all my Grails video courses broke (Starting a Grails 3 Project, Working with Grails 3 Controllers and Services, Understanding the Grails 3 Domain Model, and Advanced Database and REST Principles). That's bad enough, but so did the links for my Managing Your Manager video (!) and the one called Learning Path: Reactive Spring (!). That last one is strange, because the individual video link for the Reactive Spring video itself still works.

I've told The Powers That Be about this, and hopefully all the links will be working again soon. I've been told the O'Reilly wants people to use the "Learning Path" links, so maybe those will be working soon. Of course, that doesn't help anyone who went to the wrong link. They don't know to check the other one. Sigh.

Update just before sending this newsletter: Some "learning path" versions appear to work. Learning Path: Managing Your Manager is fine, and the Grails ones work, but not the Reactive Spring.

O'Reilly sends a royalty statement at the beginning of each month, and once again my Spring Framework Essentials video outpaced everything else, as it has done since it was released way back in January of 2016. That's a full three years that video made more than double every other video. That's every month since it was released. Astonishing, especially because at this point it's getting pretty dated.

Speaking of that, I'm currently talking to O'Reilly about updating it by creating a new "Learning Path 2.0" that will combine an updated Spring and Spring Boot video course. I'll talk about it here when that happens.

One of the reasons I like recording for O'Reilly is that I don't have to do my own video processing. O'Reilly maintains recording studios in two locations (Sebastopol, CA and Boston, MA), and the Boston studio is just about a 1 1/2 hour train ride for me. As a No Fluff speaker (much more about that when the new seasons starts next month), I'm very comfortable speaking and live-coding in front of an audience, so recording videos at their studio is easy for me. That's probably why I currently have 17 video courses there, assuming those links above get fixed.

Managing Your Manager: First a talk, then a video, then a training course, then finally...

Speaking of "Managing Your Manager", I've been giving that talk on the NFJS tour for many, many years, and occasionally at other conferences. If you want to see a relatively short version of it, I gave it as a keynote at DevNexus back in 2015. At O'Reilly, in addition to the video version, I also teach a training class version of it every other month.

For years I've been threatening to turn that talk into a book, and now it looks like that will actually happen. I was talking to an editor at Pragmatic Programmers, and she helped me through the process of proposing it as a book. That process, incidentally, wound up requiring me to write huge sections of that talk as part of the proposal, so when it eventually did get accepted I was off to a decent start.

So that book project is underway, and this is the first time I've mentioned it publicly (or at least a publicly as this newsletter gets). I'll have much more to say about it in the coming weeks, but the "elevator pitch" is that the book assumes you are an employee not necessarily interested in entering the managerial ranks, but still having to deal with managers on a regular basis. The contents show you how to build a relationship with your boss based on concepts I call "constructive loyalty", that make it most likely you get what you want without having to sacrifice your own self-respect in the process.

The recommendations come from over 30 years of experience in the business world, dealing with managers in big companies and small, and showing you what I've learned. It's definitely evolving as I commit it to paper (pixels on a screen; whatever), but the responses to the talk have been very favorable.

Expect topics from the book to come up in this newsletter fairly often.

Geb (pronounced like the "g" in gif)

On Thursday, Baruch Sadogursky and I did a Groovy Podcast. That turned into a bit of a story, too. Late last year on an earlier podcast, Baruch Sadogursky (my co-host, who I shamed into subscribing to this newsletter during the actual recording of the podcast) and I talked about the Geb framework, which is a Groovy API for doing browser automation. I don't remember how it came up, but Baruch noticed that there hadn't been any commits to the project in quite some time.

(We really ought to plan some of these discussions ahead of time, but listeners to the podcast will know that our production values are about as minimal as we can get away with.)

I pointed out during that earlier podcast that we're supposed to say nice things about projects in the Groovy ecosystem, and that there could be any number of reasons for the project to be relatively inactive. Marcin Erdmann, the head of the project, actually replied and said that the project is pretty mature at this point, so not a lot needed to be done, though they expected to get back to it.

On this current podcast, I noticed that Geb had a new release, version 2.3. Baruch immediately speculated that we were the driving factor -- that somehow our mentioning the framework had triggered work on it. I was, as you might expect, quite skeptical. That lead to a brief discussion of paid influencers on YouTube.

(Related: The Top 10 highest paid "influencers" on YouTube, according to Forbes. Spoiler: I'm not one of them.)

As it turns out, after our latest podcast was released, a tweet from @Geb verified that our earlier speculation that the framework was inactive had actually caused them to work on it again. :)

My reply was a tweet that said that now that I know what real power is like, the next step is for us to build an island lair complete with sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads. I'll let you know how that project progresses.

Last week:

• No classes, but I did meet with two different editors and a co-author. One of those was for the Managing Your Manager book I described. The others I'll explain in upcoming newsletters.

• We did a Groovy Podcast, as mentioned above.

• We had dinner at the Marlborough Tavern for New Year's Eve. A picture is included below.

  

Next week:

• I'll be on "vacation" next week in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Every year a group of current and former NFJS speakers go to a resort with their spouses. This is the third time my wife and I have done so. Since I don't really feel like I'm on vacation unless I have a high-speed Internet connection, I'm sure I'll be keeping up on email and Twitter and doing some writing, at least until my wife puts her foot down.
  
  Note that the flights are a bit of a gamble. Because I need my frequent flyer miles, we're taking United. The only available United flight gives us a brief 40 minute layover in Houston, which is seriously risky. If we don't make the connection, I will not be happy with United. Now that I have all this power, maybe they'll help -- nah. Nothing will happen. Grr. Wish me luck.