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New! Landing page for Getting to Know IntelliJ IDEA

Background image of the colours in the Getting to Know IntelliJ IDEA book

One of the things you have to do as a self published author is marketing. I mean, obviously you have to do EVERYTHING as a self published author, that's the thing.

I've just finished creating a landing page for Getting to Know IntelliJ IDEA. It's one of those things that should be "easy" and "quick", and yet after all the work we put into the book, we never got around to it.

Fortunately, now it's a few months after our official launch, we have a lot more information to put on the landing page, like: videos, interviews, and recommendations from people who liked the book.

It's also yet another example of how "easy" and "quick" turns into a morning's-worth of work, and, more than that, self-doubt and dithering on where to place things and how to present information. It's a morning of Googling how to do things in WordPress.

There's still a lot to do, not least of all removing all the "Trisha Gee" site branding and making it into a proper standalone page. But it does the job.

Anyway, take a look. And buy the book!

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Gradle Gradle Gradle, with Gradle we’re going to play

I know I owe you a blog post1, and today I actually have the time, energy and inclination to write it. It's not often those three factors coincide.

I have already done the Great Reveal about the job I am doing now that I'm no longer at JetBrains.

The question I wanted to answer (if only to remind myself later in life!) is why?

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Writing A Book Is Hard

Getting to Know IntelliJ IDEA book cover

Hey Helen, I know you were disappointed you missed out on a chance to contribute to 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know, do you want to write a book with me?

Trisha Gee, Spring 2020

That's how it started.

It's that easy.

[Maniacal laughter in the background]

I have long wanted to write a book. It didn't really matter what type of book (novel, technical) or on which topic (I have opinions on everything). I wanted My Name On The Front Of A Book. I wanted to be An Author. I knew Helen also wanted to be An Author, and that by working together we could keep each other accountable and actually do this.

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What’s Next for Trisha?

Right. It's about time I started looking for my next job/gig/source-of-income. I'll be honest, 9 months of sabbatical has not been as restful as I had hoped, but apparently writing two books and taking on the ownership of a restaurant are not restful activities. Who knew?

Anyway this blog post is because it's too hard to explain in 140 characters (OK fine 280, but I'm old school) what I'm looking for. There are three main paths I'm exploring:

  1. Developer Advocacy
  2. Engineering
  3. Consulting & Training
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It’s not you, it’s them

I believe in asking for help, for being vulnerable about the things we don't know, especially if we've been in industry a long time. We can't possibly know it all, and it's important to normalise that.

So I wrote a blog post about the thing I was struggling with. Yes, it also had the lovely positive of asking The Internet to solve my problem.

Shocked I was, shocked (no, I was not) to receive responses suggesting that perhaps I was a bit rubbish as a developer.

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“Simple” Network Connections with Java – a problem

I've been playing with NIO for network stuff to see if/how I want to update the code for Head First Java 3rd Edition. The original code used Sockets and Readers/Writers, and I thought there must be a more "modern" way to do this so I've tried updating it a few different ways. I got it working using SocketChannel and ByteBuffer (eventually!), but the ByteBuffer stuff is just too fiddly to use to teach people basic network IO in Java. After turning to Twitter for the answers (Twitter Driven Development) I had what looked like a promising hybrid approach.

However, I've run into a problem with using the Channels factory methods to provide this nice bridge between NIO (SocketChannels) and classic streaming IO.

I'm posting the code here because you can't post source code this long on Twitter! Maybe someone can help me.

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