05 August 2017

I just back from Gr8Conf in Minneapolis last week and I had a great time. In case you missed it, I led a three hour workshop on Groovy and the slides and code are available (I did some practice screen-casts on youtube as well). Although I was pretty nervous leading up to it, I think it went really well. To those who attended: Thank you for listening and asking such great questions, I hope you enjoyed it! This was my first such workshop and everyone was super nice, so thank you again. I look forward to doing talks and/or workshops again in the future.

There were tons of great talks at Gr8Conf and although I didn’t get to go to all of them (I wish I could) I learned a lot and loved the energy from the conference in general. The “hallway discussions” and lunches were great as well.

In other news, “Learning Groovy” is now featured on the official Groovy website, and was featured in "Groovy Calamari"! I can’t stress enough how thrilled I am about this! Meanwhile, thank you to my company the SDG for supporting me in all these endeavors as well as just being a great company.

Modern Java: Second Edition is still in the works and I’ve expanded it to include Java 9. I’m sorry this one has been in production for so long. I hope to get it wrapped up before the final release of Java 9 in September. :-) There’s been a lot going on in the past year …but I won’t make excuses. The good thing is the final product is going to be great. With all the new stuff in Java 9, plus more experience with Java 8 and other things, it should be interesting. I’m also mulling over next books, but nothing to announce yet.

I met and talked with tons of people at Gr8Conf, but one in particular is Eric Helgeson @nulleric. If you’re at all interested in Grails 3, check out his book, Practical Grails 3. The cool thing about it is he’s selling his book completely on his own and the book covers the app he wrote to sell the book.

Also, I’m still working on GrooCSS and have tons of ideas for it.

Thanks for reading! Hopefully I’ll write again soon…