Nailed it, again
How creativity, family, and fun help energize technical communities
Invest in your making your community fun
This is for folks who work in tech and participate in technical community conferences and meetups. If you spend a lot of time prepping for, networking, and engaging with your community there are two things I can recommend that have helped me.
- Have fun
- Include your family whenever possible
Fun is infectious. Folks are more likely to engage in conversations when there is something fun happening around them.
Spending time away from family is tough. In the past two years, I have started bringing my family to conferences. This solved a few problems for me. I didn’t miss them. I could also introduce them to folks, whose names they may have heard, but had never met in person.
What I didn’t expect was that my wife would wind up creating her own brand and style in the Java community. My wife loves getting her hair and nails done with colorful designs. She came up with the idea to add the Java Duke mascot to her nails, and has been adding another Java Duke with each Java conference she attends. Technically, she has been to five conferences now, but is only up to four Java Dukes/Duchesses on each hand. This is for a very simple reason. Java uses zero based indexing. This is my story, and I’m nailing it, I mean, sticking to it.
The picture above is of her current nails for the conference we are attending next week called dev2next. My wife got her toe nails done as well. It took a total of five hours for the nail technician to finish both the hands and toes with all of the hand drawn artistry. The craftwork is simply amazing. This is also a serious commitment to preparing to have fun at a technical conference.
I’m giving a talk at dev2next with my good friend Vladimir Zakharov on Data Frames in Java.
I highly recommend checking out his recent blog comparing how Data Frame performance compare with the One Billion Row Challenge if you haven’t already.
This is the first time my wife has added the Eclipse Collections orange iteration loop to her nails. I am thankful to have gotten two thumbs up after 20 years of working on Eclipse Collections. I’m currently working on finishing my first technical book, on Eclipse Collections, so folks can feel free to ask me about it. I may bring it up in conversation anyway.
If you’re attending dev2next and see us at the conference, don’t be shy, and say hello. Take a selfie with Duke and Duchess on nails. Feel free to ask me for an Eclipse Collections sticker as well.
Thanks for reading!
I am the creator of and committer for the Eclipse Collections OSS project, which is managed at the Eclipse Foundation. Eclipse Collections is open for contributions. I am writing a book this year about Eclipse Collections. Stay tuned!
