The Hugo static-site generator can work with data files in the form of JSON, yaml or toml. If you place these in the data directory you can access them within Hugo templates (including Hugo shortcodes, which are called directly from a Markdown file) by saying .Site.Data.<filename>, and then use the contents as part of your static-site build. This feature came in handy for the AtomicKotlin.com site, because the ebook deployment service I’m using (Stepik.

I’ve been experimenting with different forms of events for many years now. Mostly this has been in the form of self-organizing conferences, but in recent years I’ve tried going further, to even less structure. I’ve held a number of “developer retreats” where we had a theme that everyone focused on, and those have been quite interesting and valuable. To be honest, what I really wanted to try with the developer retreats is zero structure.

William Gross has posted Give Away Your Code, But Never Your Time, a potential and/or partial solution to the problem of funding open source projects, which I offered a solution for here. I’ve since heard from people pointing out projects that have actually used the “bounty” approach – I was unintentionally describing something that already exists. We’ve been solving all these other problems around open source, but not the essential one: how can people get paid for developing open-source software.

I found Gophercon to be valuable and it restarted my interest in the Go language. I’m currently working my way through The Go Programming Language Phrasebook and plan to explore ways to call Go from Python (described later in this post). If I hadn’t been attending with my friend Luciano Ramalho it would have been a different experience. The conference is clearly commercial and I had a strong sense of having my experience decided for me.

For many years I’ve been getting requests for some kind of sequel to Thinking in Java, 4th Edition. Over two years ago, I finally decided to “pull together something quickly.” After all, how much time have I spent writing about the language? I should be getting pretty fast by now. Self-delusion knows no bounds. No matter how many books I write, every one seems to take longer than the previous ones, not shorter.

This year I repeated my strategy of “Don’t go to any recorded sessions,” and also did more volunteering (one of these was at the green room, and again one of the session chairs failed to show up so you’ll see me introducing three of the talks). Dinners In the past I’ve kind of stumbled into dinner groups, but not always. This time I made more of an effort and was rewarded with dinner friends every night.