Scheduling Social Media Posts

I recently became responsible for managing the NYJavaSig social media. I’ve been using TweetDeck for scheduling Twitter posts. Today I researched scheduling Facebook and Linked In posts. Here’s what I learend

Buffer

Buffer.com was recommended to me. I like it. It is free for up to three channels/connections. There’s a limit on how many posts you can have in the queue at the same time, but it is way higher than I would need.

Once I registered, I immediately dropped the Pro trial so I could see what it would look like for me. Connecting Facebook was pretty easy. I had to sign in with Facebook to connect. It got dropped once and I reconnected. But after that, it seemed happy.

LinkedIn was tricker and I encountered two problems:

  • On the dashboard, there were buttons to connect instagram and twitter. So I though the limit of three social media channels was only those three.
  • I later learned you can click “manage social channels” and get access to your LinkedIn Account or a LinkedIn Page. However, it is not possible to schedule posts into a Group because LinkedIn has disabled that API

HootSuite

I learned about HootSuite from a linked in article about scheduling posts. I had two problems

  • HootSuite wanted permission to see my contacts. Why? This is not needed in order to post on my behalf. I didn’t want to give that.
  • It is no longer possible to schedule posts into a Group anyway because LinkedIn has disabled that API. (Yes the same problem as Buffer.)

Conclusion

I decided to split and use TweetDeck for Twitter and Buffer for Facebook. I may consolidate later. But I might not. I really like TweetDeck for Twitter!

blogging from JDConf online

I blogged a few sessions from Microsoft’s JDConf. I’m referring to it as synchronous blogging rather than live blogging. Because online with no live Q&A doesn’t feel live to me.

This is the first time I’ve tried to live/synchronous blog from home. I decided to try it because sessions were only 25 minutes and I wasn’t attending a lot of them. Also, some were topics I’d heard before which made it easier.

Like many things, I found it harder to do it at home. While I have two screens, they aren’t ideally positioned for this. And I found myself more distracted than at a conference. More importantly, blogging helps me process/network. I felt like that was lacking because the backchannel (twitter) was so quiet.

Blog posts

AMA from Microsoft JDConf

Moderator: Bruno @brunoborges

Panel: George (@gdams_), Kirk (@kcpeppe), Bernhard (@lewurm), Monica (@mon_beck), @Charlie (@crgracie), Martijn (@karianna), Scott (@coolcsh)

This felt more like a panel than an AMA to be because (as far as I can tell), the questions all came from the moderator rather than the audience.

Note: If any of the panelists read this, these are my notes, not a transcript 🙂

  • What would you bring from Java to .NET?
    • Scott: can configure settings for performance. Bruno did something impressive “turning dials” to tune a benchmark and make a huge difference.
  • How tune JVM?
    • Monica: JVM provides a lot of logs. ex: GC log over time shows patterns
  • What about JFR (Java flight recorder) events?
    • Martijn: Used to be commercial, now open source. In built telemetry.
  • ARM
    • Monica: COGS = cost of goods sold. More scaling across threads now.
    • Bernhard: Using ARM64 for 4 years. Before that, mobile phones.
    • Charlie: Not easy to do Java on hardware. Opportunities for less objects on heap. Don’t need to have chip do it for us.
    • Monica; Stack allocation is all about allocating into registers. ARM has more registers available
    • Kirk: Profilers don’t see so even sluggishness.
    • Monica: Some optimizations on memory channels. Buffer size matters.
    • Scott: ARM has Linux support
    • Scott: .NET can allocate memory inside a function on stack (instead of heap). Lets you micro-optimize
    • All: Both .NET and Java have “Unsafe” feature. Smalltalk too [good to know such things develop independently!]
  • OpenJDK
    • George: Java 11 getting more downloads than Java 8. 200 million downloads last week (across all versions)
    • All: New name of AdoptOpenJDK is Eclipse Adoptium. Can never win on creating a good name
    • Scott: Name has to be valid in many countries
  • How is it being a Java developer at Microsoft?
    • Martijn: Leads Java Engineering group. Have a lot of JVM engineers so a lot of C/assembly/yaml.
    • Bernhard: Came from MS .NET team. Can’t write either language, but ARM!
    • Charlie: Worked on J9 until last year. Different JVM, but same things. Good to see another large company in OpenJDK community
    • Kirk: Hope is that more will be built-into JDK and less will require parameters. Will still need some flag because of different needs
    • Monica: JDK background, new to working with .NET team. Similarities across both because managed runtime.
    • Bernhard: JIT (just in time) is more advanced in Java than .NET.
    • George: Benefit from JDKs together. Don’t need to build same thing over and over.
  • Closing
    • All: A lot to learn across language communities