Tales from the jar side: A Groovy Podcast, Upcoming presentations, and Dealing with Pain
Yeah, this week was tough
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of August 23 - 30, 2020. This week I recorded a new episode of the Groovy Podcast, worked on a video course on Mockito, and wrote a bit more on my Managing Your Manager book…
… oh, who am I kidding? This was a hard week, and way less productive than I’d hoped.
So there was this vicious gang of biker ninjas…
… attacking a helpless playground full of puppies and babies and I felt I had to intervene, and while I eventually emerged victorious, during the battle I hurt my shoulder.
Not buying that? Okay, how about this? I was pitching out of jam I inherited in the bottom of the 9th, and while I did manage to strike out the side, my left rotator cuff suffered the consequences.
Oh, wait, you might know I’m right handed, which is the only unlikely part of that story.
Fine, let’s try this. I was getting out of bed Tuesday morning and I tried to throw back the covers with my left hand, but they were tucked in, so I wound up spraining my rotator cuff in the process.
(Hangs head in shame.)
Yeah, that’s closer to what actually happened. But this is 2020. Didn’t the possibility of encountering biker ninjas attacking puppies and babies seem plausible for a moment? Was your first thought to wonder if the babies were wearing masks and social distancing?
The results, however, were the same. By late in the day on Tuesday I could no longer lift my arm, and on Wednesday just reaching for the keyboard was painful. I finally gave up and saw the doctor on Thursday, which is how I know I have a sprained rotator cuff. Ouch. Getting old sucks, though I guess it beats the alternative.
The doctor put me on a pretty good anti-inflammatory, so my shoulder is slowly getting better, but it made it hard to be productive this week. That and all the chaos, horror, and massive illegality that spewed out of the GOP convention and the Trump administration this week (but I repeat myself) — no, I’m not going to rant about politics here. Anyone who isn’t painfully aware of the abuses this week is actively trying to avoid knowing, and the rest of us are just trying to survive.
Speaking of actual heroes
I was very sad to hear about Chadwick Boseman passing away this week. I knew he played Jackie Robinson in 42 and James Brown in Get on Up, but I didn’t know much about him until he played Black Panther in the Marvel cinematic universe. Somehow he managed to make several movies while dealing with colon cancer.
My injury this week was nothing, but it reminded me of two things:
Pain hurts, and chronic pain is distracting even when it isn’t flaring up.
Pain is exhausting.
The fact that Boseman was able to play such physically demanding roles while undergoing treatment simply amazes me. I watched my father undergo cancer treatment for four years, and it’s an incredible ordeal. To do your job under those circumstances requires strength beyond anything I can imagine.
I respect his right to privacy in not saying anything, of course, but knowing what he was fighting adds a new layer of meaning to his performances. I’m simply in awe.
I can’t share his movies, but I can remind you of his very funny appearance on Saturday Night Live as T’Challa.
The world lost a brilliant and talented man, who set an example for us all.
Groovy Podcast
On the positive side, I did manage to record a Groovy Podcast this week. I’d been hoping to do one for a while now, but coordinating schedules has been very difficult. The impetus was finally provided by Szymon Stepniak, who acted as a co-host this time.
Here is the YouTube version:
We also store an audio-only version on PodBean, which is then made available to podcast players through an RSS feed.
Even with our planning, we still hit a conflict. My long-time co-host Baruch Sadogursky had to give a conference presentation during our talk, so he only stuck with us for the first few minutes. He managed to drop the bombshell that his company, JFrog, filed for an IPO this week. According to the news articles, the company could be valued as much as $2 billion.
I don’t know much about IPOs, but I think that means two things:
Baruch Sadogursky is about to become our newest tech billionaire.
If I buy one share of JFrog stock, I’ll be his new boss.
Since he’s prohibited by law from discussing issues related to the IPO, I’m going to assume both of those are true until he tells me otherwise.
By the way, Szymon has a new video, on using the GraalVM native image tool to run Groovy scripts:
It’s excellent, as usual.
I have the following Groovy script lying around, which really just processes dates and times from Java’s java.time package.
Maybe I should try to use the GraalVM native-image compiler on it.
The current output is:
There are 65 days until the election
That's 0 years, 2 months, and 4 daysSigh.
Upcoming Events
This week I’m speaking at a London Groovy & Grails User Group virtual meetup:
I’m looking forward to this. As programming languages go, Groovy has always been my first love. It’s great to get back to it again.
This week is also the GIDS developer summit for Java. I’m giving talks on Java Testing Skills with JUnit 5 and Mockito 3, Latest Java Best Practices, and Functional Modern Java:
Because of time zones, my Java Testing talk is at 6am EDT, my Latest Java talk is at 7am EDT, but then my Functional Java workshop starts at 8pm (that’s right — AM for the talks, PM for the workshop), all on September 3 (the tweet says September 4 because of time zones again). That ought to be fun.
At their events in November I’ll be talking about Groovy 3, giving a Kotlin workshop, presenting my Mental Bookmarks talk, and finally giving a workshop called Beyond Managing Your Manager. Much more about those as we get closer to them.
If you’re interested, you can see my entire schedule here.
This week:
Groovy Podcast Episode 80, S04E06
Just getting through the week, frankly
Next week:
Spring and Spring Boot on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Presentation on Groovy 3 at the London Groovy & Grails User Group
Three presentations at GIDS Java Live 2020