Tales from the jar side: A new Medium post, Mozart's Requiem, and a Kotlin upgrade
So far no one has told me my newsletter has "too many notes," though they might very well be thinking that this week.
Welcome, jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of June 20 - 27, 2021. This week I taught a course on Reactive Spring on the O’Reilly Learning Platform, and two NFJS Virtual Workshops, one a Deep Dive Into Spring and the other on Spring MVC. I also had my first article associated with my book Help Your Boss Help You published on the Pragmatic Programmers publication on the Medium platform.
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Going Large on Medium
The publisher of my book Help Your Boss Help You is known as The Pragmatic Bookshelf, though I’ve always called them the Prags, after their original name, the Pragmatic Programmers. They were founded by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas back in 1999 when they wrote a book (entitled The Pragmatic Programmer, go figure), discovered the poor state of technology in the publishing industry at the time, and decided to fix it themselves. I find this highly ironic, because while they leapt ahead of everyone else, they then got locked into a mix of technologies that is now horribly behind the other tech publishing companies that carry my other books (Manning and O’Reilly Media). That’s known as the First Mover problem, where you establish a competitive advantage and then fall behind as others innovate around you.
The Prags have a publication on Medium entitled (of all things), The Pragmatic Programmers. They have about 13K subscribers, so it’s a good way for me to reach a much broader audience for my book. I’m working with the editor, Margaret Eldridge, on writing a series of articles to be published there.
(So far my relationship with Margaret is a very good one, so now I’m going to potentially damage it beyond repair by referring to her as Meg. Or Peggy. Either way, this is a test to see if she actually does read this newsletter. Hi Peg!)
(If there’s no newsletter from me next week, you’ll know she does read this newsletter and that I’m paying for that little aside. You’d think after being married as long as I have that I wouldn’t intentionally cause myself pain, but apparently I still have much to learn, assuming I survive.)
(BTW, I once referred to my friend Trisha Gee as Patty just to see how she would react, and all I can say is it’s a good thing I had a running head start. Please learn from my bad example.)
Anyway, my first article came out on Medium this week. It’s called Hacks: Your Boss Is Not Your Friend and can be found at this link, and also as the subject of this tweet:
The Hacks in the title refers to the recent HBO Max show of the same name, starring Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder. I start off the article by making two observations about the show, which are:
Jean Smart is brilliant, and this part gives her a chance to really shine. Seriously, she steals every scene she’s in, and she’s already the star of the show. It’s not like she wasn’t already well-known, but if ever the term break-out star could be applied to someone in their late 60s who you already know, this is the actor and this is the role.
Over and over I felt compelled to recite a phrase that has practically become one of my mantras: Your boss is not your friend.
I know you’ll be shocked to hear that the article came out longer than I intended. Medium somehow lists it as an “11 minute read,” which I find highly amusing. Not 10 minutes; not 15; no, it’s 11, for when you need that extra push over the top.
It occurs to me now that instead of going with Spinal Tap, I could have referenced Eleven from Stranger Things. After all, it would be nice to occasionally make a pop culture reference from this century, though I guess Hacks already qualifies. Oh well. If the stats still say 11 minutes next week, maybe I’ll go there instead. Honestly, though, any excuse to include the “These go to 11 scene” is a good one.
I hope you enjoy the article, especially if you are already a Medium member. Medium is a blogging site that I have mixed feelings about. They do provide a good service, but they only let you read a limited number of articles a month before they want you to subscribe. I always resisted that, but the Android people publish tons of information there (why is it always Android that causes me issues?), and when the Prags started their publication, I finally gave in and joined. After all, what I really need in my life is yet another subscription service.
Still, the content from the Prags is solid and they reach a much bigger audience than I normally do, so look for future articles from me there, roughly once a week or so. I’ve already got my next one written and a couple ideas for more.
My article currently has 9 claps, which is what they call likes at Medium. In case you were wondering, when I mouse over the clapping hands it says, “you cannot applaud your own article,” not that I would ever do something so self-referential.
Finally, I should mention that the book has finished its copyedit phase, so the text is officially complete. It now goes out to layout, which should be pretty trivial given that I don’t have any code in it, and then off to the printers.
Rock Me Amadeus
I went down a bit of a rabbit hole this week in movies and television. I mentioned Hacks above, which got me thinking about other HBO shows involving Jean Smart. In case you didn’t know, she also played Helen Fahey (Mare’s mother) in Mare of Easttown and Laurie Blake in the Watchmen TV miniseries (as opposed to the Zack Snyder movie of the same name). Given that trio, some people are referring to HBO as the Jean Smart Repertory Company, which is pretty funny. I’d been planning to rewatch the Watchmen (mild pun intended) for a while. I liked it the first time around, but it’s a puzzle story, so I wondered how it would hold up if I already knew the puzzle.
It turned out, quite well. The characters are well done, the acting is superb, and I really love the plot twist involving Hooded Justice which I won’t spoil here. Also, every major scene involving Adrian Veidt (played by Jeremy Irons) had the music from the Lacrymosa movement of Mozart’s Requiem in the background, which I’ve always loved.
(Aside: If you want to hear a great rock variation based on that movement, Evanescence included one on their album The Open Door. You can watch a YouTube video of it here, where the video is just the music played over the album cover. Still, any reason to listen to Amy Lee sing is a good one.)
Watching the miniseries and hearing the Requiem again led me to the movie Amadeus, which features brilliant performances by Tom Hulce as Mozart and F. Murray Abraham as Salieri. Both actors were nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, which, ironically, was won by Abraham — Salieri triumphs over Mozart at last.
Look, I know the movie plays fast and loose with history. It’s no doubt closer to reality than the movie 300 (heck, anything would be), but the idea that Salieri had anything to do with Mozart’s death was an idea from Pushkin that had been debunked for years. As the trivia at IMDB reports, the only real outcome of that theory is the great line, “Salieri didn’t murder Mozart, but Pushkin for sure murdered Salieri.”
The movie is enjoyable, especially for the theme of an artist dealing with his own jealousy when he encounters a true genius.
That part I get. With my educational background and experience, I’ve met many brilliant people in my life. The biggest lesson I’ve learned from them is that no amount of genius justifies treating people badly.
BTW, for an example of badly behaved genius, see the Sylvia Nasar book A Beautiful Mind about the mathematician John Nash. The movie of that name is a highly sanitized version of his life and especially his relationship with his wife*.
*Did you know the real John Nash had multiple affairs and even had a son out of wedlock with one of his mistresses? Somehow that didn’t make it into the movie.
I usually call the movie A Beautiful Mind the Ron Howard-est of all Ron Howard movies for that reason. The John Nash that emerges from Nasar’s biography is a much darker, much nastier person, whose arrogance and contempt are often blamed on poor social skills combined with genius. I don’t buy it. Again, as far as I’m concerned, no amount of brilliance justifies treating anyone as less important or less valuable than you. Plus, I know many people with poor social skills (after all, I’m in the IT field) who only treat people badly inadvertently and are always sorry afterwards. That’s very different from what Nash was like, at least before his mental illnesses took him.
I must admit, however, I still love the movie with Russell Crowe. Ron Howard really does know how to tell an affecting, beautiful love story, even if it didn’t really happen that way.
To conclude this exercise in free association, I’ll just say I have one real-life connection to the Mozart Requiem. Back in the 1990s when I was taking voice lessons on a regular basis, my teacher got me an audition as a soloist with the local Connecticut group the Plainville Choral Society. They were planning a performance of the Requiem with full orchestra. The music is for chorus and orchestra, and a few movements involve four soloists (soprano, mezzo, tenor, bass) in duets and quartets as well as with the rest of the chorus. That turned out to be one of my few paying gigs as an operatic tenor.
I know it’s supposed to be “pics or it didn’t happen,” but this was back in 1998 and I didn’t even have a cell phone yet, much less one that could take video. I couldn’t find any recordings online, but I did find this short news article in the Hartford Courant that at least referred to the upcoming performance (with no names included). From the archive:
How did I do? As I recall, the best word to describe it is fine. I did the job, sounded good enough, and didn’t make any (obvious) mistakes. The bass was outstanding, as was the soprano, and if there were any reviews those two should have gotten the praise. The chorus did very well, too. I was good enough not to be out of my league, but Pavarotti had nothing to worry about (which pretty much describes my entire operatic career). Of course, Pavarotti wasn’t there, so I didn’t have to go all Salieri on him, which is just as well.
New Kotlin Version
I ought to say at least something technical this week. It turns out that a new version of Kotlin was released:
None of the new features affected me, but I did take the time to update the GitHub repository for my Kotlin Cookbook, as well as my repository that mixes Groovy, Java, and Kotlin. Neither update required any significant changes, which was great.
Sometimes The Students Are Funnier Than Me
During one my Spring virtual workshops this week, the students introduced me to a couple of entertaining websites. One is called the URL Lengthener, for when your URL is too short for your liking.
FYI, here is the entire lengthened URL for this newsletter: https://aaa.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com/a?áaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂáaaÂåAæãæãæaæââÁáÆáÆåÂåäåÅåÂåÆæäæâåäåÅáÅæâæäåáæâæãåàåâåÂáÅåâåÆåÄ . Good luck rendering that, newsletter readers. :)
The other website they suggested is perfect for Java developers, especially Spring Framework people who never met a class name too long. It’s called Enterprisify your Java Class Name. I’d seen it before, but it’s still funny. The idea is your start out with the name of a class, hit the Enterprisify! button a few times, and recoil in horror at the result. For example, this:
After a few clicks, became this:
And you can go way, way further than that. Yikes, but enjoy. 😊
Finally, A Teaser
I mentioned earlier in this newsletter that my book Help Your Boss Help You doesn’t have any source code, so the layout phase will be easy. Another side-effect is that the book makes a good candidate for an audiobook version.
I talked to the people at the Prags, and while they have a few audiobooks in their catalog, they’ve decided not to produce them anymore. They therefore agreed to give me the rights to create and market one myself.
I’ve done some research on how to do that, and now that the text is officially finished, I can dig into that project. For the record (no pun intended this time), I’ll be reading it myself, so hopefully some of that vocal training I mentioned earlier will help. Please don’t expect too much — remember, my voice is fine, not great. On the other hand, the audiobook will provide definitive confirmation that my last name really is pronounced “cousin,” like the relative.
I’m sure I’ll have updates in future newsletters.
As a reminder, you can see all my upcoming training courses on the O’Reilly Learning Platform here and all the upcoming NFJS Virtual Workshops here.
Last week:
Reactive Spring, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Deep Dive Into Spring, an NFJS Virtual Workshop
Spring MVC, ditto
This week:
Upgrade to Modern Java, an NFJS Virtual Workshop
Ken, will you audiobook be available on vinyl? :)