Tales from the jar side: Compartmentalization, Gradle, and the Joys of watching Steph Curry
My goodness 2020 is taking a long time to go away
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of January 3 - 10, 2021. This week I taught a two-day course in Spring and Spring Boot and a two-day course on Functional Programming in Java, both on the O’Reilly Learning Platform.
So how was your week?
Wikipedia defines compartmentalization as “a subconscious psychological defense mechanism used to avoid cognitive dissonance, or the mental discomfort and anxiety caused by a person's having conflicting values, cognitions, emotions, beliefs, etc. within themselves.”
I don’t know; that almost makes it sound like a bad thing. All I know is that somehow I managed to shut out all the distractions this week and teach my classes, which was not easy. I’m sure Mr. Rogers would reward me with a sugar-free cookie as a result.
I needed to compartmentalize because, well, stuff happened this week.
I read the news today, oh boy
(I don’t mean anything by The Beatles reference, other than the “oh boy” part. Sorry if it means you now have A Day in the Life going through your head. I’ve been stuck with it in mine since I thought of this title yesterday.)
A big event happened this week. I’m sure you know what I’m referring to:
Yes, that’s the Bruce Eckel, author of Thinking in Java, among other books. He’s linking to a blog post he put together about the difficulties he experienced working with the Gradle build system.
Oh wait, that’s not the news you were expecting? I’ll get back to Gradle below, but instead I’ll start with this, which was posted on Wednesday:
Yes, we had a nasty case of insurrection here. And you thought COVID-19 was bad. (Which it is, but it is hard to do much about a deadly pandemic when the Capitol is being attacked, and that’s a sentence I never, ever thought I’d have to write.)
In last week’s newsletter I specifically said I wasn’t going to discuss politics here. Yeah, good luck with that. So here’s my brief take on current events, and then I’ll move on.
The situation as of January 9 (when this article was written), complete with options involving censure, impeachment, and section four of the 25th amendment is summarized very well here.
The “revolution” failed, but it scared a lot of very powerful, very wealthy people. that will have major consequences.
The whole world is watching how congress reacts and any additional “events” leading up to the inauguration. Powerful, scared people will take extreme steps not to be attacked again. For the revolutionaries, the element of surprise is officially lost.
The biggest problem is that Trump has zero impulse control, feels trapped and betrayed, and still can’t acknowledge he is wrong in any way. He also feels he has been unfairly cut off from his primary way of communicating with the world (Twitter, but all the other social networks as well). He won’t take that well.
That means something dramatic is likely to happen in the next few days. The rest of the government knows it and will be putting in place mechanisms to protect themselves (and hopefully the country).
The police (and, to a lesser extent, the National Guard and the FBI) have been embarrassed on national TV. They won’t take that well, either. Every single person identifiable from the riots will be tracked down and arrested. Very few of them will escape justice. As we’ve seen, only really wealthy people get away with crimes — the rest go to jail, or, at minimum, lose their jobs and are publicly shamed. They are going down.
I believe these rioters and going to discover that the entire weight of the government is coming down right on their necks, and if they’re stupid enough to try anything else, they’ll find out what the U.S. military can do. Everyone who violated the Capitol is in for a world of hurt, and if any of them attacks again, they will not survive it.
We’ll see what happens, but I am actually fairly optimistic about the results.
Speaking of banning Trump from Twitter (a very good move that buys us time), you might have seen this meme going around, with variations:
Also, a couple of cabinet members resigned on “moral grounds”. I thought this was a good response:
Let me not minimize this, though. Every day between now and January 20 is going to be difficult. It’s clear that those in power right now are not going to go willingly. Even though we’re in a period of transition, those falling out of favor will cause whatever trouble they can. But at least if you know something is going to be painful, you can prepare for it.
Clubber Lang in Rocky 3 predicted it:
By the way, if you had a lot of trouble being productive this week, I don’t blame you at all. If I’d been attending a class rather than teaching them, I would not have handled it well.
If you’re in a reading mood, let me link to two other essays that I found particularly informative this week:
The American Abyss, by Timothy Levin, a professor of history at Yale. The article talks about how the Republican party is now divided into “breakers” who want to destroy the system, and “gamers” use the distractions provided by the breakers to game the system into giving them what they want (power, tax cuts, conservative judges, etc). Trump is obviously a breaker. The definitive gamer is Mitch McConnell.
Separately, I want to call your attention to this thread, though I have to warn you it gets a bit … colorful … starting right from the first tweet:
Gradle Issues
Let’s get back to that “The Problem with Gradle” blog post. I retweeted the initial post:
The basic theme of Eckel’s post was, as he expressed it, “in order to do anything, you have to know everything.”
Cédric Champeau, a Gradle employee on the core team, responded later in the week with his own blog post:
Yeah, that kind of mild sarcasm is so typical of Gradle, though he has a lot of good points. Personally, I don’t think it’s a good idea to tell customers who have issues with your product that they’re wrong, but admittedly the post doesn’t (quite) do that.
For my part, I’ll just say that I have extensive experience with Groovy, which helps me with Gradle a lot. Also, the documentation is often not helpful, but it’s way better than it used to be. Finally, I have to be a bit careful what I say, because I still teach the official Introduction to Gradle course every other month for Gradle, Inc (next run is January 25 - 26), and I don’t want to anger them unnecessarily.
My plan this week (other than teach my courses) was to also respond in a carefully written and sourced blog post, discussing both Eckel’s original post and Champeau’s response. But you know what? I can’t do it. It’s all too much this week. Maybe next week I’ll get back to this.
I will say that Gradle 6.8 was released this week. I updated a few of my projects to use it, and they worked without incident. So, yay.
Steph Curry Makes Me Happy
On a positive note, I found joy from an unexpected quarter this week. I’ve been a Steph Curry fan since he entered the NBA. I love that he’s small (by NBA standards), lithe, not particularly fast, not particularly quick, and yet the greatest shooter the league has ever seen.
A couple days ago, this article discussed a video I heard about over the holiday break, which showed Steph in practice making 103 (!!) three-pointers in a row.
The odds of doing that are essentially zero. Seriously, that’s just not possible. And yet, there he is, doing it. Wow.
The Golden State Warriors are not a particularly good team this year, and Steph is both getting older (a baby-faced 32 — his birthday is two days after mine in March) and lost all of last year to injury.
That didn’t prevent him from scoring a career high 62 points against the Portland Trail Blazers this week:
He then followed that up with 38 as he lead a second-half comeback from down 22 late in the 3rd quarter against the Los Angeles Clippers:
I love watching Steph. I root for the Warriors because of him, and if he ever left, my fandom would follow him. He’s just that much fun, and I needed that this week.
So, thanks Steph. :)
It is my fervent hope that can get back to technical topics next week. Now it’s time to send this out so I can lose myself in more NFL playoff games, because compartmentalization only goes so far.
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:
Spring and Spring Boot, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Functional Programming in Java, ditto
This week:
What’s New In Java, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform