Tales from the jar side: GIDS conference, Just call us KenKat, The Ding Of Power, Coffee with Josh Long, and the usual silly Tweets and toots

Seen on Twitter: "I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "LMAO," said Gandalf. "Well, it has." (@JokienWTolkien)

Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of April 23 - 30, 2023. This week gave several talks at the Great International Developer Summit in Bangalore, India.

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GIDS

As I mentioned last week, this week I traveled to Bangalore, India for the Great International Developer Summit (GIDS).

The conference is extremely well attended, with lots of enthusiastic developers. Here’s a picture from just after my Help Your Boss Help You talk:

Don’t blame them — I asked them to wave. I only caught about 2/3 of the room in the picture as well. I’m really not good at selfies.

I gave six talks in all:

• Help Your Boss Help You

• Java Testing Part 1: JUnit Jupiter and AssertJ

• Java Testing Part 2: Mocks, Stubs, and Spies in Mockito

• Property-Based Testing: Concepts and Examples

• Upgrade to Modern Java

• Key Gradle Concepts and Practices

All the links to the descriptions can be found here if you’re interested.

Each day started with a keynote address, and as it happened, all four were given by current or former NFJS speakers (Venkat Subramaniam, Michael Carducci, Mark Richards, and Neal Ford). I had to post this the first day:

Venkat was excellent, as usual, but don’t tell him I said that. Wouldn’t want him to get a swole head or nuthin.

(More about my, er, relationship with him below.)

One interesting feature of the conference is that the schedules for each room included posters showing photos of the speakers along with the titles. For example:

You can see how old my pictures are by how much hair I have left.

I thought the talks went well, but this was particularly nice to see:

Mala Gupta is charming. I was glad to see her at the conference, even though I missed her talk because I was attending a different one at the same time. There were five or six parallel tracks, so it was hard to see everything you wanted to. Fortunately everything was recorded, so I’ll be able to catch up on the ones I missed.

Mr Subramanian [sic]

The conference arranged for all the speakers to stay at the local Sheraton. The funny part for me was when I finally made it to my room at about 4am Monday morning, I found a note apparently intended for Venkat. I decided to intentionally misinterpret it as intended for me with an updated name:

After that I expected people to call me Mr Subramaniam (though at least I know how to spell his last name correctly), but the abbreviation KenKat (kind of like KitKat, but with an Indian flavor) worked better. Your mileage may vary.

I also mentioned last week that I was not nearly crazy enough to consider driving myself while in India. The conference fortunately arranged rides to and from the hotel. I did, however, make an observation:

That turned out to be an exaggeration. When I traveled over to Josh Long’s hotel to do a livestream (see below), I was surprised when we stopped for not one, but two actual stoplights. The point remains, though.

Eventually I (more or less) understood:

• Everybody is trying to cut off everyone else at all times, so expect it.

• The horn is used mostly to warn other drivers where you are. Everybody respects them and backs off. In other words, unlike in the US, the horn is not used in anger.

• Lane markings mean nothing. I don’t know why they bother painting lines at all. If you see three lanes, there will be a minimum of seven cars across all jockeying for position.

The result is a kind of loosely organized chaos between the cars, small vans, and zillions of tiny scooters swarming in, out, and around everyone. Yet somehow I never saw a fender-bender, or even evidence of one. Somehow it all works, but I have no desire to do it myself.

Given how goofy those selfies looked above, here’s one last one, to show I can do a bit better than that:

As I mentioned, this photo was taken ten minutes before my last talk, at about 3pm on Friday afternoon. I couldn’t believe the room was that full already. Sure enough, eventually every seat was taken and there were people literally sitting in the aisles. GIDS audiences are the best.

I used up pretty much all of my nerd-related jokes. During my property-based testing talk (which, in case you’re interested, used the jqwik library in Java), I had an example ready that calculated Fibonacci numbers. That led to this old gag:

I hear that this year’s Fibonacci conference is going to be as good as the last two combined!

Normally when I speak at a conference, I don’t attend many talks myself. Usually I’m too busy polishing my slides (“polishing” is doing a lot of work in that sentence — sometimes those slides come together very, very late) or writing code, or doing conference calls, or whatever. This time, however, it wasn’t so easy to go back to the hotel, and I was already there, so I figured I might as well learn something.

That meant I went to lots of talks. In fact, in the full four days, I only missed three slots total, and had reasons for each of those.

As for the actual traveling part of the trip, I’ll just say that it may be a small world after all, but it’s still a big planet when you have to fly halfway around it.

One other note related to travel, from Michael Carducci and his wife:

They know how to travel the right way. They purchased round-the-world tickets and are spending a couple of months (!) making their leisurely way around the planet. Sweet.

One Ding To Rule Them All

If you followed the chess World Championships at all, you’ve seen the pun in the title of this section. This morning Ding Liren won the title in the fourth game of his tie-break rapid match against Ian Nepomniachtchi. Here is the final scorecard:

Since last week’s update, the two played a pair of hard-fought draws in Games 10 and 11. Then in a wild Game 12 that went back and forth several times, Ding managed to win it to tie up the match. As the wikipedia page says, it was “a complex and error-ridden affair, with both players showing extreme signs of nerves.” The end result left them tied with two games to go before tiebreaks.

Game 13 was an interesting draw without a solid edge for either side. Game 14 was expected to be a quiet draw, figuring that neither side wanted to risk losing everything in the last game, but Ding didn’t play that way. He took a big risk that quickly went bad, putting him on the defensive. Ian missed some chances and Ding was able to liquidate into a 90-move draw, the longest game of the match.

That led to today’s action. The schedule called for four rapid games, meaning each side had 25 minutes for the game plus a 15-second increment added to each player’s clock per move. I didn’t plan on watching, because the games started at 5am my time (EDT), but my trip to India left the tattered remains of my circadian rhythms a bit off, so I was able to catch the broadcast.

The first game was wild, with Ding making some bold moves, but Ian found a way to equalize and manage a draw. The second game was quieter, with almost no errors, and settled into a draw. The third game went similarly.

Game 4 again was expected to be quiet, because a draw would send them into a series of blitz (5 minute) games for the title, but again Ding wanted more. The game swung back and forth and could easily have been drawn, but Ding found a great resource on move 46 (pinning his own rook to his king with just over a minute left on his clock!) which worked out beautifully. Ian had chances to save it, but moved too quickly (a common error for him all match) and Ding won. As several people pointed out, Ding never led in the match until he won.

Ding Liren is now the 17th World Champion, and now both the men’s and the women’s world champions are from China. Ding was overcome by emotion at the end, barely keeping from crying right on the podium.

Magnus Carlsen sent his congratulations:

Look, everyone knows Magnus is the best player in the world, and nothing in this match changed that. On the other hand, the match was extremely close, very well fought, and quite entertaining. In any match that close, the resolution could have come down to any small mistake anywhere, and both players held it together remarkably well given the tension and pressure. I’m happy for Ding (and all the Lord of the Dings puns) and it will be interesting to see how he handles the title.

I also wonder, like everyone else, how long it will be until Magnus decides he wants his title back. That will be fun. :)

Screencast With Josh Long

The YouTube channel in that video is called Coffee + Software with Josh Long.

Josh Long is a celebrity in the Spring Framework world. He is a Spring Developer Advocate (the very first one, actually), a Java Champion, and the author of six books, most recent of which is Reactive Spring (available on LeanPub and Amazon). I’ve known him as a passing acquaintance for years, but we’ve never really had an opportunity to sit down and talk.

Josh was a late addition to GIDS. As I mentioned above, I’d been attending talks in all the other slots when I wasn’t speaking, but on Friday I missed one. When I setting up for my Upgrade to Modern Java talk, I realized I’d left my laptop power source in my hotel room, so after the talk I got a ride back to the hotel, picked it up, and came back. That’s why I was hanging out in the Speaker Room right before lunch when Josh walked in.

That gave us a chance to talk, and he was then kind enough to invite me to do a live-stream on his YouTube channel, embedded above. We talked about a wide range of topics, from Spring to Kotlin to Groovy to Java, and I had a great time, even if he did make me sit on a chair that was much lower than his. :)

It’s a sign of his level of fame that he started his live stream with no announcement or warning, and still we had over a dozen people show up asking questions. I was suitably impressed.

See? He called me an industry legend.

Don’t let that destroy his credibility entirely.

We were going to record something for my channel as well, but I had to get back to my hotel to pack for my trip home. I hope to have him participate in a video in the future, or maybe he’ll be a guest on a livestream on the Tales from the jar side YouTube channel whenever I get around to making one.

Best not to take a chance of missing it by subscribing today.

Tweets and Toots

It was a nice day this year too

The quote continues, “All you need is a light jacket.”

In case you were wondering, Miss Congeniality came out in 2000, which is (checks notes) longer ago than you think it is.

New JUnit version

I only mention this because the release happened less than an hour before my JUnit talk. Did I upgrade the repository anyway, risking all my examples right before my talk?

Of course I did. YOLO.

As it turned out, none of my code was directly affected, so no prob. That probably still doesn’t justify the risk, but sometimes I can’t help myself.

Twitter Still Exists, Barely

A lot of people I know are headed over to Bluesky (why they don’t spell that using camelcase — BlueSky — is beyond me), the new social media site created by Jack Dorsey, the same guy who thought it was a good idea to let Elon Musk manage anything bigger than a hotdog stand. I don’t have an invite yet, but I’ll probably check it out when I do. I’m happy enough with Mastodon, but I guess I could use Bluesky as yet another marketing channel.

Rumor has it they still don’t have any way to block anybody, demonstrating conclusively that Dorsey hasn’t learned anything from his Twitter experience. Not a good sign.

Speaking of Elno (as some people call him, though I prefer Space Karen):

The numbers say he’s blown over $200 billion. That’s billion, with a b, right down the tubes. Can you imagine the good he could have done with 0.1% of that money? He obviously can’t.

The article is from NPR, that bastion of the liberal media elite, and confirmed by Bloomberg, another known radical left publication.

To think I actually thought he was intelligent at one point. (Hangs head in shame.)

I hate when that happens

That got dark quickly (and even spelled poisoned wrong), but I laughed.

I wish it was me, too

Too funny. For those not up on their pop-culture references, that’s from Game of Thrones, when Olenna Tyrell (matriarch of the Tyrell clan, played by the legendary Diana Rigg) tells Jaime Lannister to inform Cersei that she (Olenna) arranged the death of her son at the so-called Purple Wedding.

It also refers to the idiotic controversy Tucker Carlson tried to create because the redesign of the green M&M made it no longer “hot” to him.

Another way of saying the same thing:

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

An Oldie But Goodie

Probably pretty good at catching bugs, too.

Finally, a good use for AI

I actually linked that image to the original Tweet. You know, like we used to be able to do easily before Elon had a fit about Substack Notes. Enjoy the AI-generated skydiving babies.

Have a great week, everybody!

The video version of this newsletter will be on the Tales from the jar side YouTube channel tomorrow.

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:

• GIDS conference in Bangalore, India.

This week:

• Managing Your Manager, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform.

• Next-generation Java Testing with JUnit 5, ditto