Tales from the jar side: Hey, assorted tweets and videos, and a light bulb joke of my very own
I now have a light bulb joke for technical trainers. Seriously. You've been warned.
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of June 28 - July 4, 2020. This week I taught an online class called Reactive Spring, and worked on my upcoming Managing Your Manager book.
I noticed this week that the Substack editor includes a “Share” button that will share this post. Feel free to use it if you want. Remember, this newsletter is free and will remain so.
Whether it’s worth what you’re paying for it is another issue entirely. :)
Hey there, new email
A couple weeks ago I described the conflict going on between Apple and David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) of Basecamp, involving their new email client called Hey. Apple turned down the iOS HEY app from the App Store because it didn’t use their In App Purchasing (IAP) system, which meant Apple couldn’t get their mandatory 30% cut. DHH, never one to back down from a fight, battled Apple on social media, in the press, in the halls of congress, and so on.
Eventually, Apple decided to approve the app. They also changed their policies so there is now a path for appealing a negative decision, though the appeal arguably still goes to the same people that said no in the first place. They even made it possible to appeal the policies themselves, though again I’m not sure what effect that will have on Apple.
Once the app was approved, however, DHH announced that Hey was open to all subscribers on any platform, without requiring an invitation. As a result, I now have the email address ken.kousen@hey.com, and, to see what would happen, I used it to subscribe to this newsletter.
The biggest feature of Hey is its emphasis on privacy. That means it prohibits tracking cookies of any kind. So when I received last week’s newsletter, I first had to approve a new sender (that always happens the first time), and then I saw this pop-up message:
Well, now I know. This newsletter is free, of course, and the only tracking I do is watch to see how many times each issue has been opened. Like any metric, I root for the numbers to go up. In my case, however, they don’t actually matter, since I’m not selling advertising or anything else that would require a minimum amount of subscribers. It is rather amusing to know that my own subscription doesn’t count toward my numbers, but at least it’s not a big deal.
The real question is whether or not I’ll pay the required $99/year after my trial period ends. I probably will, mostly because I can afford to do so. At the moment I can’t port my company email address (ken.kousen@kousenit.com) over to Hey, so it would just be used for personal stuff where I’d prefer to be protected from tracking. If you decide to get a Hey email address, please let me know what you think. This is one of those innovations that may become a big deal or may never break out of being a niche product.
(I’d argue that’s similar to DHH’s previous creation, Ruby on Rails. We’ll see whether that somewhat inflammatory statement gets any reactions as well.)
Assorted Videos And Tweets
First, my friend Szymon Stepniak has been expanding his coding videos on YouTube. One of his latest is called “Building command-line app with Java 11, Micronaut, Picocli, and GraalVM”:
It’s really good, and the production values are excellent. I’ve used Java 11 (did you know I have a book of Java recipes?) and GraalVM in the past, but still haven’t spent time on Micronaut (hangs head in shame) or Picocli, and now I want to. I think that’s the best praise I can give it.
Next, I’ve been following Anjuan Simmons recently, who is an excellent developer and speaker. This week I watched his conference talk on Lending Privilege:
I was pleased to see a lot of the advice I give in the Women and URM chapter of my Managing Your Manager book is consistent with what he says (whew), but of course he goes far beyond that and he is much more qualified to talk about those issues directly. I follow him on Twitter now, so I hope to learn more from him in the future.
Here’s your feel-good story of the week, in case you haven’t seen this Twitter thread yet:
It’s charming, and features guest appearances by Mel Brooks and Sid Caesar. Enjoy!
This tweet is very clever, but a bit harsh:
Yup, that figures.
Next, I’m working on a book, so I tend to notice tweets like this:
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the GIDS developer summit going on online at the beginning of each month from July to December.
I believe the discount code works on any of the events, whether I’m speaking or not. My talks are in the September event and the two events in November, which I’ll discuss as we get closer to them. I’ll just say that I have talks planned on both Kotlin and Groovy, as well as an interesting non-technical talk I’ve given on the NFJS tour (currently on hiatus, but we’re still doing virtual workshops — see below) called Mental Bookmarks and the Fractal Nature of Success.
One thing I definitely want to mention is that I am giving a workshop called Beyond Managing Your Manager scheduled for 17th November, which means I have an unofficial deadline for releasing my book. :)
How Many Instructors Does It Take…
(This story was supposed to be included last week, but I forgot. It’s worth including anyway, I think.)
During my Functional Java course online on the O’Reilly Learning Platform a week ago I was in the middle of demo when I heard a pop and the lights went out.
“Oh, no!” I said. “I lost power! Now I have to wait for the backup generator to kick in!”
I then heard a voice from my speakers. “We can still hear you,” my producer said.
“You can? Seriously?”
“Yes.” I noticed that several people agreed with him in the group chat.
“Whoa. I’m surprised. Usually I have to wait a few minutes for everything to come back online.”
Somebody typed in the chat: "You have a backup generator? Where are you based, Costa Rica?”
“I don’t know about Costa Rica,” I said, “but here in the United States our infrastructure is a mess and crumbles all the time. I had a backup generator installed as the cost of doing business.”
“We can still hear you,” my producer said.
“Okay, fine. Let me finish this demo. Then we’ll take a break and I’ll figure out what went wrong.”
I finished the demo. Ten minutes later we came back from break.
“I know what it was,” I said to the students. “I only have one lamp in my office, and the light bulb burned out.”
Sigh. Of course, that gives me a chance to add a few bad light bulb jokes here:
Q: How many software developers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None, that’s a hardware problem.Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?
A1: A fish.
A2: Two. One to hold the giraffe, and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools.*
* I told that one to my father once, and blew his mind for days
Q: How many existentialists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Two. One to screw it in and one to observe how the bulb itself
symbolizes a single incandescent beacon of subjective reality in a
netherworld of endless absurdity reaching out toward a maudlin
cosmos of nothingness.Q: How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Only one, but the bulb has to want to change.
For the various vocal ranges:
Q: How many sopranos does it take to change a light bulb?
A: One. She holds the bulb, and the world revolves around her.*
*Note: My wife is a soprano, but she’s of course nothing like that and I would never dream of implying any such thing.
Q: How many altos?
A: None. They can’t reach that high.Q: How many tenors?
A: Three. One to do it, and two to say how they could have done it better.
I don’t have a version for basses. If you have one, please let me know.
This week I taught a class in Reactive Spring, and I came up with this gag, which I forgot to tell. Don’t worry if you don’t get this one unless you do this stuff for a living:
Q: How many reactive stream publishers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Only one, but if there are no subscribers the bulb never changes.
The idea is that a publisher doesn’t emit any signals unless it has at least one subscriber. Get it? Yeah, I know, don’t give up my day job.
Clearly I’m obligated to come up with a light bulb joke about my own profession, so here goes:
Q: How many technical trainers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: The instructor discusses in great detail the history of the light bulb, featuring the first commercially viable bulb in 1879 by Thomas Edison and the prior invention of the electric light by Humphry Davy in 1802. The instructor then explains the principles behind incandescent lights, the pros and cons of various types of filaments (including carbonized bamboo!), the transition to quartz glass and halogen bulbs, and proposes a future involving compact fluorescents and LED lamps. Then the instructor demonstrates how you can replace a broken bulb in its socket with an uncooked potato. You’re fascinated until you realize your time is up and you’ve been sitting in the dark for the last hour.
In my own humble opinion, the creation of that joke ranks as possibly the peak of my writing career.
Last week:
Reactive Spring, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Writing Managing Your Manager, including marketing material (ugh) needed for the soon-to-appear web page and Amazon listing.
This week:
Introduction to Gradle, online for Gradle, Inc. Spaces still available!
Functional Modern Java, full-day NFJS Virtual Workshop. Spaces available here, too!