Tales from the jar side: JUnit assumptions video, Upcoming Live Stream with Venkat, Medium Day, Subspace Rhapsody, and Toots and Skeets

I never wanted to believe my Dad was stealing from his job as a road worker. But when I got home, all the signs were there. (rimshot)

Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of July 23 - 30, 2023. This week I taught my Functional Programming In Java course on the O’Reilly Learning Platform, in the APAC time zones, which meant in the evening for me.

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JUnit 5 Assumptions

(This is the technical part of this week’s newsletter. If you’re not interested, feel free to skip it. How would I know? It’s not like I collect any data on you, unlike Google / Apple / Facebook, etc, beyond the number of opens that Substack reports. Wait, does that mean the big Silicon Valley monsters know everything I read too? Yeah, probably. So I guess it’s not news to them that I get most of my dad jokes in the subtitles of my newsletter from the DadSaysJokes twitter feed.

And yeah, I still call it twitter. Sometimes instead I’ll say, “you’ll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy,” which is more and more true every day.

Don’t like it? Come at me, Elon! I can think of no better way to make my books sell and my YouTube channel views skyrocket than for that idiot to call me out publicly. Heck, I’d be willing to be in the warm-up cage match with Elon before his Zuck fight, because then I can also sue him for the inevitable hospital bills I incur just from the training I’d need to get ready.

Hey, speaking of Elon the Stupid, did you see this (sadly only a parody) headline from Andy Borowitz of the New Yorker?

That’s a riot, though I could totally see him doing that. But I digress.)

Last week I had a section in the newsletter about using the Assumptions class in JUnit 5. I wrote that partly because it’s interesting, and partly because I was working on a video on the subject at the time.

This week I published that video:

The content is solid, but the presentation is a bit ragged. I’ve been working with a YouTuber named Meredith Marsh to improve the performance of my channel, and so far it’s mostly made me self-conscious when recording. That’s just part of tearing down existing habits in order to form new ones, but I’m still in the teardown stage.

The other issue is that thumbnail. I thought I did a good job with it, and it’s no doubt better than many of my older ones, but as she kindly pointed out, it’s seriously boring. If you don’t already know that there’s an assertTrue method in JUnit and already want to learn about it, you’re not going find image very clickable. I’m going to work on that, starting with my next video.

The video didn’t get a lot of views (yet), but the channel as a whole achieved a milestone:

That was sent to me by the site vidIQ, which does keyword research, analytics, and more, with most of that “more” section being trying desperately to get me to send them a monthly subscription fee, which so far I’ve avoided doing. Still, it’s a nice image.

In order to join the YouTube Partner Program, even in its newer limited form, you need 500 subscribers and 3000 watch hours in the last year. I now have the 500 subscribers, but I currently have only 487 watch hours, which leaves me a tad short. Presumably the more subscribers I have the faster I’ll accumulate watch hours, but I don’t really know. 3000 (or 4000, which I need to join the full program) seems like a lot.

The next video is already in the pipeline. It involves using that Assumptions class in a Spring Boot application, so you avoid testing clients of rest web services when the network is down. I tried to get it ready this week, but I decided to use Descript for the recording and editing and ran into a lot of problems. I not sure how many of those are my own learning curve and how many are issues with the product, but at least some are their fault (I can’t believe they have a built-in Zoom In animation, but no corresponding Zoom Out — what’s that all about?).

Anyway, look for that video this coming week.

Upcoming Events

I have several events scheduled for this week. On Wednesday, I’m doing a Tales from the jar side Live Stream with the incomparable Venkat Subramaniam. Here’s the thumbnail:

I’ll schedule it inside of StreamYard (my regular streaming platform) tomorrow, from which I will share the link on both the YouTube channel and my LinkedIn account. Look for that on Monday, which I’ll probably do before I record the video version of this newsletter.

On Saturday, I’m participating in Medium Day:

Here’s the registration link. My talk is part of a panel about writing technical books, hosted by The Pragmatic Bookshelf, who published both my Mockito Made Clear and my Help Your Boss Help You books. It’s called Q&A With Authors From The Pragmatic Bookshelf:

I’ll have to be careful with how much I say. I’m an instructor, so I can fill almost any given amount of time all by myself, and here we’ve only got 30 minutes to divide among four authors and a moderator. But I guess that’s really Margaret’s problem rather than mine. :)

Medium Day is all day on Saturday, August 12, which is potentially also a bit of a problem for me since that’s my wife’s birthday. She already said half an hour in the morning is fine, but I’ll have to be careful not to overdo it.

Of course, I may already be in serious trouble with my wife, as you’ll see a bit later in this newsletter.

Finally, a week from this Friday I’m giving a lunchtime (for me) webinar called Practical AI Tools for Java Developers:

That’s a free webinar from the No Fluff, Just Stuff conference tour. On the homepage for the tour, you can find recordings of all their previous webinars.

(That reminds me that I have to watch the recording of Venkat’s talk last week on functional programming idioms before our live stream on my channel on Wednesday.)

My webinar will cover the usual suspects, from GitHub Copilot (and Copilot X or Copilot Next or whatever else they’re planing) to ChatGPT to Google’s Bard to Anthropic’s Claude to the AI Assistant inside IntelliJ IDEA and hopefully lots more.

I added the Code Interpreter capability into GPT-4, which was pretty cool. In last week’s newsletter I used it to generate a plot of the Mandelbrot set. Here’s a Julia set as well:

I was going to explain what the Julia set was here, but never mind all that. It’s just a neat looking fractal.

I have Java code that accesses ChatGPT programmatically, so that’s good. Bard apparently also has an API, but I’m only on the waiting list to get an API key. Hopefully that’ll come through before the webinar.

The real challenge for me, as usual, will be to fit everything inside the time limit.

Subspace Rhapsody

Now we get to the reason my wife is (potentially) not going to be happy with me. She’s away this week on her annual ladies retreat, where several of the wives of NFJS speakers (and others) get together in a crafting house to do … um … crafting, or whatever bizarre, mystical, and strange things women do when they gather in groups like that.

That means that presumably I wasn’t supposed to watch the current episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds without her. If it had been an ordinary episode, I might have made it, too, but this was the musical episode, called Subspace Rhapsody. I can rationalize as well as anybody, so here’s my reasons for watching it now:

1. There were spoilers online, and avoiding them would be tough.

2. It’s a musical, and frequently you need to listen to the songs several times for them to settle in.

3. I really wanted to watch it.

So far I’ve seen it twice, and of course I’ll watch it again with her when she gets home. I also found the soundtrack on my music service (YouTube Music) and have played it several more times (after all, it’s only about 30 minutes long).

My mostly-non-spoiler impressions are:

• The plot is basically superfluous. They give a technobabble excuse for why they’re singing, but the real reason is clearly the showrunners wanted to do a musical episode.

• For a group of actors that aren’t professional singers, they did an excellent job.

• The music isn’t that catchy at first, but it really grows on you with repeated listens.

• I can see why they needed James Kirk to be a guest, because otherwise they had no tenors in the main cast. He’s mostly a baritone with good high notes. By contrast, Spock is a baritone with excellent low notes.

• The K-pop segment was awesome. I don’t care what anybody says. I thought it was great. I also can’t believe I haven’t seen anyone make an MC Hemmer joke yet, but maybe I missed it (that’s as close to a spoiler as I’m going to get, at least until next week).

It’s definitely going to be one of the more controversial Star Trek episodes of all time, but I really enjoyed it.

Next week is the second season finale, so that will no doubt be heavy again. This was fun, and I liked the character stuff inside the songs.

Full disclosure: I met my wife doing musicals in community theater shows, so I was probably the target audience. If so, it landed. 🎶

Toots and Skeets

In my prime

Hey, it me! I’m one of those. I’ll let you guess which one.

Too much time online

Yeah, I could see how that could be a problem. Btw, here’s an old joke:

You know how to tell the difference between an alligator and a crocodile?
One you see later, and the other you see after a while.

Elon, yet again

From this article in the Verge:

In case you didn’t know, it a vain attempt to keep from bleeding subscribers, those right-wing nutjobs that get a big enough audience are getting paid for it. But, true to form, Elon is screwing that up, too. What a surprise. Not.

That image, though. 😆

Yeah, that would be great

I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords.

One political image

I couldn’t resist reposting this:

Here’s the direct link. The alt-text has it all:

• Jack Smith is playing chess, while Trump has a single checker.

• Smith opened with e3, a very conservative opening

• Trump has way more time on his clock than Smith, probably because it took this long for the indictments to be handed down

• The king and queen are on the wrong squares, but I don’t know if that was intentional

Wow, that got dark quickly

One does not simply mambo into Mordor.

Yeah, me neither

I’d probably be in jail, but I get the point.

Elegant solution

My mother-in-law would have loved that. She spent every summer in a cabin (they called it a camp) on Lake Champlain in Burlington, VT. Every time a car zoomed by at more than the 5 mph (!) speed limit, she would go outside and yell at them. If only this solution had occurred to any of us, we could have made her very happy. I can so easily picture her doing that and laughing the whole time.

Definitive proof

Go ahead, flat earthers, respond to that.

And finally, a Star Trek joke

Have a great week everybody!

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

Last week:

• Functional Java, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform

This week:

• Tales from the jar side Live Stream with Venkat Subramaniam

• Medium Day on Saturday