Tales from the jar side: Making mistakes, UberConf sessions, and moving forward
Memory is tricky, but it's annoying when it leads to mistakes in public.
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of July 12 - 19, 2020. This week was the UberConf conference, the flagship destination event for the No Fluff, Just Stuff (NFJS) tour.
This Beastly Newsletter
First, I hit a bit of a milestone this week. As I tweeted about this newsletter:
Early during UberConf I reached the magic number:
There are zero subscribers because nobody is paying $$ for this. Ching!
Time for a confession: I’ve been sitting on that “668, next door to the Beast” joke for literally decades. Seriously.
Back in the early 1990’s, I decided I wanted to be a science fiction writer. As part of that process I subscribed to the Science Fiction Book Club. In the catalog I received every month there was a book I that my memory said was called “668, the Neighbor of the Beast”. I never actually bought it. The first time I saw that title, though, I thought the gag was a riot, and I’ve remembered it ever since. I’ve always wanted an opportunity to drop it into a conversation.
Now that we have Google, I was able to look back for that book. It turns out that my memory is a bit off. It’s likely the book I was remembering was called 668: Neighbor of the Beast, by Lionel Fenn, because the publication date (Oct 1, 1992) is about right. It turns out there’s also a beer of the same name, which is a Belgian pale ale from the New England Brewing Company. You can also get a T-shirt that says 667: Neighbor of the Beast, but that bothers me because 667 would be across the street.
There’s also an album by Attila the Stockbroker (good name), a song by Travis Shredd and the Good Ol’ Homeboys (another good name), and more. Here’s the Wikipedia disambiguation page if you’re curious.
I’m just glad I finally had a chance to use that gag.
Speaking of false measures of success (a key theme in my Mental Bookmarks and the Fractal Nature of Success talk), the current total number of subscribers to this newsletter is 676. Thank you everybody for being here. It still amazes me so many people are willing to receive a company newsletter from a one-person company.
Mistakes Were Made
I was part of the (pretend to be an) Expert Panel at UberConf on Thursday morning, which led to:
One of Jethro Gibbs’ rules from NCIS, a show that jumped the shark so long ago I now say it jumped the flounder.
I made a mistake while on the panel. To explain it takes a bit of context. First, the panel was a reminder of how far my skills have moved away from the current hot topics in I.T. I have my areas, and they’re relevant enough that they keeps me busy, but the questions to the panel all related to architecture, devops, JavaScript MVC frameworks, and the Go and Rust languages, none of which I know much about. So I was already a bit bored.
Then Mark Richards — my friend and a real expert on architecture issues — decided for some reason to mention the Quarkus framework for building microservices. I always squirm at that, because I’m a big fan of micronaut, and (Hot Take Warning!) I believe that in a world where micronaut exists, there was no reason for Quarkus at all.
Finally, one lesson I’ve learned from my friend and NFJS speaker Nate Schutta is that the Expert Panel is more fun when there are some disagreements to make them more entertaining. So I was already looking for a chance to mix things up.
Mark made a totally uncontroversial comment about how companies struggle to eliminate technical debt, and I picked that moment to push back.
“Sometimes technical debt isn’t all bad,” I said. “I saw a talk by Michael Carducci once where he referred to debt being incurred on purpose in order to invest in the future.”
Mark looked at me like I’d lost my mind and said something like, “I’d hate to be in that company where they decided technical debt wasn’t a problem.”
Mark is one of the nicest people I know, so that was massively sarcastic for him. I knew immediately I’d gone out on a limb I didn’t want to be on. I backed off and said I was just trying to keep things interesting, which was true but weak.
Fortunately, Michael was able to explain that what he’d actually meant was that software developers use the term technical debt and other developers understand it intuitively, but when we say it to managers, we have to remember that they often use financial debt for investment purposes. In other words, the problem is that non-technical people might not understand the seriousness of the technical debt problem.
See? I get it now, and I think I got it when he first said it at the user group meeting I attended. But sometime since then I messed it up.
Oh well. No real harm done, I guess, but it was a silly blunder. Oops. Let this by my apology to both Mark and Michael. Listen to both of them.
I also was reminded that sometimes I don’t have anything to say (the length and frequency of this newsletter notwithstanding), and in those cases maybe I shouldn’t say anything. We’ll see.
Leading Without Authority
On the plus side, I watched a talk from a speaker I didn’t know well at all. Kate Wardin gave a talk called Leading Without Authority, and since I’m working on my Managing Your Manager book and knew something related, I thought I’d monitor it.
The talk was really excellent, and Kate did a great job delivering it. It’s not directly relevant for me because she was talking about teaching managers how to lead inside an organization and I’m just a one-person company, but I found a lot of the principles valuable.
She works at the Travelers but also runs a company called Developer First. Definitely check out her site, and if you get a chance to attend one of her presentations, I suggest you do so. I know I will.
Even better, when I told her about my book, she agreed to be a reviewer.
The rest of my talks at UberConf went really well. It’s harder to give talks online than in person because it requires more energy on the part of the presenter, but during each talk I got going and the enthusiasm carried me through without a problem.
For the record, my talks were Java Testing with JUnit 5 and Mockito, Key Gradle Concepts and Practices, Latest Java Best Practices, a two-part Kotlin Workshop, and the Mental Bookmarks talk I referred to earlier. Four of those were on Friday, so that was a long day. Still, it was fun, even though I was pretty tired at the end of it.
Managing Your Manager
My Managing Your Manager book, to be published by Pragmatic Programmers later this year, is now headed for its initial three-chapter review. I have far more chapters written, but the process works because writing other chapters taught me enough about what I wanted to say that I was able to rewrite the earlier ones. The current review is internal, but after that it will go out to external reviewers. I have a list of about a dozen people I’ve either already approached or intend to talk to soon. That process will likely happen in early August.
I tried hard to choose reviewers that have a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences different from mine. If you want to be one of them, though, please let me know.
I have roughly 120 pages written, and I’ve been writing long on purpose because I feared I might wind up with too few pages.
(Pauses for a moment as all the readers of this newsletter recover from rolling their eyes so hard it makes them dizzy.)
The first three chapters (of the current 11) are called:
Dealing with the Inevitable Conflict
Creating Constructive Loyalty
Giving Good-Enough Answers
I’m both looking forward to, and terrified of, getting feedback on them. I suspect I may say something about that in a future newsletter.
Miscellaneous
I mentioned last week that I can’t listen to the Hamilton soundtrack as background music because I keep being distracted by it. This week I realized I have the music going through my head pretty much all the time anyway, so I might as well listen to the soundtrack.
Speaking of Hamilton, it didn’t take me long to realize that the same actor (Daveed Diggs) plays both Lafayette in Act I and Thomas Jefferson in Act II. I didn’t realize until later that the same actor (Anthony Ramos) that plays John Laurens in the first act also plays Philip Hamilton in the second, and the actor (Jasmine Cephas Jones) who plays Peggy Schuyler also plays Maria Reynolds. But I have to admit I didn’t realize until yesterday that the actor (Okieriete Onaodowan) that plays Hercules Mulligan in the first act plays James Madison in the second. Wow.
The Dresden novel Peace Talks came out on Tuesday and I finished it yesterday. It was tough because the author (Jim Butcher) makes Dresden suffer so much. I knew it was going to be continued in Battle Ground, out in September, but that means now I have to wait again.
The next couple of weeks are going to be very, very busy for me. I have courses on the O’Reilly Learning Platform for nine out of the next ten business days (details below), plus I’m helping out on another of those bootcamps for new developers. It should be fun, but very tiring.
That leads me, yet again, to the fundamental contradiction of my life at the moment. Personally and professionally I’m having a great year (despite mistakes like the one I described above), and it’s happening as my country is being ravaged by a preventable pandemic, with massive unemployment in a system that foolishly ties health care to your job, run by an administration that thrives on cruelty (see the secret police attacks going on in Portland, OR) and complete abdication of responsibility.
The result is that I’m happy while having my heart broken, if that makes any sense. All I can do is keep moving forward, trying to help where I can. I’m trying to learn from the extraordinary example of Rep. John Lewis, who passed away this week. I don’t have one one-thousandth his courage, but I’m amazed that somehow despite everything he managed to stay upbeat and positive during his life-long battle for justice.
It seems the least I can do to try and do the same.
Stay safe everybody.
Last week:
UberConf, with several talks and discussions
Submitted the first three chapters of Managing Your Manager for review
This week:
Next Generation Java testing with JUnit 5 on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Basic Android Development, on the same
Functional Programming in Java, again on the O’Reilly Learning Platform