Tales from the jar side: Mockito article and videos, Travel to GIDS, Substack Notes revisited, Chess update, and Great Moments in Rapid Unscheduled Disassemblies

Why did the Biology teacher break up with the Physics teacher? Because they had no Chemistry. (rimshot)

Apr 22, 2023

Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of April 16 - 23, 2023. This week I taught week 3 of my Android Developer Bootcamp and my Reactive Spring and Spring Boot course on the O’Reilly Learning Platform, and my Deep Dive Into Spring course as an NFJS Virtual Workshop.

NOTE: This newsletter is appearing a day early because I’m going to lose all day Sunday in a plane, as explained below.

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Mockito Article and Video

This week my article Mockito vs BDDMockito appeared in the Pragmatic Programmers publication on Medium. I included the video I uploaded on my YouTube channel:

Take a look if you’re interested. On the plus side, now that I know what it looks like, I promise never to make that face again.

Incidentally, after hovering at 199 subscribers on my YouTube channel for a couple of days, the total jumped to 201 this morning. Cool. This is currently week 16 of 2023, and I started the channel at the beginning of the year. That’s an average of 12.56 new subscribers per week. At that rate, I’ll make it to 1000 subscribers (the minimum required to monetize) in late June of 2024.

I also need 4000 watch hours in the last year, and I’ve only got 158 at the moment. I’d do the math on that one, but it would be too depressing. I’ll just assume that sooner or later one of my videos will go viral (or at least viral for me) and that will do it. We’ll see.

I should note that while reaching those numbers is a goal, I have other reasons to record the videos:

I’m still enjoying the recording and editing process.
The Screenflow tool I use is pretty cool, and learning it is a valuable skill.
It gives me an excuse to talk to my Unofficial Official Social Media Consultant (my son).
It helps me reach a broader audience.

None of those require monetization. Still, getting a bigger audience will help, and eventually may get me noticed enough to join Nebula, which I’d really like to do. Long way to go for that to happen, though.

Speaking of Silly Videos

I had a (mildly) disconcerting experience this week and made a video about that, too:

As I mentioned last week, I’m going to be a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at Trinity College in the Fall. It turns out that the deadline for submitting textbook requirements for the Fall is next week, when I’ll be in India (more about that later). This video is about how I considered requiring, or at least recommending, my own Modern Java Recipes book, but it turned out the online form for the bookstore never heard of it. So much for fame. Anyway, I added a lot of pictures to the video in case you want to see it. Hey, gotta get those views and watch hours somehow, right?

GIDS Next Week

A few years ago, before the pandemic, I was offered the opportunity to speak at the Great Indian Developer Summit (GIDS), now rebranded the Great International Developer Summit, conveniently keeping the same initials. The conference is held in Bangalore, India, every year, or it was before the pandemic.

GIDS is one of the best organized and run conferences I’ve ever attended. Dilip Thomas and his team at Saltmarch Media do a wonderful job and it’s a pleasure to do business with them every year. During the pandemic they managed to hold the conference virtually, so I wound up speaking at some strange hours, given that Bangalore is UTC+5:30 and I’m on UTC-4 or UTC-5, depending on Daylight Saving Time.

The biggest challenge for me is the very long travel time to get there. In order to avoid multiple stops, I’m flying out of Boston, and getting there is no picnic. I usually drive to Framingham, MA and take the Logan Express bus. The complicating factors this time are:

The Sumner Tunnel into Boston is closed for repairs on the weekends for a long-overdue upgrade, and yup, I’m traveling on a weekend, and
Due to school vacation weeks, parking at the Logan Express sites (especially Framingham, where I go) is extremely limited.

It looks like I’ll be taking an Uber to Framingham, then the bus to Logan, then going through the international terminal, and hoping everything works.

Honestly, this will likely all be fine, but my least favorite part of every trip is the actual traveling part of travel. Once I’m there everything will be fine. Even the weather looks to be nice, ranging from the low 70s to the low 90s (Fahrenheit, which is evil, but that’s the one I know).

Oh, and just for the record:

I have no intention of driving while I’m in Bangalore. Whatever you think of me from reading this newsletter, I’m not completely insane.

Depending on how I recover from the travel to the conference, I’m hoping to record a short video each day reviewing the talks I attended and presented. We’ll see. Much more about that during the week, of course.

Chess Update

I’ve been giving updates on the progress of the chess World Championship between Ian Nepomniachtchi and Ding Liren in Kazakhstan. Here’s the updated score table:

Games 7, 8, and 9 were played this week, with one win for Nepo and two draws. Ding had excellent chances in Game 8 but couldn’t find the win. Nepo had a huge attack in Game 9, but Ding managed to draw it anyway. Today is a rest day, and then we head into the home stretch, with all five remaining games this week (Sun/Mon/Wed/Thurs/Sat and if necessary tie-breakers on Sunday). So far it’s been extremely entertaining and arguably one of the closest matches ever, or at least since the classic Karpov/Kasparov matches of the 1980s.

See the linked Wikipedia page (which seems to get updated very quickly) for details.

Substack Notes Fiasco, revisited

In last week’s newsletter, I included the interview disaster from the CEO of Substack, Chris Best, where he completely fumbled a question about content moderation on the platform. I suppose I should have anticipated that there would be a follow-up from the company, and I just saw it. It was posted on Notes, of course, but at least that makes it easy to include here:

Fine, whatever. I’m not going to debate it here. But since I posted the original mess, I thought it only reasonable to post the reply. Make of it what you will.

(The bio for Hamish McKenzie lists him as “Co-founder of Substack and Chief Writing Officer,” whatever that means. Presumably this is as official a reply as we’re going to get. As he said, you can consider it an official company statement.)

Rapid Unscheduled Disassemblies

This week SpaceX launched its Starship rocket (claimed to be twice the thrust of the old Saturn 5s) for the first time, and it didn’t work out all that well.

As the rocket approaches its first stage separation, it starts spinning and eventually explodes. It’s frankly astonishing how the commentators treated the launch as a success anyway, even though it resulted in a cloud of debris over Texas (shared free article from the New York Times) that is going to take a long time to clean up, and tons of damage to the launch pad that they arguably should have managed better.

The explosion, about four minutes into the test flight.

The entertaining part, however, if we can use that word during a disaster like this, is that rather than say the rocket exploded, the officials referred to it as a rapid unscheduled disassembly. Seriously.

Apparently that’s a real term, at least according to Wiktionary, which has had a page for that term since 2013. The resulting memes, however, were inevitable:

Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly | Know Your Meme — May 6, 1937, over New Jersey

Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly - 9GAG — The force will be with you, always

Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly meme | Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly | Know Your Meme — Woof. Seriously, woof.

Of course, my favorite had to be:

Super Bowl LI. Tom Brady’s finest hour. Almost, but not quite, made up for blowing the perfect season in 2007. Almost.

Too soon? I wore my NE Patriots shirt to the DevNexus conference (in Atlanta) a few weeks after the Super Bowl, but apologized for it (as in sorry, not sorry).

Let me know if you have better examples.

Tweets and Toots

Goodbye Blue Checks, We Hardly Knew Ye

On 4/20 (of course), Elon finally got around to removing the blue checks from verified users that had not subscribed to Twitter Blue.

So much for driving up subscription numbers. In fact, most people I followed who lost their blue checks were happy about it, as a blue check is now a badge of shame.

Good point. The flood of spammers is inevitable. Lots of people just automatically block anyone with a blue check. At least two celebrities, Lebron James and Stephen King, loudly announced they were not going to subscribe, only to discover that Elon had already paid for them. Yikes.

This is not going to end well. I think I’ll keep this in mind: