Tales from the jar side: Mockito Made Clear finished, Four years of Tftjs, My new YouTube channel, and Way too many Xmas jokes
What do you call Santa without his GPS? A lost Claus. <rimshot>
Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of December 18 - 25, 2022. This week I taught the third week of my Spring and Spring Boot in 3 Weeks course. I also published the first edition of my companion video series, Tales from the jar side: The videos, as a YouTube channel. More on that below.
Regular readers of (and listeners to, and now even viewers of) this newsletter are affectionately known as jarheads, and are far more intelligent, sophisticated, and attractive than the average newsletter reader (or listener, or viewer). If you wish to become a jarhead, please subscribe using this button:
As a reminder, when this message is truncated in email, click on the title to open it in a browser tab formatted properly for both the web and mobile.
Mockito Made Clear is Finished
I finished the last updates for my latest book, Mockito Made Clear, available from the Pragmatic Programmers. As I mentioned last week, though, I missed the deadline for their holiday release train, so the book is still listed as a Beta version on the web site. Rest assured, however, that if you buy a copy, in addition to the current beta you’ll also receive the completed version when it’s available. Given that it’s an ebook-only release, that will presumably happen by mid-January.
Real authors (I still have a hard time thinking of myself in those terms, but go with it) turn in completed books and have to wait nine months to a year for them to appear in print. I have no idea how they stand the wait. Some of them say they just immediately start on another book. Good for them. Given that my last four books (Modern Java Recipes, Kotlin Cookbook, Help Your Boss Help You, and Mockito Made Clear) were written back-to-back-to-back-to-back, I won’t be doing that. First, I need a break, and second, I’d like to stay married, and I don’t believe my wife would react well to me starting another book right away.
(How do you like that? I found a subtle way to mention four (!) of my six books. (The other two are Gradle Recipes for Android and Making Java Groovy.) My editor will be so proud. And if you’re rolling your eyes right now, I have no defense. I’ll be over here hanging my head in shame and waiting for the royalties to roll in. Maybe I shouldn’t quit my day job, though.)
Four Years of Tftjs
In case it’s not obvious — and it might not be, so don’t worry if it wasn’t — the abbreviation Tftjs stands for Tales from the jar side. I’m also not sure whether I should capitalize those last two letters, in TftJS, even though the Java command jar is not capitalized. If you have an opinion, please let me know in the comments.
According to my records, the first issue of Tales from the jar side was sent out on December 30, 2018. That means this upcoming Friday is the four-year anniversary of my newsletter. I’ve somehow managed to publish a new edition every Sunday the entire time, with the only exception being the day before I wound up in the hospital for a week last March. In fact, I’m sure my inability to put out a newsletter that Sunday was part of the reason my wife insisted I visit the doctor the next day.
I guess technically I should wait for next week’s newsletter to mark the four-year anniversary, but I’m going to talk about it this week anyway. It’s a lot like that silly debate on December 31, 1999 about whether to celebrate the new millennium on January 1, 2000 or on January 1, 2001 (since there was no year zero), and my advice was to have a party on both days, because hey, party.
The traditional gift for a four-year anniversary is fruit and flowers, so I’m guessing some kind of port wine would be appropriate:
I stopped drinking wine some time ago, but I might consider a small glass next time we emerge from our freezing-cold, winter-induced hibernation.
I wasn’t planning anything special for the newsletter, but as it turns out, I wound up making a big change anyway, which is the subject of the next section.
Tftjs: The YouTube Channel
For the past few weeks, I’ve been recording a voiceover on these newsletters. The mechanism to do that is built into Substack. I just click a record button and read the post. One problem with that is that I can’t edit the recording, or even pause it after I’ve started. That’s not a crisis or anything, but it does mean if I make a serious mistake, I have to start over. I’m also not sure how many people, if any, are listening to it. Substack does allow for an alternative — I can upload a recording if I have one — but I haven’t tried that yet.
As a side point, I teach a lot of online courses, either through the O’Reilly Learning Platform (which has their own proprietary system) or the No Fluff, Just Stuff virtual workshops, which use Zoom. I also have several recorded courses on the O’Reilly Learning Platform, on topics ranging from Groovy to Advanced Java to Android to Gradle to Spring. So I’m pretty comfortable talking to a camera, even if I can’t see the people on the other end. My hope is that that makes me a natural YouTuber.
As with most life-changing projects, there’s a story here, though a minor one. At last count, this newsletter had just over 1600 subscribers. Conspicuous by their absence from that list are my wife and my son. As the saying goes, “No one is a prophet in their own land” (which is based on Luke 4:24, in case you were wondering), but I think there’s more to it than that.
My wife does read every issue. Strangely enough, she goes through my weekly Facebook post to do so. I’m used to it. Nothing I do, however, can convince my son to read my newsletter. He does, however, spend lots of time on both YouTube and Twitch. He was the one who suggested I make a YouTube channel in the first place. I’d been toying with the idea of starting a companion channel for this newsletter, but the final push came from him.
I don’t know why he doesn’t read. We read to him nightly as a child, and he was surrounded by books growing up, but none of that mattered. He’d much rather watch a video than read anything. It’s just part of who he is. So be it, and that’s fine, of course. But it finally occurred to me that his approach may not be unique to him. I remember reading a few years ago that there is a generational difference in how people acquire new information. Here’s the list of generational boundaries, defined by Pew Research (from 2019):
He was born in 1992, which puts him at the latter end of the Millennials, almost, but not quite, to the start of Gen Z. For the record, I hold a similar role with the Boomers, since I was born in 1962. My younger siblings are Gen X. Of course, those boundaries are rough generalizations anyway.
The article I read said that while older people like me read a textbook by reading the text first and then processing the figures, younger people work the opposite way. They check out the figures first, and then read the text to add details and understanding. I don’t know how true that is, and it sounds like a major oversimplification, but I expect there’s something to it.
At any rate, all of this finally encouraged me to create my own YouTube channel for this newsletter. It’s called, of course, Tales from the jar side. I wasn’t planning to announce it until at least the New Year, but I decided to record last week’s newsletter and publish it just to see how the process worked, so that announced it whether I meant to or not. You can find it here, and the first video is embedded below:
I published last week’s newsletter on the channel on Friday, and by today it’s got 13 views, so I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice.
The whole motivation for the channel can be encapsulated in this statement:
Don’t feel like reading my newsletter? Let me read it to you.
If you decide to watch the video, you’ll find that I read the newsletter, magnified big enough for people to see it, but I also add extra comments and follow links and make jokes and even smile occasionally. As I get better at this, I plan to add time markers to separate the sections, since I know a lot of readers skip the technical parts and go directly to the jokes at the end, which is fine, of course. My son tells me I also need to work on the thumbnails, too. Honestly, he’s shown more interest in this than anything else I’ve done in the past 20 years, so that’s fun.
My hope is that I’ll be able to record videos to accompany each of the newsletter issues, so there should be a new one every week. It may take an extra day or two to put them together, depending on how much extra effort they require, so subscribing to the text newsletter on Substack will ensure you get the information first. The video channel is, of course, free. It may become difficult to justify all the extra work, but if it helps me reach a bigger audience, it’ll be worth it. There’s even a remote chance, wildly unlikely though it may be, that my son will actually start listening, too. We’ll see.
Holiday Stuff
All I want for Xmas is…
There are many similar videos, but this one is my favorite:
Q could have been in the most annoying character ever, but in the hands of an actor of the caliber of John de Lancie, I actually looked forward to his episodes now and then.
Speaking of Jean-Luc:
I’m sure the baby smiled at the Little Drummer Boy, but I seriously doubt Mary felt the same way.
(Incidentally, everyone always recommends the Bing Crosby / David Bowie version of that song, which is great, but I like this one from Pentatonix.)
More Xmas Jokes
I never really liked the Home Alone movies, mostly because of their extreme violence. It’s one thing to see Bugs Bunny do that; it’s quite another to see it happen in “real life” (shudder). Somehow, the Three Stooges doesn’t get to me the same way, though they did when I was young. I’m not sure why that’s different now. Still, the tweet’s a good gag.
Of course Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Duh. And I do feel bad for Takagi (James Shigeta), but Ellis (Hart Bochner) deserved what he got. In fact, he went out of his way to get it.
Yes, Zuzu, Teacher is very smart.
Speaking of wisdom:
Brilliant.
There are a whole series of posts from a Mastodon user whose handle is The Whore of Blahbylon (of all things; hey, I didn’t write it). Here is one of them:
Here’s another:
Fantastic. Check out her Mastodon feed for several similar posts.
This is also inspired, though a bit dark:
Yeah, that ought to do it. Or not. Either way, it ought to be entertaining.
A subtle Elon joke
In keeping with the idiotic, likely rigged Twitter polls Elon keeps running:
The funny part is that the results are exactly what Elon got on his “should I resign as Twitter CEO” poll, but you probably already knew that.
Last, but not least, an awesome pun
Here’s one of those “Oww, that’s awful — who can I tell, who can I tell?” jokes:
I can’t believe that never occurred to me, but at least I got to inflict it on you. :)
Have a good week, everybody.
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:
Spring and Spring Boot in 3 Weeks (week 3), on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Turned in final updates to Mockito Made Clear.
Began the YouTube channel, Tales from the jar side: The video series, because what I needed most in my life was yet another project.
This week:
No classes this week, which probably isn’t terribly surprising. I’m sure I’ll find something to do, like publish this edition of my newsletter on my new YouTube channel.
Very amusing, Ken. AND a “Caddyshack” joke! Happy holidays.
BTW, I'm in the Silent generation, but I prefer watching a video to reading a text.