Tales from the jar side: Talks at UberConf and confidence issues, JUnit 5 webinar, CrowdStrike memes, and the usual tweets and toots

Happy CrowdStrike outage day to all who celebrate! Sadly, we Mac people still had to work.

Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of July 14 - 21, 2024. This week I gave several talks at UberConf in Denver, CO.

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UberConf 2024, and My Crisis of Confidence

My first talks on the No Fluff, Just Stuff tour were back in 2011, which means I’ve been a regular member of the tour for 13 years. That feels like a long time. Back when I first started, the tour consisted of about 15 to 20 weekend conferences at cities all over the country, including Boston, Seattle, Washington DC, Chicago, Minneapolis, and many others. Running the shows on the weekend meant a couple of advantages:

• Attendees didn’t have to miss much work to come to the conference. The conferences tended to be half-day on Friday and then all day on Saturday and Sunday. That made it easier to sell to management, because at most their employees only missed half a day.

• Speakers also didn’t have to miss much of their own day jobs, whatever they might be. The tour was unique in that they employ a regular group of speakers that repeat their talks in many shows around the country during the year, so they get lots of practice and can adjust the talks based on questions at other events. But the speakers are busy, too, and knowing they only had to fly in Friday morning and leave by Sunday night made many people available that otherwise might not have been.

In addition to the weekend conferences, however, the tour had one “destination event,” which was called UberConf. UberConf always took place during July in the Denver area every year, and was the only conference that ran during the week. This was long before there was a company called Uber, so for several years nobody confused the two.

UberConf not only ran during the week, it was intended for the seriously dedicated developers. Talks on most days ran from about 9am to 5pm, but on Wednesdays the talks ran until 6pm, then dinner and a keynote, followed by another talk from about 8:30pm to 10pm. I was surprised how many people were willing to attend those “Uber After Dark” sessions, but that’s the sort of developer the conference attracted.

Fast forward about a dozen years, and everything has reversed. If you look at the NFJS home page, you’ll see that there are only three weekend shows left between now and the end of the year (and one of those has already been cancelled, though the page hasn’t yet updated to show it). In addition, there are four destination shows, all being held in December in Florida between the 2nd and 12th of that month.

In addition, the tour added a schedule of Virtual Workshops, which are half-day online courses, as well as a set of free Friday webinars held over lunchtime. My schedule usually involves teaching a handful virtual workshops a month, and I occasionally give the Friday webinar sessions.

This year at UberConf I gave the following talks:

• A full-day workshop on the latest features in Java, up to and including Java 21

• A two-part talk on Practical AI Tools for Java Developers

• A talk entitled Custom GPTs for Fun, Profit, and Potential Liability (that was my Wednesday evening talk, and it’s a fun one)

• A summary talk about upgrading to the latest Java, which was a condensed version of my first-day workshop.

Now comes the hard part. I have to admit that my performance was fine, but with one exception. The first part of of AI talk I think I seriously misjudged what my audience wanted. Given my history with UberConf, I believed they wanted lots of code, showing details about how to access Mistral, GPT, Claude, etc, to do chat, image generation, vision, and audio. What I now believe they wanted was much more about the tools themselves and when to use them.

I could tell things were off about halfway through the first talk, and I tried to adjust. I spoke more about GitHub Copilot and IntelliJ’s AI Assistant, and when to use tools like Claude or GPT-4o as external resources, but when only half the audience from the first talk came back for the second one, I knew I’d missed the target. That talk went much better, because I really did focus on more tool-level operations. I showed them Descript, and how it removes “filler” words automatically, shortens word gaps, and can generate summaries and YouTube descriptions. I showed how to use the AI assistant to generate git commit messages for you. Unfortunately, though, there was nothing I could about the first audience by that time.

I don’t think the experience was all that bad, but there were three really negative consequences for me:

1. Since the first talk paralleled a lot of what I’m trying to do in my upcoming book (working title: Adding AI to Java), it made me seriously question my whole approach to that book. Now I’m not sure what to do. I guess it’s a good thing I’m speaking to my editor tomorrow.

2. I realized afterwards that I’d made the exact same mistake when I gave the first version of this talk back at an NFJS event in April. Again I had a big audience for part 1, and again I lost half of them and adjusted for part 2. I still can’t believe that I somehow managed to make the exact same mistake over again. Back when we had over a dozen events a year, I would be sure to get it right next time, but that leads me to my last problem, which is…

3. I’m now officially done with NFJS events for the rest of this year. I’m giving some virtual workshops and I’ll know what to do there, but I’m not scheduled for either of the two remaining NFJS events and I’m not presenting at the destination events in December, largely because of my new Trinity College schedule. The December conferences conflict with finals week at Trinity, and it’s hard to skip out on that.

It’s just so frustrating knowing I had an opportunity to do it right and messed it up, and there won’t be a chance any time soon to fix it. Worse, now I’m questioning my upcoming book, and the book was supposed to be mostly text complete by the end of August. I guess we’ll see.

I’m probably overreacting. Nobody actually complained about anything. It just feels more like a missed opportunity that’s shaken my confidence a bit. I’ll get over it, but it might take a few days and a lot of rewriting on the book.

JUnit 5’s Best Features

I did get lucky, though. I was originally scheduled to fly home on Friday morning, and given the CrowdStrike fiasco that could have been a real problem. Instead, I flew back Thursday evening without any issues. Whew.

The reason I came back early (the conference didn’t end until Friday) was because I was scheduled to give one of those Friday NFJS webinars, entitled JUnit 5’s Best Features. That, fortunately, went very well. I’ve been teaching JUnit 5 training courses for years now, and I even have a playlist of videos on the Tales from the jar side YouTube channel about it. If you’re interested, the recording is already available.

I’ll take CrowdStrike Memes for $100, Alex

Normally I would save this for the Tweets and Toots, but I think it deserves it’s own section. Let’s start with this:

I imagine everyone interested in my newsletter has already heard about it, but a bug in a code update distributed by the security company CrowdStrike infected several million (!) Windows machines and brought them down Friday morning. Chaos ensued.

I’m really glad I’m on a Mac, but honestly, this who fiasco was a symptom. The lack of testing, the lack of support staff to fix issues, the lack of developers to ensure everything was done properly is all part of the “cost cutting” layoffs done by executives over the last few years as they try to eliminate everything in the infrastructure that doesn’t directly make money. We’ll know more soon, but unless CrowdStrike’s stock price gets hammered, don’t expect them to actually fix the problem. Like most of the crumbling infrastructure surrounding us that is the result of late-stage capitalism wanting to grab every last dollar, we’re now just waiting for the next disaster.

I don’t want to fall too much into curmudgeon mode, so let’s look at some of the funnier memes to come out of all this.

XKCD wins again. The mouse-over text is: “We were going to try swordfighting, but all my compiling is on hold.” That’s a reference to another comic from years ago, when two developers were sword fighting while waiting for their code to compile.

Speak, friend, and try to enter all you want, but first you have to reboot the system in safe mode and delete the bad file.

Here’s the link to that tweet. It’s a dramatic illustration of the ground stop that resulted.

Reminds me of this old gag: If I’m ever in a hospital on a respirator, pull the plug. Then plug me back in. See if that works.

Here’s an interesting reference:

That’s from the Chernobyl series on HBO, in case you don’t remember. That series was excellent, except for how badly the messed up the behavior of radiation. Radiation poisoning is NOT contagious. You’re either exposed to radioactive materials or you’re not. It doesn’t matter how close you are to a sick person or how much time you spend with them. If there’s no material, you’re safe. I’m surprised that a series that go much right messed up such a fundamental issue.

Good to have a user story to implement, I guess. Let’s finish with this:

As they say, if you think nobody cares that you’re still alive, try missing a couple of car payments.

Let’s go to the regular tweets and toots.

Tweets and Toots

Now that’s just mean

As the saying goes, you’re not paranoid if they really are out to get you.

Bond, James Bond

Auric Goldfinger, Hugo Drax, Elliot Carver, the list goes on an on.

Speaking of evil billionaires

Good point. We’ll see how many employees resign rather than move. I suspect that few will, mostly because anybody who could leave Elon probably already has.

Nice update

Moth People

Very good. And finally:

Sam I Am

Sound medical advice.

Have a great week, everybody!

Last week:

• UberConf, in Denver. I have several talks, and it will be fun to see my friends again.

This week:

• Managing Your Manager, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform

• Reactive Spring, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform