Tales from the jar side: The Two Messages to give your boss, Kotlin + Spring, and Way Too Many Seal Jokes
What sort of cinemas do seals go to? Dive ins.
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of September 27 - October 4, 2020. This week I appeared on Nate Schutta’s new show Between Chair and Keyboard, taught a course on Kotlin + Spring Boot, and gave several talks on Day 2 of the No Fluff, Just Stuff Virtual Tour Stop #2.
I realized last week that I’m going to struggle getting this newsletter out early enough on Sundays now that football season has started. I’m a big fan of NFL Red Zone, and the wonderful lack of commercials means it’s hard for me to work while it’s on. The real goal this week is to finish this edition before the 4 pm game between New England and Kansas City, though I expect the Patriots to lose…
Cam Newton, New England Patriots quarterback, tests positive for Covid-19
Oh no. How could that happen? What am I saying? How could that NOT happen? The NFL isn’t in a bubble, like the NBA players. Some kind of transmission was inevitable.
Oh well. I’ll watch the game anyway and see what they can do…
Patriots-Chiefs postponed after positive COVID-19 tests for both teams
Cam Newton was placed on the COVID-19/reserve list Saturday.
Aw, nut bunnies. So much for that. I’ll guess they’ll make it up during a bye week or something…
New England Patriots-Kansas City Chiefs planned for Monday
Huh? What difference is one day going to make? I’m confused.
At least they’ll be careful to wear masks and practice social distancing in the meantime. If someone does test positive, I’m sure they’ll let everyone they encounter with know about it. They certainly won’t hold rallies full of unmasked supporters, or hold a $250K/plate fundraiser while experiencing symptoms, and even charge people an extra $50K to come into close physical contact.
I mean, nobody could be that stupid, that selfish, and that malicious, could they?
Let’s just move on.
Managing Your Manager
At long last, several chapters of my Managing Your Manager book went out to reviewers. Or, more properly, the chapters to share were selected, a pdf was created, a list I compiled of twenty (!) potential reviewers was sent to my editor, and the initial email asking them if they were still willing to participate went out or will very soon. The book will start going out to those who are interested later this week.
At least I think that’s how the process works. This book is being published by Pragmatic Programmers, and it’s my first book with them, so I’m still getting accustomed to the process. Now I’ll work on the rest of the book while awaiting the feedback from those readers.
I was going to say that if you are one of those readers, please be kind, but that’s not necessary. Given the chaos in the world this week, any fear I would normally experience about criticism of the book barely makes it halfway up that scale, which keeps being reset higher and higher. So say whatever you want. I’ll be fine.
For you newsletter readers, special group that you are, let me mention one part of the book that is NOT going out for review yet: a chapter I call The Two Messages. The idea is that there are two primary messages you want to deliver to your manager. Expressed colloquially, they are:
I got this.
I got your back.
The “I got this” message is all about taking responsibility. When you communicate this to your manager, you’re not saying that you know how to do every step of whatever you’re asked to do. Instead, you’re saying you’ll either figure it out, or, if needed, you’ll ask for help. Taking responsibility means you’ll find a way to do the job. If you encounter obstacles you can’t overcome yourself, you’ll find help and let your manager know so that you can replan if necessary.
The “I got your back” message means you promise to support whatever decisions your manager makes, at least to the outside world. You reserve the right to argue those decisions directly with your boss however much you feel necessary, but to everyone else — including the manager’s boss — you’re a team. Whenever you’re asked about the project, you’ll use the term we exclusively, as in “we decided to do x, which didn’t work, so then we met and decided to do y, which didn’t work either.” You acknowledge that you’re a team, regardless of who made the decisions, and you will back up the manager when things go wrong.
Both of these messages are vital to your boss, and form a fundamental part of what I call constructive loyalty. Any encounter you have with your manager should be evaluated in terms of these messages, because whether you believe in them or not, your manager does. If you want to be successful, you need to keep them in mind.
Much more coming in the book, of course. I’m still working on that chapter, however, so it’s not part of this initial review.
Between Chair and Keyboard
Nate Schutta and I met on Monday and basically just bantered back and forth for an hour. We talked about surviving the current lockdown, what TV shows to binge or books to read, where we’re going to go when we can travel again, and so on. Here’s the YouTube link if you’re really bored:
Kotlin + Spring
This week I ran my Kotlin + Spring Boot course on the O’Reilly Learning Platform. If you are a subscriber there, you’ll find the course listed as “Kotlin + Spring Boot Essentials,” with an actual plus sign in the title. I have no idea why. I’m sure I used the word “and” during the proposal, but somehow that turned into a plus sign during the approval process. I guess I should turn that into a joke about operator overloading somehow, but nothing is occurring to me yet.
From a presenter point of view, I really enjoyed the course. From an instructor point of view, however, not as much. The problem with that course is that to get a lot out of it, you have to already be reasonably comfortable with Spring, and it would probably help to know something about Kotlin. The prerequisites are listed in the description, but I also didn’t want to limit the size of the potential audience, so I always wind up with many people who don’t have as much background as I’d like. I therefore always spend some time going over some of that background.
It’s a full course, but there’s no way to teach a whole language and how to use it with Spring all in four hours. Ultimately I think I overwhelmed the students, but I did give them a decent overview of what’s possible and why you would do it.
If you’re interested, the GitHub repository with the code is here, updated to the latest versions of Kotlin and Spring Boot.
Sealed Java
Java 15 came out on September 15, which already seems like months ago. One of my talks at the NFJS conference was entitled Latest Java Best Practices, and Java 15 is now available, so I updated my talk to cover it. The only really new feature is something called sealed classes, like this from the JSR covering them:
While I didn’t make any jokes about them, all I could think about when discussing them were the inevitable seal memes.
Wait, what are you doing in a restaurant? Don’t you know there’s a pandemic on?
That’s totally not funny, and yet I keep laughing.
I’ll stop now. In the immortal words of Henry Lipkin, Psychologist from Good Will Hunting:
(Just in case that gif file doesn’t appear properly in the email:
Henry Lipkin: Now, no more shenanigans, no more tomfoolery, no more ballyhoo.
or see this link. Some day, and that day may never come, I’ll find a reason to use the word ballyhoo in a sentence. (Other than that one.) But I doubt it.)
That reminds me that we have one totally awesome joke that in my household we call The Penguin Joke. I’m not going to tell it here. This is a family newsletter, even if the family in question is usually the Addams Family.
Seal photobombing a flock of penguins. Nuff ced.
I’ll say this much. One day my wife and I were at her church, rehearsing for an upcoming production of Benjamin Britten’s Noya’s Fludde. The chief pastor, a man of great dignity and an deep resonant bass voice, was playing the Voice of God. During a break, my wife — meek, mild, shy, retiring little maid that she is, decided to tell the pastor The Penguin Joke.
When she finished, he was shocked, but then cracked up. It was only then that my wife realized she’d told The Penguin Joke to her pastor, in the meeting house of her church of all places. Yikes.
She is, of course, a legend. On Wednesday this week we’ll celebrate our 30th anniversary. More about that next week.
It’s been six months in quarantine, and we’re all feeling on edge. Here is the first tweet in an excellent thread that talks about the “six month wall” that everyone hits when isolated in stressful situations:
Dr Ahmad is an international security professor and knows what she’s talking about.
This issue is getting really long, so I’ll leave it at that. Please stay safe and healthy. Don’t deliberately flaunt physics and biology in the idiotic belief that a virus cares about political parties.
Last week:
Appeared on Between Chair and Keyboard
Kotlin + Spring Boot Essentials, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Gave four talks at NFJS Virtual Tour Stop #2
This week:
Spring and Spring Boot, O’Reilly Learning Platform
JUnit 5 and Mockito, NFJS Virtual Workshop on Wednesday
What’s New In Java, O’Reilly Learning Platform