Tales from the jar side: Titles are hard, Spring Boot upgrade, Bezos as Blofeld, and other funny tweets
Yes, I liked the old title better too, but you get used to it.
Welcome, jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of May 23 - 30, 2021. This week I taught an Introduction to Gradle course for Gradle, Inc, and finished my Spring Boot in 3 Weeks course on the O’Reilly Learning Platform. I’ve also been updating the final text of Help Your Boss Help You (HYBHY) based on feedback from the reviewers.
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Spring Second Chance Sale
The most recent newsletter from The Pragmatic Bookshelf includes information about the Second Chance Spring 50% Off Sale. From the email:
If you missed out on anything in this year's Spring Sales Event or if you're already ready to take on new topics, we've got some great news for you. For one week only, we're giving you one more chance to pick up any of the 48 sale titles for 50% off. Go and graphs, Rust and LiveView, Tailwind and more—it's all back and at prices you won't see again for a very long time. Scroll down for the full list and promo code.
Let me spare you the suspense (even though it may mess up their analytics): Enter the coupon code SpringSecondChance2021 at checkout to save 50%. There are a lot of great books in that sale, which also includes my new book Help Your Boss Help You.
The coupon code expires June 2, so you only have a couple days left to use it. See the link for all the books included in the sale.
Saying the books are great and that my book is included reminds me of an old gag I used to do for my first book, Making Java Groovy. That book took me over three years to write, which my publisher was not at all happy about. But when people asked me why so long, I replied:
THEM: Why did your book take so long to write?
ME: Great Art takes time… [wait for it] …and so did my book.
Naming Things Is Hard
Speaking of HYBHY, I’ve noticed an odd phenomenon regarding the title. Whenever I tell someone the title, they start off excited, like they’re going to hear something really interesting, and then you can watch the disappointment flow over their faces when they hear the new title.
That sounds bad, but it’s not the whole story. Part of the reason for the disappointment is that most of the people I’ve talked to knew the original title, Managing Your Manager, which is still the title for all the association presentations and courses. Everybody loved that title. It sounded nicely subversive, and the word play didn’t hurt either. Help Your Boss Help You doesn’t bring the same connotations. Worse, it turns out that a lot of people have negative associations with the word “boss,” which apparently generates a much worse reaction than the word “manager.” I didn’t expect that. (It doesn’t work that way for me. Maybe it’s a generational thing.) I only used the word Boss in the title because I thought it scanned better than Help Your Manager Help You.
But here’s the funny part. Over the next few minutes, you can actually watch how each person slowly talks themselves into the new title. It doesn’t matter what I say during that time. You can see the interplay work itself out on their faces as they start thinking, “Well, it IS all about the relationship with your manager, and the recommendations are making it more likely your boss will become your ally, and that really is helping your boss help you ….” I’ve gotten to the point where I can watch them gradually persuade themselves that the new title works, even if they still don’t like it as much as the original.
I’ve seen this happen half a dozen times now, and I’ve come to expect it. The only problem is that it takes time, and that’s not great for impulse buys. I can only hope that when I appear on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to hawk the book, the segment will be long enough for the process to play out.
Feel free to let me know if the same process happens to you. Also, if you know anybody involved with bookings for The Late Show, I could use a referral.
Spring Boot Upgrade
I suppose teaching Spring over three weeks made this inevitable, but between weeks two and three Spring Boot changed versions. From the Spring Blog, there is a post entitled Spring Boot 2.5 is now GA.
Of course I updated our existing app from 2.4.4 to 2.5.0. Pretty much everything worked the same way it did before, except when I went to demonstrate Spring Data Rest with the so-called HAL Explorer. The resulting page looks like this under Spring Boot 2.4.4:
Now, after upgrading to 2.5.0, it looks like this:
See how those extra buttons in the officers row are now missing? Those buttons let me invoke GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE operations through the HAL Explorer in the older version, and now those buttons are gone. The system still responds to those types of non-GET requests, which I can do at the command line (I’m a fan of httpie, if you’re interested), but I don’t know why those buttons no longer appear on the browser. I’ll keep looking, but if you’ve heard anything, please let me know.
Miscellaneous Other Stuff and Whatnot
There are some pieces of music I never tire of hearing. Debussy’s Clair de Lune is one of them. If you don’t know it by the title, you may recall it as the music playing over the celebration scene around the water fountain at the end of Ocean’s 11 (video includes spoilers for a 20-year-old movie).
I’m not a connoisseur or anything, but there is the performance I love above all others:
The pianist is Tiffany Poon, and I find her dazzling. She’s a true artist. The way she starts so quietly, and delays so many of the transitions, makes everyone else’s version seemed rushed. She brings such a beautiful gentleness and fluid technique to her performance, I’m just blown away.
In case you’re interested, I created a YT playlist that includes this video, which I call Haunting Beauty.
Next random item is from the late Roger Ebert:
I would love to be able to plan out what I’m going to write before I write it. Some writers are able to do that, or so I hear. For me, whenever I start I only have a vague idea what I’m going to write about, possibly with a beginning and a possible ending, but that’s about it. The rest happens during the writing process. That’s both fun and terrifying, but I’m stuck with it.
It reminds me that when I worked in the business world, I used to write my annual goals retroactively. When performance review time rolled around, my boss would ask me for my goals and accomplishments and I’d think, “okay, what did I do this year?” and write my goals based on that. I’d make sure at least one was a stretch goal, and one had some parts I didn’t quite achieve, or whatever else I needed to best game the system. Most of my managers would roll their eyes but let me get away with it. Everybody knew how much of a raise they were going to get (if any) anyway, so the rest was just paperwork.
(As I’ve said before, I’ve always been a “talented but high-maintenance” employee, as one review stated it. There’s a reason I learned all those lessons I talk about in HYBHY.)
Next, there’s a sale going on:
Oh wait, I talked about that at the beginning of this newsletter. At least it’s okay I already gave you the coupon code, since they added it to the tweet.
Next, you may have heard that (1) Jeff Bezos is stepping down as CEO of Amazon, though he’ll still be very much involved in the company, and (2) Amazon bought MGM for $8.5 billion. That makes this a perfect tweet:
I always thought Bezos looked more like Lex Luthor than Ernst Stavro Blofeld, but maybe not:
Has anyone seen the two of them together? “But,” you may object, “one is a fictional character!” Oh yeah? How do you know Jeff Bezos really exists?
Next, this tweet combines two other news stories in a clever way:
I wanted to insert a picture here of cicadas watching Friends, but that’s way beyond my own artistic abilities. I googled for images of cicadas watching TV, but it turns out I don’t want to look at cicadas any more than you do.
Finally, I’ve been spending my free time harassing my son and nephews with dad jokes, which is really fun. I get a lot of them from this Dad jokes twitter feed, which this week included this little gem:
Snicker. And on that farm he mined some bitcoin…
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:
Introduction to Gradle for Gradle, Inc.
Day 3 of Spring Boot in 3 Weeks, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
This week:
No classes. I need to turn in the final text of HYBHY by June 7, so that’s what I’ll be working on all week. If you have any feedback to give me, now is the time.