Tales from the jars side: ÜberConf, My book on Medium, and Too many funny tweets
Try to live your life so that if your site goes down (looking at you, Facebook), people don't hope it never comes back up. Things are bad if even Twitter is dunking on you.
Welcome, jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of October 3 - 10, 2021. This week I gave more talks than a reasonably healthy individual should at the NFJS destination event known as ÜberConf.
For any newcomers, welcome! All the brilliant, sophisticated readers of this newsletter (that’s all of you, by definition) are affectionately labeled jarheads, at least until a real Marine objects, at which time I’ll back down like the coward I am. But so far, so good.
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ÜberDuperConf
ÜberConf is one of the major destination events for the No Fluff, Just Stuff tour. Unlike the regular NFJS events, which are held on weekends, ÜberConf is held during the week and is described as the ultimate even for übergeeks, because the sessions sometimes run from 8am to 10pm. I’ve been speaking there for several years, and it’s always one of the best attended conferences with some of the most dedicated and most interesting groups of attendees.
I have to admit, it was good to see real people again, even if attendance was lower than normal. The sessions were all both live and online, which was a first. Some poor volunteer had to go around and remind each speaker to hit the record button, so I can say all my sessions were recorded.
I did a full-day workshop Tuesday on Modern Java, followed by six talks on Wednesday, five on Thursday, and three on Friday. That’s every available slot (other than the keynote) for a total of 14 plus the tutorial day (which counts as 4, bringing the total to 18). My topics covered Gradle, Android, Java, JUnit, Mockito, Kotlin, and my two non-technical talks, one called Mental Bookmarks and the Fractal Nature of Success and the other Help Your Boss Help You, named after my recent book.
I’m still recovering, so maybe I’ll comment on specific items more next week. I do want to mention, though, that in honor of my fellow speaker, the inimitable Venkat Subramaniam, who works twice as hard as the rest of us and would laugh at my lack of endurance (except he’s too nice to actually do that), my performance qualified me for a Full Venkat. For the record, I came up with this ladder a few years ago:
A Full Venkat means giving a talk in every available slot.
A Royal Venkat includes the keynote, too. Venkat did the keynote this time, because of course he did.
A Full Metal Venkat has only happened once (that we know of). At a Rich Web Experience a few years ago, Both Venkat and my friend Nate Schutta did talks in all the available slots. Then Venkat gathered a few attendees and did another session just for them. Nate is convinced to this day that Venkat did that just to stay one talk ahead of him.
Ironically, due to a scheduling conflict, Venkat didn’t do a Full Venkat this time. He did everything (plus the keynote) until Friday, but wasn’t available that day. So I’m counting this as a win —one that I never, ever want to repeat again.
I should also mention that I apparently got a reputation during the conference as the source of lots of bad jokes. I have no idea how that happened. As I mentioned in one of my sessions, an accusation like that only encourages me, so here’s one more:
How does a programmer escape a shark?
\🦈
(I know if you have to explain a joke it’s not funny, but for those who would like an explanation: most programming languages include “escape” characters which let the language interpret a value as a literal symbol. In many of them, the backslash, \, is the escape character, so \t is a tab and a \n is a carriage return. This joke isn’t original — most of mine aren’t — but I admit I do have a keyboard shortcut for it.)
I managed to catch an early flight home after the conference, which was great, and to my astonishment I won a vendor raffle and now own an Oculus Quest 2. Somehow I even managed to get it home on the plane. Clearly I am living the best life, though if Facebook goes down again (see many jokes below) and takes Oculus with it, I’m in trouble. You know what they say: if you’re lost in virtual reality …
We’ll see.
Book News
The publicity people at Pragmatic Programmers are not only hardworking, but clever as well. This week they tweeted this about my book Help Your Boss Help You:
Huh. Makes sense, though I’m not sure how to interpret it.
The other big event about the book is that the complete text has now been added to the Directory of Pragmatic Programmer Books on Medium.
Those books include the complete text, available if you are a Medium subscriber. Here’s a direct link to my book.
Amusing Tweets
On October 4, Facebook experienced a world-wide outage that was so bad, it brought down the other properties it owns, including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus (as referenced above). Apparently even the security systems on the Facebook campus were affected, as employees were unable to access locked rooms using their badges without Facebook being available. The outage was blamed on a configuration problem, which has since been fixed.
Wow. I expect:
They will be rethinking their security policies Real Soon Now.
Some poor intern will be identified and publicly flambéd for the problem. I’m actually encouraged that hasn’t happened yet, but maybe it’s too soon.
Users flooded Twitter, and you can find lots of trolling comments in response. I’m going to skip those.
Well, maybe one:
![Twitter's official account said "Hello literally everyone" to which WhatsApp's account tweeted [waving emoji' hello!" Jack chimed in to say he "thought this was supposed to be encrypted"](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6983ec93-39a7-4ac3-a83c-baaf8ac72394_600x383.jpeg "Twitter's official account said "Hello literally everyone" to which WhatsApp's account tweeted [waving emoji' hello!" Jack chimed in to say he "thought this was supposed to be encrypted"")
I did enjoy a few humorous responses:
Sadly, I doubt that’s possible.
Come on, admit it. You laughed. I certainly did.
Apparently, it could have been worse:
It’s all metaphors:
Also, always look on the bright side of life:
In unrelated news, 90 year-old William Shatner is scheduled to go to (almost) space on Blue Origin, Amazon’s (almost) space launch vehicle, on October 12. I liked this response:
This hit a bit too close to home:
There was even a follow-up:
Finally, I have to include this, for one jarhead in particular:
Please stay healthy, everyone. And if Facebook goes down again, hurry and get all your crazy aunts and uncles vaccinated.
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:
UberConf, baby. :)
This week:
Functional Java, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Spring MVC, an NFJS Virtual Workshop