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Showing posts from March, 2007

This Blog Has Moved!

Right, so yes, five years ago I moved to github pages, and never bothered to redirect any of these pages there. Now I've moved on from there, and... Finally I am using my real domain, trishagee.com . My blog is now at trishagee.com/blog .  See you there!
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Agile Infection Growing

This is a bloody good idea . It builds upon my own Virgoen tendancies to write lists and tick things off, but what the list model lacks is the "in progress" state. Plus occasionally my lists get confused. See today's notebook page: Thursday Fix bugs in Test Director Merge fixes up Do build Merge down Read terms of contract E-mail solicitor Go to Robert Dyas Order DAB Radio Finish business analysis docs Carry on with QCon note consolidation How do I know which ones I've started? I could do with a couple of boards at least as well to separate the personal from the business. Also note that I took something away from my Time Management course, attended when I was a mere graduate at a large manufacturing organisation: make a new list for each day, discarding your completed items and moving forward the incomplete ones (it also mentions to discard "low priority" items that haven't been done over a week or two under the theory that you'll never do it if
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QCon: Blogger's Summary

I might be too late in writing my own thoughts on QCon, but a bunch of other people have done a pretty good job.
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Certifiction

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From spellfecker  today: Certifiction (n.) : a professional endorsement which states only that the holder had the money to pay for the exam. ...which reminded me of this debate , particularly the first comment.
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QCon: TODO list inspired by the conference

Investigate Maven 2 Have a glance at TestNG Potentially play with JMock for current testing framework Play with GWT Sign up for Pragmatic Architect event Check out JavaBlackBelt site - what is provided, and what are the feelings of professionals (or, more importantly, recruiters) towards these qualifications? Look into getting Visual Studio .NET again so you can have a go at GUI development in it. Go to technorati . Investigate JUnit 4 changes/improvements
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Continuing the Agile froth...

...there are a number of points in this interview with Paul Oldfield which are interesting to consider when thinking about "doing Agile right".  It seems to be compatible with my "people over process" view - I'm not stating that having good people negates the need for any form of process or discipline, I have seen that this is simply not the case.  I do however think that agile techniques in particular rely heavily upon the "right" people / team, for some nebulous definition of  "right".
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QCon: Initial thoughts

Things I took out of QCon: I want to play with Ajax .  Maybe I've "grown out" of front end development but that doesn't prevent it from being (potentially) extremely cool Selenium looks like a good place to start for automated website testing It can take up to 7 years to move away from a legacy architecture.  Depressing, but at least it shows it can be done and it's worth the effort I'm going to become a certified Scrum Master Mistress .  I believe Agile in some form or other is the most efficient way to run software development, but there are a LOT of lessons to learn in order to get it right.  And number one lesson is you need the right team.
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QCon London

Last week saw the first QCon London conference, an event "designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers". The conference consisted of two days of tutorials followed by three days of talks covering technologies, vendor products, and processes. In addition there were numerous "networking" opportunities with plenty of break times to both absorb information and meet other people, plus evening events. The conference was both comprehensive and absorbing, and I'm hoping to take the next few days to filter through the notes I have taken and present a more succinct version here. Whether it will be of use to anyone other than myself remains to be seen...
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Popular posts from this blog

Dissecting the Disruptor: What's so special about a ring buffer?

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Recently we open sourced the LMAX Disruptor , the key to what makes our exchange so fast.  Why did we open source it?  Well, we've realised that conventional wisdom around high performance programming is... a bit wrong. We've come up with a better, faster way to share data between threads, and it would be selfish not to share it with the world.  Plus it makes us look dead clever. On the site you can download a technical article explaining what the Disruptor is and why it's so clever and fast.  I even get a writing credit on it, which is gratifying when all I really did is insert commas and re-phrase sentences I didn't understand. However I find the whole thing a bit much to digest all at once, so I'm going to explain it in smaller pieces, as suits my  NADD audience. First up - the ring buffer.  Initially I was under the impression the Disruptor was just the ring buffer.  But I've come to realise that while this data structure is at the heart of the patte
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Dissecting the Disruptor: Writing to the ring buffer

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This is the missing piece in the end-to-end view of the Disruptor.  Brace yourselves, it's quite long.  But I decided to keep it in a single blog so you could have the context in one place. The important areas are: not wrapping the ring; informing the consumers; batching for producers; and how multiple producers work. ProducerBarriers The Disruptor code has interfaces and helper classes for the Consumer s, but there's no interface for your producer, the thing that writes to the ring buffer.  That's because nothing else needs to access your producer, only you need to know about it.  However, like the consuming side, a ProducerBarrier is created by the ring buffer and your producer will use this to write to it. Writing to the ring buffer involves a two-phase commit.  First, your producer has to claim the next slot on the buffer.  Then, when the producer has finished writing to the slot, it will call commit on the ProducerBarrier . So let's look at the first bi
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Dissecting the Disruptor: How do I read from the ring buffer?

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The next in the series of understanding the Disruptor pattern developed at LMAX . After the last post we all understand ring buffers and how awesome they are.  Unfortunately for you, I have not said anything about how to actually populate them or read from them when you're using the Disruptor. ConsumerBarriers and Consumers I'm going to approach this slightly backwards, because it's probably easier to understand in the long run.  Assuming that some magic has populated it: how do you read something from the ring buffer? (OK, I'm starting to regret using Paint/ Gimp .  Although it's an excellent excuse to purchase a graphics tablet if I do continue down this road.  Also UML gurus are probably cursing my name right now.) Your Consumer is the thread that wants to get something off the buffer.  It has access to a ConsumerBarrier , which is created by the RingBuffer and interacts with it on behalf of the Consumer .  While the ring buffer obviously needs a se
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