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Showing posts from May, 2008

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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Scrum

I think the statement that struck me the most when I was on the Certified Scrum Master course was:  the start of the project is when you know the least about what you're doing . Which of course is absolutely true. So why do we come up with extensive requirements, detailed design, and fixed plans at this point of time?  We haven't put anything into place yet, we haven't played with the code, the customer hasn't seen anything of what we're promising to deliver. If we think about it this way, suddenly the waterfall method makes even less sense (assuming people do still like to work this way). How many times have you just played with a bit of code, done a prototype, a "hello world", knocked up a basic screen, before you can even give your manager some finger-in-the-air estimates?  I don't know about you but I'm not comfortable unless I have played a bit to get the feel of something before even looking at someone who asks those questions! The empirical
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BSc (Hons) SCJP SCWCD CSM

What are our thoughts on putting all the letters after your name in a CV/resume?   Pretentious?  Or the only reasonable time to use all those letters?
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Certification

This week I acquired some more letters which I can add after my name when I'm feeling pretentious:  - SCWCD  - CSM I'm feeling a bit over-saturated at the moment as you might imagine, especially since Wednesday's exam was a detailed technical one and Thursday and Friday were spent learning about development methodologies - well, one specifically I suppose. What I need now is a real project to apply it all.  It might be time to tackle that favour I was asked for back at Christmas.
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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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