Trisha's Ramblings

If you have a Parleys subscription, you can watch the whole "Why we shouldn't target women" panel from Devoxx 2011 a month or so ago.  Watch me attempt to monopolise the whole panel as if it was my idea or something...

When you're applying for a job at LMAX , your CV (or résumé, for our American readers) usually comes through me and I decide whether to call you for a technical phone screen. I'm going to let you into a secret. I'm going to tell you the criteria I use when judging your CV. Now, you could say this is a foolish thing for me to do, because now when you apply you'll be "cheating" and writing your CV to pass these guidelines. Good. LMAX isn't the only company that's going to judge your CV based on these criteria. I firmly believe that an increase in quality of the CVs in our industry can only be A Good Thing.  An increase in the quality of your CV is definitely A Good Thing for you . Even more importantly, if I get CVs that do not pass these basic criteria, now I know you either don't read the LMAX blogs (shame on you), or you're not able to follow simple instructions (bodes poorly for your ability to learn within the company). The t...

At JAX London Mike and I presented "Understanding the Disruptor - A Beginner's Guide to Hardcore Concurrency".  This is the session we initially previewed to the London Java Community a few weeks earlier.  The content is the same, but the feel of the presentation was quite different to us - the venue for the LJC event was more intimate, and it was easier to interact with the audience.  At JAX, we were up on stage, which was pretty cool actually, but meant that it felt more like a lecture and it was less easy to connect with the audience. We received some really great feedback on this presentation, and it was brilliant to see a lot of the speakers from JAX there watching us.

Tori Wieldt from the Oracle Technology Network interviewed me at Devoxx.  Because I was there to be on the Why We Shouldn't Target Women panel, the interview is just another platform for me to air my views on this subject again. Yes, I am actually wearing pink....

Saturday was, hopefully, my last conference of the year.  My lucky readers should start to see some posts which are not simply me gushing about another opportunity to hang out with awesome people and learn about interesting "stuff". Who wants to propose a session? In many ways the London Java Community Open Conference was my favourite one so far, and not just because it's near home and I helped to organise it.  One of the awesome things about both Java One and Devoxx was the opportunity to travel, to see new places and to meet people you might not meet in London.  The scale, and the opportunities to meet key players in the Java world, were the things I probably appreciated the most from both of those conferences.  And you can tell from my posts I really enjoyed them. But the LJC conference was probably perfect as my last one for 2011: "How do you spell 'lightning'?" Being on home turf with awesome people who have really helped drag...

I'm back from Devoxx, having had lots of food for thought.  In particular, my panel on Why We Shouldn't Target Women generated a lot of discussion and I'm still trying to process it all. Martijn Verburg; Regina ten Bruggencate; Trisha Gee; Antonio Goncalves; Claude Falguière; Kim Ross  The panel went really well, we got decent interaction from the audience, and of course my fellow panel members were awesome.  I managed to restrain myself from using the opportunity as my own personal soap box and allowed other people to speak occasionally.  Sadly the only male on the panel stole the show somewhat, so Antonio won't be invited in future... Actually in seriousness, it was great to have a guy on the panel to present his point of view.  It was interesting that he's a father, highlighting that parenting issues are not the same as women's issues, and conflating those two concerns hurts both genders. But Antonio's hair is far too shiny and pretty and he's ...

Stephan wearing the Brazilian flag at the opening keynote European conferences are different (and cool) because you get to hear even more languages spoken than you usually do in London (apparently the most diverse city in the world for spoken languages).  I think the idea of a Paris Devoxx with 75% of the talks in French is brilliant - I'm always banging on about diversity, we shouldn't expect developers to learn in English only. Really great to meet up with some of the people I met at Java One and am starting to feel more a part of the global community. Seems to me there are slightly more women here than at the other conferences I've been to, and not just because Regina and I pulled together four women for a panel on women technologists.  And once again, a lot of guys asking why this is, because they want things to change. A highlight was seeing my namesake, AutoTrish, up on a cinema-sized screen in front of hundreds of people at Dave Farley 's Continuous Deli...

A couple of weeks ago, I was at JAX London along with a number of the London Java Community regulars ( Martijn / Ben / John / Sandro / Simon / Zoe I'm looking at you....) My purpose for attending was largely to present the Hardcore Concurrency for Beginners talk that Mike and I debuted at an LJC event a few weeks back. Almost as important was catching up with the aforementioned LJCers and meeting with as many people as would talk to me. After the disappointment of the sessions at Java One, sitting in a room being talked at was quite low down on my list of priorities. Sometimes it's nice to be wrong. The sessions at JAX were of a very high standard, and I learnt something from every one. I was pleasantly surprised by the calibre of international speakers that were there, and the sessions seemed to be pitched right for me personally, which was nice. Downsides: I'm going to cover these first because I like to end on a high note.  Firstly, although I was inte...

"What... exactly... were you guys looking to get out of today's event? Because..." "Because we're girls?" "Um... yes..." Kim impetuously opts for The Truth: "We're here to meet men." Our interrogator looks round dubiously. "No, really, why are you here?" Phew.  My reputation is intact 1 Kim eloquently describes what her situation is as Product Manager and the criteria she's measuring third party products against.  I explain how LMAX aims to be the fastest retail exchange in the world, and therefore low latency is a tiny bit important to us.  I talk about how we created The Disruptor on our path to achieve that goal.  The guys gathered around us look a little... shell-shocked. I'm exaggerating for Dramatic Effect.  Before anyone starts getting upset about the only two girls at the event who weren't staff or hospitality being singled out, you have to give the guys credit.  They approached us, engag...

It must be time for me to move on from talking about Java One, it has dominated my blog of late.  But also I want to talk about JAX London from this week. But before I move on, it's probably worth rounding off with the last two resources from the conference. 1) Martin Thompson and I are interviewed about the Disruptor winning the Duke Award (we come in halfway through): 2) I'm interviewed by Duchess about life, the universe and everything (well, the London Java Community, the JCP, the LMAX Disruptor and Duke Award, and women programmers).  

I discovered, through the power of the search words that lead to my blog, that there was an incident at JavaOne that once again opens the can of worms that is Sexism In IT. This Makes Me Sad.  I had a really positive experience at JavaOne.  In fact, I would say it was the one conference I've been to in the last 12 months where I felt like my gender wasn't a problem - I even got away with wearing hotpants (tweed is business-casual, right??) without being mistaken for anything other than a developer. I know incidents like this cause a lot of tension, and I want to explore why.  Get ready for some gross generalisations: women get upset because they feel they're being marginalised or treated differently; men get upset because they think we're being over-sensitive, especially when the cause is something unintentional.  I sometimes wonder, as I'm sure other people do, if perhaps picking up every incident harms our cause more than advancing it.  But then I feel t...

Last Tuesday  Mike and I unveiled our brand shiny new presentation: Understanding the Disruptor, a Beginner's Guide to Hardcore Concurrency .  This was a preview of the talk we'll be doing at JAX London on the 2nd November. A video of the session is available, as are the slides .  I promise not to say "so" anywhere near as many times when I repeat my performance at JAX (is there anything more painful than watching yourself on video?). I thought the session went really really well.  We got some great questions at the end, we had an audience that was engaged, and I was dead pleased we didn't lose anyone with the assembly language.  We had some very valuable feedback afterwards too. As well as our presentation, there were three great lightning talks: Somay Nakhal on Java Thread States - Somay gave a nice overview of thread lifecycles with code and some great diagrams.  I liked how he made this more applicable to the real world than the sort of...

Having been back in London for a few days I've had some time to digest the madness that was last week. My lasting impression of JavaOne is almost entirely positive.  Granted, it was my first major conference, so maybe I'm just not jaded yet.  But let me tell you what I loved about it (yes, I did cover some of these in my last post ): First and foremost, the people.  I don't remember meeting a single grumpy person. Everyone I spoke to was there to get the most out of the experience, regardless of how many times they'd been previously.  In my experience, techies are not conditioned to be socially comfortable, yet introductions were made and the conversations flowed easily. Of course it wasn't just the attendees who were friendly, the staff and organisers were approachable and helpful, and it was nice to have people hanging around to direct you. One of the (few) advantages of having the event over multiple hotels was the outdoor space between them. ...

So I've been at JavaOne for the better part of three days, it's time to record some of my observations so far: The wireless access is rubbish. <Gross generalisation> technical people are not natural public speakers.  Makes me feel better about the presentations I'm going to be giving (see A Beginner's Guide to Hardcore Concurrency ). The sessions are less useful than getting out and chatting.  I've had a really excellent time, I've met: people from other Java User Groups; the Duchess girls; other Duke Award winners; the Azul guys; guys (well, girls) from O'Reilly books; JCP members and many random and awesome people. Everyone thinks that Large is an acceptable default t-shirt size (it's not).  Vendors - if you're really serious about appealing to The Other Gender you need to stock XS, if not actual skinny tees. If you're running a conference, you should probably have your projection screens above the height of the audience members...

So, I'm off to JavaOne next week! This is an unexpected and very pleasant surprise.  I'll be there with Martin (of the Disruptor fame), and Martijn (that's not going to get confusing at all).  Martin will be talking about the Disruptor on Thursday, and Martijn is busy talking about... everything.  Most importantly for the LJC he's representing us in our shiny new JCP Executive Committee role. I'm really looking forward to meeting pretty much anyone and everyone who'll talk to me.  It's the first international conference I've been to and I'm hoping to meet people I wouldn't normally get a chance to see in London.  It's also really cool to be able to represent both LMAX and the London Java Community. Hopefully it won't lead to some sort of split personality syndrome. Almost more excitingly, I'll be doing a spot of shopping in New York on the way there and back. Because, well, it would be rude to fly over to the States and n...

Remember a while back I talked about my first public appearance ? Well, I chased down the video, because I'm masochistic, and here it is for you all to enjoy.  Pleasingly my mannerisms are slightly less of a camp man trapped in a woman's body, which was my impression the last time I saw myself presenting.  It helps that YouTube has made the video so dark you can't see me. Slides are available for all to enjoy . Special thanks to Playfish for hosting the event - as always, their hospitality was awesome.  The fact that they didn't serve wine is probably a Good Thing.

We are hiring ! If you think we're doing something interesting , or if you think you can help us do our thing even better , come join us.  Your boss will be the dude who wrote Continuous Delivery , you'll get a chance to experience what Danny calls meta-Agile (or Agile Agile), and you'll really start to care about Domain-Driven Design . Ideally we're after Java people, but at the heart of it we want people who are dead passionate about development. Apply via the Stack Overflow Careers advert  (you get extra brownie points if you mention my blog).

As a survival trait for living and working in the cites 1 of London, I have a set of rituals to avoid hangovers. If you are not a single person living in a city like London, you might not understand how vital this is. Most networking, particularly in the financial services industry, is done in the presence of alcohol. So preventing the inevitable hangover is quite important to the other part of the job – the actual working bit. I'll let you into a secret and tell you my nightly ritual: Floss and clean teeth (OK I'll admit, I barely floss when I'm sober let alone drunk) Cleanse/tone/moisturise (I'm a rubbish girl, this is a very recent ritual for me) Apply cuticle cream Do my calf stretches Drink 500ml of water Eat something, even if it's a dirty McDonalds (quarter pounder with cheese, no pickle no onion). Prior to all this is the additional requirement “don't drink more than a bottle and a half of wine”. Everyone has their limits, lots of practi...

On Thursday I was at Simon Brown's Effective Sketches session at Skillsmatter .  Just because my pictures are pretty awesome doesn't mean there's no opportunity for continuous learning. The points Simon made in the session really made sense to me, and I wish I could have had something like that as a primer when they taught us UML at university.  Without the context of what the diagrams were supposed to mean, to convey, all the boxes and lines made no sense to me back then.  I'm still not a fan of large chunks of UML because I think the convention sometimes gets in the way of real meaning. My take-away points were: Don't try and squidge everything onto a single diagram.  The reason lots of different flavours of architecture diagrams exist (e.g. logical view , infrastructure view , etc) is because you have different audiences for each of the diagrams and different things that are important when you're looking at it from one particular angle. One diagram yo...

Martin recently announced version 2.0 of the Disruptor  - basically there have been so many changes since we first open-sourced it that it's time to mark that officially.  His post goes over all the changes, the aim of this article is to attempt to translate my previous blog posts into new-world-speak, since it's going to take a long time to re-write each of them all over again. Now I see the disadvantage of hand-drawing everything. In the old world This is an example of a configuration of the Disruptor (specifically a diamond configuration).  If none of this means anything to you, feel free to go back and refresh yourself on all the (now outdated) Disruptor details . The most obvious changes over the last few weeks have been: Updated naming convention Integrating the producer barrier into the ring buffer Adding the Disruptor wizard into the main code base. The New World Order You'll see the fundamentals are pretty much the same.  It's simpler, because ...