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!
Post a Comment

JavaOne: Initial Observations

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' heads
  • People at JavaOne are dead friendly.  I've ended up in a lot of conversations just by virtue of standing alone for longer than 30 seconds.  It is noticeably easier to talk to people here than at the conferences I've been attending in London.  Not sure if that's a location thing or a domain thing.
  • Socialising in London is great practice for this sort of event.  I am capable of taking advantage of free drink and still maintaining a conversation and staying upright in 6 inch heels.
  • I miss American breakfasts.  I've been gorging myself on pancakes, biscuits and gravy, and eggs benedict.  I'll be calling my personal trainer as soon as I return.
  • Haven't seen anything to contradict my view that San Francisco is not the Brit's typical view of California - the weather is rubbish.  London has been hotter and sunnier this week.
  • Sharing an apartment with your CTO is not as weird as you might think.  Especially if you relegate him to the closet (no, that's not a euphemism).
  • It's difficult to remember to Tweet or blog when you're totally engrossed in conversations with people.
Here's a photo of me representing LMAX as I pick up the Duke Award we won for the Disruptor:


 (Thanks to Martijn for taking the photo).

I was grabbed for an interview which should be available (un-edited - erk!) on java.net at some point, I'll post it when it's available (if it's not rubbish).

Comments

Post a Comment

Comments have been disabled since this blog is no longer active.

Popular posts from this blog

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

Image
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
Read more

Dissecting the Disruptor: Writing to the ring buffer

Image
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
Read more

Dissecting the Disruptor: How do I read from the ring buffer?

Image
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
Read more