Trisha's Ramblings

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).