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Showing posts from May, 2012

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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GOTO Amsterdam

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Three airports and three hotels in a week, and I don't know whether I'm coming or going.  Add to that a mere four hours sleep last night, and this might resemble the ramblings of a mad woman (more than usual that is). GOTO Amsterdam was a different affair to  GOTO Copenhagen , which is not necessarily a bad thing - it's great that the events have their own personalities and aren't cookie cutter versions of the same thing. Great communal area for meeting people, in a unique venue Amsterdam was smaller and shorter, and therefore felt even more intimate than Copenhagen, which didn't exactly feel massive either.  The venue was beautiful and imposing (and not at all air conditioned!), which I think also contributed to its unique feeling; the timetable felt less intense (although both conferences had a reminder that the next session was going to start, great for moving people at the right times); there was a different mix of attendees and speakers (fewer Danes
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GOTO Copenhagen

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So,  before everything gets pushed out of my head, GOTO Copenhagen. It was my first conference "alone", in that I didn't have friends and colleagues from LMAX or the London Java Community there with me.  And certainly at the start of the conference, I wasn't the only one who was standing around, hoping someone would talk to me (in all honesty some of the photos above are a little unfair - the schedule was a very nice, simple phone app so most people spent a lot of time playing with their phones). It actually turned out to be an advantage to be alone, as I met a lot of interesting new people.  I was impressed actually by how local it feels - i.e. many of the speakers and attendees were from Copenhagen or at least Denmark.  I liked this, because the alternative is that the conference feels like lots of the usual suspects travelling from place to place, doing the same thing and not really giving much to the city it's hosted in or getting much out of the loca
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What Do You Do and How Did You Get There?

So yet another interview with me is available, but this one is in written form.  It's for the Graduate Developer Community, the aim is to show undergraduates and graduates what real techies jobs are like, and how people doing them they got there. It's long, but if you know anyone just starting out their career who wants to get a feel for where they might want to go, please point them at it.  The site has a number of interviews with people in different roles so it's quite a good way to showcase the diversity of what's available.
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Interviewed for InfoQ at QCon London

I was flattered to be interviewed for InfoQ at QCon London.  It was a fun interview actually, and didn't feel anything like the half an hour it actually took.  In it, I get to talk about Agile at LMAX, the Disruptor (of course) and diversity in IT (again).
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Why Open Source Your Secrets

Here's a video of my Open Conference session on the business benefits of open sourcing your software.  Given that the conference was at a weekend and had a very intimate feel, I think I was a teeny bit more honest than I usually am.  Enjoy. Why Open Source Your Secrets View more presentations from Trisha Gee .
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Update on events

Just a quick note to say I was interviewed for another podcast , again to talk about all-female events.  It's only a short one and there's probably not much in there that I haven't said before, either on here or in person. From the 21st May, I'm at GOTO, both Copenhagen and Amsterdam.  I'll be talking about code & the Disruptor, thank goodness, and will be trying not to rant about the subject of women in technology.  If you see me there, come and say hello! On Friday 25th May, after all the GOTO craziness, I'm going to repeat the Disruptor presentation in Rotterdam at 010DEV , an event rather fantastically called "The Disruptor and the Perfect Programmer", which someone on Twitter correct noted sounds like a fairy tale. After all that, I'm hopefully going to take June off to play Diablo 3 and Prototype 2, and read the next Game of Thrones book.  All these joys I have been denying myself to make sure I get everything sorted in time for nex
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Featured on a BBC Podcast

This week's BBC Outriders podcast features yours truly venting about The Subject That Won't Go Away, Women in Technology.  I was interviewed at Sunday's Girl Geek conference , and got a chance to voice my opinions once again.  For those who can't be bothered to listen, they can probably be summarised as: There are genuine problems that face people in our industry, let's talk about those that you have actually faced, not ones that you imagine exist. In my opinion, now is a great time for women to make a name for themselves - conference organisers are crying out for you to attend and (if you want) speak, and our industry needs talented people of any type and isn't that fussy about who you are. Please, please can we start talking about the good stuff that we see as women in IT?  We shouldn't only talk about the issues we face.  Yes, we need to highlight problems and address them, but I believe that this message is drowning out all the great things about w
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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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