Trisha's Ramblings

On Monday, Stephen Chin from Oracle visited me at the 10gen offices as part of his NightHacking tour .  In the video we talk about my sessions at JavaOne and the Agile presentation I'm giving at Devoxx, and I do some very basic hacking using the MongoDB Java driver , attempting to showcase gradle at the same time. It was a fun experience, even if it's scary being live-streamed and recorded!

So, I've finished my first full week in the new job and I've learnt lots of new stuff. Which is great, because that's usually why you change jobs. I'm learning a lot about these new-fangled NoSQL database thingies. The LMAX architecture was based on keeping everything in memory and reducing the waits for IO - messages were journalled to disk, and reads and writes to the MySQL database were off the critical path. Therefore doing anything radical to the storage side of the architecture was just not high on the list of priorities. Everything I knew about NoSQL I learnt from the various conferences I've been going to in the last year, and even then that's limited - without a business reason to pursue knowledge I know it'll just leak out of my brain, so I avoid sessions with no immediate applicability to me. Let's summarise what I knew about NoSQL databases before last week: They don't use SQL. Who knew?  There are different flavour

Time for another ad-hoc update on what I'm up to: Thur Oct 25th: LJC JavaOne Circleback Event Thur Nov 1st: The Problem With Women - A Technical Approach Wed 14th November - Devoxx : Why Open Source Your Secrets , Agile++: When Agile Goes Well Sat 24th November: LJC Open Conference Thur 29th November: My first MongoDB Webinar .   I'm also going to be in New York for training from the 5th - 9th November, but I can't swear to my availability during that time - apparently training is going to take up the days, and the evenings I'm going to try and get a jump start on some actual code.

Seemed like a quiet conference this year.  Not really sure why, maybe it was the layout of the massive (and extremely dark) main room; maybe it was the awkward L-shape of the communal space; or maybe this year people were more interested in listening to the (really very good) sessions rather than participating or meeting other people.  Whatever the reason, it felt quiet and almost low-key. Performance seemed pretty high on the agenda, as you'd expect from a London conference, with a number of things on offer: A great keynote from Kirk Pepperdine and Martijn Verburg , covering a massive range of things to care about when thinking about performance on the first night A high-level talk about Java Performance from yours truly (which I may run again for the LJC if there's interest, but it's more likely to be a one-off) A deep dive into writing lock-free coding by Mike Barker And a talk from Kirk exploring your GC logs. It was great to see a number of LJC regulars p

The time has come, and I'm moving on from LMAX .  I've had an incredible (nearly) four years working for one of the most radical finance firms in the world, during which time I feel I've learnt more than the rest of my work experience put together, and had the pleasure to work with some of the smartest and most interesting people I've ever met. I've been invited to join 10gen and their MongoDB driver team, a challenge I am really looking forward to.  After years in finance and in the IT departments of other organisations, I'm finally working for a product firm, and an open source one.  I expect it will be very different from anything else I've been involved in. I hope this means I will be blogging even more, and that I'll have opportunities to abuse my graphics tablet producing more ridiculous scrawlings.  I also hope this will give me an opportunity to meet more people as I travel around. So, as if this were a goodbye e-mail to the company or a

I've produced a very cut down version of the presentation I've been giving at a lot of conferences, giving a high level overview to the Disruptor .  This serves as a quick intro to the concepts behind it. Introduction to the Disruptor from Trisha Gee My slides are usually pretty useless without me (or someone else) talking over them, so for more context don't forget there's always my original blog posts (the Magic Ring Buffer , Reading from it , Writing to it , Wiring it up ), which are now pretty dated, and the Java Magazine article I wrote at the start of the year.

So, JavaOne. Taylor Street Cafe I'm going to be controversial.  I think this was my favourite conference of this year.  I know that's not trendy, and that Oracle-bashing is still a popular pastime.  And I know I've also made a big deal about how much fun it is to meet people who program in different languages.  But there is something very special about being surrounded by thousands of people from all around the world who use the same technology as you, some facing the same problems, some solving very different issues. Maybe it's because since I first spoke at JavaOne last year I've met a lot of people in this ecosystem - Oracle Java people, other conference organisers, Java User Group leaders, speakers and attendees from all sorts of places - and seeing many of them in one place is fun and makes you feel like you're "home".  I'd be sat in the Taylor St Cafe area and people would sit down and hang out with me.  I'd be hiding somewher

Yesterday dawned, with a sense of foreboding (actually it dawned with me coughing my lungs out, but we've heard enough about the sub-optimal state of my respiratory system this week).   On this day, I was giving the talk I was dreading when I got asked to do it.  It's the talk I actually put more work into than any of the other sessions I was presenting at this JavaOne.  It was the Women In IT talk. It's timely, given that conference season has one again led to cries of sexism and discrimination .  So although I really hate banging on about the subject (you'd never believe it from my blog) it's still necessary to cover. I feel, and have felt for a long time, that the way we're approaching the "problem" of the lack of women techies is just wrong.   Obviously painting stuff pink is just not going to cut it (I hope that's obvious).  I think the fundamental problem is that we keep thinking about women.  While that should be great for someone li

...or, tips-for-Trisha-because-she-has-the-memory-of-a-goldfish. Do not drink too much coffee beforehand. Do not replace coffee with Diet Coke, it is not better... Do not drink too much coffee and drink diet coke and forget to eat. Check skirt length before prancing around on stage. Check desktop background for public-display-appropriateness. Close down applications that have popup notifications.  Do you really want hundreds of people seeing that tweet...? Plug in your laptop power.  Re-typing your password every time the screen powers down is boring. Remember your Mac-to-VGA dongle thingie.  Bring one even if you don't use a Mac - there might be a cute/friendly/senior/cool speaker who needs one, and you can help them. Bring your slides/laptop.  Not that important, especially if you've put it on dropbox.

Well this is exciting!  JavaOne 2011 is the first conference I spoke at, so this the first time I've covered the same conference two years running.  I think. It's very nice to be back at JavaOne.   Last year  it was my first opportunity to meet so many people - the guys at Oracle who work really hard to make sure Java has its own identity; the JUG Leaders and Duchess folk; the JCP EC committee members; and loads of people who live and work in the area who I wouldn't normally get a chance to speak to in person. This year I'm here with several other  London Java Community  people, and it's great to be a member of the Alumni, to have the privilege of showing other guys around and introducing people to each other.  It's nice to run into people I met here for the first time last year, some of whom I've had a chance to see at other events this year. Today, Sunday, is an interesting day.  The focus is on community, so I get to hear what other JUGs are do