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Showing posts from August, 2013

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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How to get started with the new MongoDB Java Driver

The second in my short series of blogs about the new Java driver is now available for your perusal.  In it, there's some guidance on how to get started using the new driver, whether you want to use the new (unfinished) API, the existing "classic" API, or a blend of both. The post also shows that Gradle is prettier than Maven .  Sorry Maven. If you are going to play with the new driver, please read all the caveats carefully.  I know it looks a bit like the warnings on your prescription medicine, but it serves the same purpose.  Short version: the driver is not finished yet, and should not be used in production. We really want to hear your experiences with the driver - it is an open source project and MongoDB is very much driven by the community, we want to hear from you.  But only if you say nice things.  No, seriously, please tell us if you have problems, if functionality is missing, if your tests fail if you start to use it, etc etc etc. Go play.
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Interviewed by Stephen Chin about JavaOne 2013

Yesterday Stephen Chin , one of Oracle's Java Evangelists and the JavaOne content chair, interviewed me via a live stream about JavaOne , the new MongoDB Java driver , and my plans to Change The World. It was a fun interview to do, and I really like the format of being interviewed over Skype and streaming my desktop.  There's a slight (OK, 25 seconds, not really low latency) lag between the screen and the speaking which means it's not a great platform for doing live demos, but I think I'd like to do more code demos in this way, if I can find a suitable platform.
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Life on both sides of the interview table

InfoQ has posted the video of Dan North and I opining on the subject of hiring.  Most of the talk is spent on how to be a good interviewer, and touches on how to market your company to prospective hires.  We spend less time on how to do well as an interviewee, but in theory if you know what's going through the interviewer's mind, you should be in a much better position to take control of the interview and shine. Hire Education - Making Interviews Rock It's kind of funny because we talk a lot about hiring at ThoughtWorks (where we both worked, and which has one of the toughest interview processes in the industry) and LMAX, which learnt a lot off ThoughtWorks and shaped its own process for a smaller company that has different goals.  Yet neither of us work at those places now.  Still, we share stories from many of the places we've worked (or chose not to work), and if there's one take-home point, it's that hiring (and being hired) is not a simple thing to do
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Autumn World Tour

It's nearly the end of August already (how is summer allowed to go by so fast?) so it's time to start thinking about the autumn conference scene.  It feels like I'm going to be at most of them this year, so hopefully I'll see you at one of them? 11-12th Sept -  JavaZone , Oslo - Design is a Process, not a Document 16-20th Sept - New York - meeting and working with the MongoDB JVM and .NET teams in our shiny new office. 22-26th Sept -  JavaOne , San Francisco - Design is a Process, not a Document (I'm in CA 20th - 27th) 30th Sept - 2nd Oct -  GOTO Aarhus  - Career advice for Programmers; Power Use of Tools. 17-18th Oct -  GOTO Berlin  - What do you mean, Backwards Compatibility? 28-30th Oct -  JAX London  - A workshop on the new Java Driver ; Design is a Process, not a Document.  I should be in London all week. December -  YOW Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney  - What do you mean, Backwards Compatibility?
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The 3.0 Java Driver - Design Goals

I feel slightly like a traitor to my own blog, as I've written a blog post for Somewhere Else.  I've written about the design goals for the 3.0 MongoDB Java Driver in the official MongoDB blog (seems sensible, right?).  I'm not sure how I feel about cross-posting the entire contents, so I'm just linking you to them instead. Anyone who's been to my Backwards Compatibility presentation this year might notice something familiar about the content.  The talk covers the design goals of the new driver, and this blog post will let you read them in your own time rather than having me fire them at you at 100mph.
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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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