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Showing posts from March, 2014

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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Moving from Blogger to Hugo?

Experimenting with a new blog platform.   And this is why .
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Sevilla MongoDB March User Group and... an experiment

So... I've been using blogger for a few years now.  I like it because it's really easy just to start typing and get a blog out there, and because it provides simple analytics and easy integration into Google+ (OK, so I never use Google+, but hey, I'm trying to via blogger). But there are a number of things blogger is not so great at, so I'm trying out a new platform at the moment, which I may or may not stick to.  More to come on that when I've got more to report I guess. But for those who read my blog via blogger (or the RSS feed associated with it), I wanted you to know that my latest blog post is over here .  This particular experiment will help me figure out how many people read my stuff directly from here, and how many find it through other channels. Hopefully more to come on the experiment, when I've got something to report.
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QCon London 2014

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Wow. My 4th QCon London.  That’s not bad.  And every time, it’s a different experience (if you must, see my blogs for  2013 ,  2012 , and even 2007 ( part 1 & part 2 - how cute was I? "agile seems like a jolly good idea; automated testing appears to be important")). I can’t even tell you what I did on the first day, I was mostly panicking about my presentation - I was inspired after my trip to New York last month to change my talk at the last (responsible?) minute and do a live coding session, something much more technical than my recent talks.  I’ll leave the details for a separate blog post though, when the video comes out. The thing that stands out for me from Wednesday though was Damian Conway programming Conway's Game of Life in Klingon.  Yeah.  Just find the video and watch it, the man is a genius. The Thursday keynote was inspiring too from a totally different point of view - Tim Lister of Peopleware fame shared stories from his career, and I
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Sparking innovation in an established company

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I’ve been running into BSkyB a bunch this week - firstly I was invited to kick off their innovation tech talks series last Monday, then I kept meeting Sky people (that makes it sound like they’re aliens) at QCon . It seems Sky is keen to create/foster a culture of innovation, which is an ambitious goal for such a large company.  So I was given a very vague brief for Monday’s presentation (“Can you do something Mongo-ish, maybe a bit of performance and concurrency stuff, and talk about overall best practice?”) I gave them an early view of a presentation I’m working on titled something like “Why do we keep reinventing the wheel?” (anyone who saw me at JFokus might realise that I cunningly swapped out most of the body of the “What do you mean, backwards compatibility?” talk and tried out this topic instead). Picture courtesy of  +Russell Miles   This was supposed to be a 20 minute intro talk (OK, so I clocked it at 40 minutes in rehearsal) with the rest of the time devoted
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The Joy of Coding

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Dick Wall - The Tao, of the Joy, of Coding I’m on a plane (there’s a surprise) on my way back from The Joy of Coding .  It’s the title that attracted me to this conference, and it was a great little one day event with awesome people like Dan North, Erik Meijer and Dick Wall presenting.  What I liked about the themes is they were broadly technology agnostic, pulling back to a level which made me remember why I’m a developer.  It inspired me to do more research and more thinking, and less panicking and trying to write code.  That might seem odd, as someone who goes to as many conferences as I do should get loads more research and thinking time than most developers living under the whip, but I seem to spend so much time bouncing from thing to thing I don’t get space to just sit and think, or to read things in any depth. The conference organisers made it easy to focus on the bigger things - the venue was great, with a nice space for mingling with people but nooks and corners for
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In my day...

Web development has changed a lot . I was aware that there have been many changes in the last few years, and I’ve seen maturity come to web platforms in the form of standardisation and common reusable libraries and frameworks - and I don’t mean reusable in the way we used to “reuse” stuff by nicking it off other people’s websites when we saw something cool. I used to be a web developer.  Sort of.  Some times I’ve been on the bleeding edge, and others… I remember using JavaScript to call back-end services with an XML payload before people were using the term AJAX, but I also remember working on an enterprise um… “classic”… JSP application only “recently” - in fact that was probably the last job where I did anything that looked like web development. So this blog post is going to chart the progress of web development through my own experience.  Of course, this doesn’t by any means cover the whole spectrum, but I think my experience has been not unusual for a Java progra
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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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