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Showing posts with the label advice

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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LinkedIn Etiquette

For no reason other than LinkedIn communications are starting to irritate me, here's my personal LinkedIn Etiquette guide.  Feel free to disagree with it all. I'm not going to accept invitations from recruiters.  Not just because I'm not looking for a job (who knows what the future holds?), but because I believe it shows a lack of respect to my network to bring recruiters one step closer to being able to contact them all.  It's not about Evil or Good recruiters, but I really don't want to make it easier for lazy recruiters to spam people I respect (caveat: there are people who are technically recruiters who I have added into my network, either because I know them personally or because they have proved their worth). If I get an invite without an introduction message from someone who's name I don't immediately recognise, I'm going to check out that profile to see if we have employers in common or common connections, but usually I won't acce...
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Staying Ahead of the Curve

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I had an interesting discussion last night at the LJC developer sessions, and it's a topic that comes up again and again: How do I stay ahead of the curve?  There are so many technologies out there, and more coming along, I can't even keep up with Java, let alone the other JVM languages, HTML5, JavaScript frameworks, NoSQL, Big Data.... argh! Technology, particularly development, seems to move at an ever-increasing pace.  Sure, the Internet makes it a lot easier for us to get access to information than in the Olden Days, when people probably had to read papers and books, and physically meet up to share knowledge, but that just makes the sheer volume of information even more overwhelming. So how do you keep on top of all those technologies? You don't. You can't.  If you devoted yourself to learning the same way you did at university (pfff, well, theoretically you devoted yourself to learning...), you could still never master every technology out there, and ...
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How to make your CV Not Suck

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When you're applying for a job at LMAX , your CV (or résumé, for our American readers) usually comes through me and I decide whether to call you for a technical phone screen. I'm going to let you into a secret. I'm going to tell you the criteria I use when judging your CV. Now, you could say this is a foolish thing for me to do, because now when you apply you'll be "cheating" and writing your CV to pass these guidelines. Good. LMAX isn't the only company that's going to judge your CV based on these criteria. I firmly believe that an increase in quality of the CVs in our industry can only be A Good Thing.  An increase in the quality of your CV is definitely A Good Thing for you . Even more importantly, if I get CVs that do not pass these basic criteria, now I know you either don't read the LMAX blogs (shame on you), or you're not able to follow simple instructions (bodes poorly for your ability to learn within the company). The t...
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Certified Scrum Master

Hmm. I have been so busy trying to think of "good" things to write here, and not having the time to actually write, that I see it's been 6 months since the last post. If anyone is still out there though, I need help. I need a good Certified Scrum Master course in New York or London, preferably in April or May. Any suggestions? The one I wanted to go on was vetoed and now I find it's not running in NY again until Autumn. PS Do you think it would be inappropriate to use the term "Scrum Mistress" on my CV?
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Popular posts from this blog

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...
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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 hea...
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Dissecting the Disruptor: Demystifying Memory Barriers

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My recent slow-down in posting is because I've been trying to write a post explaining memory barriers and their applicability in the Disruptor . The problem is, no matter how much I read and no matter how many times I ask the ever-patient Martin and Mike questions trying to clarify some point, I just don't intuitively grasp the subject. I guess I don't have the deep background knowledge required to fully understand. So, rather than make an idiot of myself trying to explain something I don't really get, I'm going to try and cover, at an abstract / massive-simplification level, what I do understand in the area.  Martin has written a post  going into memory barriers  in some detail, so hopefully I can get away with skimming the subject. Disclaimer: any errors in the explanation are completely my own, and no reflection on the implementation of the Disruptor or on the LMAX guys who actually do know about this stuff. What's the point? My main aim in this s...
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