Trisha's Ramblings

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 fro...

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 bu...

So, following on from my observations of being an outsider at FOSDEM because I'm not an open source developer, I do have another story to tell where my female-ness is actually relevant. I'm going to give specifics, but it's not to name and shame or anything like that, it's just that anonymising it will probably erase some of the subtleties.  But I'm not telling this to make anyone feel bad, because this is not an oh-poor-me story, this is just the way it goes sometimes and I want to share what it feels like. At JFokus (a conference I really enjoyed, where I got a chance to spend time with some awesome people) I was on a panel (well, game-show really) about static vs dynamic languages.  Not unusually, I was the only woman on the panel.  Also not unusually, one of the reasons I agreed to take part is to do my bit in demonstrating that women have technical knowledge too (in my opinion, it's important where possible to avoid a stage full of white men of a...

So, FOSDEM. I've heard great things about this conference, so I was pretty exited to go The Java dev room Now I know people talk about impostor syndrome whenever they mention the woeful lack of diversity at tech conferences.  Interestingly, I felt like an impostor at FOSDEM - not because I'm a woman (there were quite a few techy women around at FOSDEM, more than I expected) but because I'm not an open source person. I mean, I am, technically - MongoDB and the Java driver are both open source, and I have real live code on github.  But I didn't get there via the open source community, I was hired to do a specific job that happens to be open source (for which I am extremely grateful).  So although I knew the MongoDB folks I was there with and a lot of people who were running or speaking in the Java room, I didn't feel really at home in this conference.  I think I feel more comfortable with the ones aimed at enterprise Java developers (by which I mean...

December disappeared in a rush of vacation and a fleeting tour of Australia.  It's hard to believe that it's the eve of Christmas Eve already, it's almost impossible to feel Christmassy when you're getting sunburnt on a boat and seeing people in swim-suits wearing santa hats.  A mid-winter festival (complete with trees and fake snow) just feels very odd in summer. I cannot take Christmas seriously in this weather YOW!  is a unique conference, in that it's the same agenda in three different cities: Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney.  It seems to me that this is a great way to attract speakers from a long way away (and everywhere is a long way away from Australia) but make it cost effective - although you have to shuttle the speakers between the cities, you have the speakers for nearly two weeks and get the material three times in the three different locations. I suffered a lot for this conference... As a speaker, it's awesome - not only do you spend the ...

In previous years, JAX London would have been an easy, local conference to go to.  This time it took me most of Sunday to get there, and not because of the Super Storm .  Still, that gave me the day to finish off the tutorial I was running there on Monday morning.  Not that I would be so unprofessional as to leave preparing things until the last minute, oh no.... But as in previous years, the main benefit of this conference for me was meeting most of the usual suspects from the London Java Community.  For example, presenting were: Andy Piper ; Barry Cranford ; Jim Gough ; Peter Lawrey ; Sandro Mancuso ;  Simon Maple ;  Martijn Verburg ;  John Oliver : John Stevenson ; Richard Warburton . The Community Night in particular also drew a lot of LJC members (including some first-timers) to JAX, and it was a really good "networking opportunity" (i.e. chance to have free drinks, catch up with friends and make new ones).  I really enjoyed hanging out wit...

So, I thought a few months ago that my blog would become more of a travel blog than a tech blog because of the amount of conferences I was going to.  Turned out that I was so busy writing / updating / practicing talks and workshops and, er, travelling, that I never got around to doing retrospectives on the events I'd been to. So, JavaOne, again, my third year there.  I'll always have a fondness for it - because of Martin Thompson , it was the first conference I presented at.  I know people always start with "it's not what it used to be" or "why isn't it in the Moscone?".  But not having ever been in the good ol' pre-Oracle days, I don't have that to compare it to. I do have the previous two years to compare it to, however.  This year, I think the quality of the presentations was much better compared to the previous two years (although I can't accurately speak for last year as I spent the whole time running between my presentation...

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 ...

I was expecting this... So, I was in China last week.  It's not really what I expected, but then my knowledge of China comes almost entirely from visiting various Chinatowns and watching martial arts movies, so I guess I wasn't all that well prepared for a modern Asian city like Shanghai. ...and found this instead The city is, in my opinion, clean, modern, and attractive.  I was surprised by American-looking early skyscrapers, and really surprised that the city overall felt more European than American - with Marks & Spencer, Tesco, Carrefour, H & M, Zara, Costa Coffee, as well as the inevitable McDonalds, KFC and Pizza Hut. Some of the architecture reminded me more of New York than Europe or Asia I felt like they had the option to take the best of all worlds - the modern, high tech and sometimes downright weird influence of Japan; a care for heritage from Europe; the consumer choice of the US; and food from all over China and the world. OK, I d...