Posts

Showing posts with the label opinion

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!
Post a Comment
Read more

Overheard: Agile truths

After attending a number of conferences and events, and performing numerous interviews, I'm starting to hear the same things again and again.  Since Dan North challenged all my assumptions at QCon , I'm reluctant to outright ridicule them, but I will put forward my personal opinion. Note: these are things I have heard from multiple sources, so with any luck I am not breaking the sanctity of the confessional interview. I've never pair programmed, but I've frequently worked with a partner on critical production problems I find this fascinating.  If there's one thing that needs to be fixed as fast, as correctly, as efficiently as possible, it's a production issue.  And when there is one, "everyone" knows that two heads are better than one, even The Business. If this is the case, why is it so hard to sell pair programming as the default state of affairs? Is it because creating new features is seen as just typing, where the bottleneck is access t...
3 comments
Read more

JavaOne 2011: Roundup

Image
Having been back in London for a few days I've had some time to digest the madness that was last week. My lasting impression of JavaOne is almost entirely positive.  Granted, it was my first major conference, so maybe I'm just not jaded yet.  But let me tell you what I loved about it (yes, I did cover some of these in my last post ): First and foremost, the people.  I don't remember meeting a single grumpy person. Everyone I spoke to was there to get the most out of the experience, regardless of how many times they'd been previously.  In my experience, techies are not conditioned to be socially comfortable, yet introductions were made and the conversations flowed easily. Of course it wasn't just the attendees who were friendly, the staff and organisers were approachable and helpful, and it was nice to have people hanging around to direct you. One of the (few) advantages of having the event over multiple hotels was the outdoor space between them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

On How Not To Target Girl Geeks

(First, let me say this post contains opinion, stereotyping and sweeping generalisations.  But that's sort of the point.  Also I don't pretend for one moment to speak for all girl programmers, I can only speak for myself) When I first started this blog, I wanted to just post "proper" technical information.  I wanted to prove that there are girls out there doing "real" programming. I specifically didn't want to talk about my gender.  I wanted to prove by silence that gender is incidental to what I do. But, it doesn't really work that way, does it? Firstly because one of the first things I get asked by guys when I meet them in this industry is "why aren't there more girl programmers?" (that's after they ask "do you work in HR?" followed by "are you a real programmer?" - I'm not joking, this happened this week). And secondly because I'm pretty passionate about the gender issue.  To be specific: I...
13 comments
Read more

Popular posts from this blog

Dissecting the Disruptor: Writing to the ring buffer

Image
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...
Read more

Dissecting the Disruptor: What's so special about a ring buffer?

Image
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...
Read more

Dissecting the Disruptor: Demystifying Memory Barriers

Image
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...
Read more