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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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...but most of all, it's fun

New Blog Post: Being a cyclist IS a lot like being a woman.  But… 
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Java 8 - Introduction to Lambdas Article

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This month's Java Magazine features an article by me, Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg about the new lambdas  coming in Java 8 . The aim of the article is to give an overview to normal, human Java developers, who don't need to know the theory behind what they are or how they work under the covers, but want to know how to use them when they get the shiny new version of Java next year (or even get ahead of the curve and try them now ). Look inside > Exploring Lambda Expressions for the Java Language and the JVM
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Update on events

Just a quick note to say I was interviewed for another podcast , again to talk about all-female events.  It's only a short one and there's probably not much in there that I haven't said before, either on here or in person. From the 21st May, I'm at GOTO, both Copenhagen and Amsterdam.  I'll be talking about code & the Disruptor, thank goodness, and will be trying not to rant about the subject of women in technology.  If you see me there, come and say hello! On Friday 25th May, after all the GOTO craziness, I'm going to repeat the Disruptor presentation in Rotterdam at 010DEV , an event rather fantastically called "The Disruptor and the Perfect Programmer", which someone on Twitter correct noted sounds like a fairy tale. After all that, I'm hopefully going to take June off to play Diablo 3 and Prototype 2, and read the next Game of Thrones book.  All these joys I have been denying myself to make sure I get everything sorted in time for nex...
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Interview by the Oracle Technology Network at Devoxx

Tori Wieldt from the Oracle Technology Network interviewed me at Devoxx.  Because I was there to be on the Why We Shouldn't Target Women panel, the interview is just another platform for me to air my views on this subject again. Yes, I am actually wearing pink....
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Mike and I debut our new Disruptor presentation

Last Tuesday  Mike and I unveiled our brand shiny new presentation: Understanding the Disruptor, a Beginner's Guide to Hardcore Concurrency .  This was a preview of the talk we'll be doing at JAX London on the 2nd November. A video of the session is available, as are the slides .  I promise not to say "so" anywhere near as many times when I repeat my performance at JAX (is there anything more painful than watching yourself on video?). I thought the session went really really well.  We got some great questions at the end, we had an audience that was engaged, and I was dead pleased we didn't lose anyone with the assembly language.  We had some very valuable feedback afterwards too. As well as our presentation, there were three great lightning talks: Somay Nakhal on Java Thread States - Somay gave a nice overview of thread lifecycles with code and some great diagrams.  I liked how he made this more applicable to the real world than the sort of...
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A chance to see some of my actual code (even if it is C#)

Remember I posted about having to write .NET ? Well, the code and the tutorial are available for you, my lucky readers, to rip to pieces view. I am not the only person responsible for this code though, so be kind.
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Getting around a bit

I'm honoured to now be listed on three aggregated blog feeds: The new and somewhat embryonic blogs.lmax.com . The London Java Community Aggrity . ThoughtWorks Alumni , along with a whole host of distinguished names. The pressure's on to try and write useful stuff.  Oh OK, I'll settle for "entertaining".
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Comments on representations of our industry

I have not (yet) seen the presentation this post is referring to.  But I think many of the comments Ted makes are very valid, and our industry as a whole should occasionally stop and think.  I've seen Ted speak at QCon, and I've had a lot of time for his comments ever since. I'm aware that this blog is rapidly filling with comments about gender and perceptions and people-y stuff, when I originally wanted it to be a purely technical blog.  But I guess this other stuff interests me more.  And there are less people talking about it than there are talking about pure technical solutions to problems.
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Why changing jobs frequently is not necessarily a bad thing...

...in fact, it's actually a good thing .
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Scrum but...

Having experience Flaccid Scrum , I find this article interesting, and agree with most of it. I'd also like to add though, that if you do the scrum practices (story cards, stand ups, retrospectives, etc) but don't buy into the fundamental principals, you will not succeed.  And that means everyone on the team, not just the people in charge.  In particular, if the team is not empowered, is not committing to the estimates and the iteration plan in its heart, and and does not trust, then you are probably better off using traditional processes.  Or just as likely to fail whatever process you use.
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Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy

Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy
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Gender Stereotyping

I'm very interested in the subject of gender stereotyping, which probably isn't surprising as I'm a girl in a predominantly male industry.  And I like cars, and sports, and get irritated if people assume I'm not "allowed" to be interested in these things. Far from being discriminated against, however, I find many people ask me why there aren't more women in the industry and what can be done to encourage girls into IT.  If these questions were easy to answer, they wouldn't have to be asked. But one of my personal theories is around how we raise our children.  Yes, it's possible that girls are genetically, for some reason, averse to technical types of roles.  Or that the working environments don't appeal to the feminine mindset.  But if you tell kids from an early age that some things are for boys and some are for girls, there just aren't going to be enough girls studying "boys" subjects later in life to get a large proporti...
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Metrics and Incentives.

This  is a great example of what happens when you try to incentivise intelligent people on very simple metrics. They cheat. This was well described in Freakonomics , and something Mr On Software bangs on about regularly .  It's clear that there isn't really a good answer to the problem - actually that's not true.  The answer to the problem is to have everyone working in a job they are happy in and proud of, one where they are intrinsically motivated, and give them enough information to allow them to make the correct calls when it comes to prioritising work.  But I'm guessing that a large portion of the working world does not fall into this category.
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Agile Infection Growing

This is a bloody good idea . It builds upon my own Virgoen tendancies to write lists and tick things off, but what the list model lacks is the "in progress" state. Plus occasionally my lists get confused. See today's notebook page: Thursday Fix bugs in Test Director Merge fixes up Do build Merge down Read terms of contract E-mail solicitor Go to Robert Dyas Order DAB Radio Finish business analysis docs Carry on with QCon note consolidation How do I know which ones I've started? I could do with a couple of boards at least as well to separate the personal from the business. Also note that I took something away from my Time Management course, attended when I was a mere graduate at a large manufacturing organisation: make a new list for each day, discarding your completed items and moving forward the incomplete ones (it also mentions to discard "low priority" items that haven't been done over a week or two under the theory that you'll never do it if ...
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QCon: Blogger's Summary

I might be too late in writing my own thoughts on QCon, but a bunch of other people have done a pretty good job.
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Certifiction

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From spellfecker  today: Certifiction (n.) : a professional endorsement which states only that the holder had the money to pay for the exam. ...which reminded me of this debate , particularly the first comment.
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Continuing the Agile froth...

...there are a number of points in this interview with Paul Oldfield which are interesting to consider when thinking about "doing Agile right".  It seems to be compatible with my "people over process" view - I'm not stating that having good people negates the need for any form of process or discipline, I have seen that this is simply not the case.  I do however think that agile techniques in particular rely heavily upon the "right" people / team, for some nebulous definition of  "right".
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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 hea...
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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...
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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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