Trisha's Ramblings

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...

Saturday I had the pleasure of being part of the 5th London Java Community Open Conference .  This is a great event to end the conference season on - it made me feel good about being part of the LJC, and  got me excited about the prospects for 2013. The fantastic thing about an open conference is that a) you don't have to prepare like mad for it and b) the short sessions and wide variety of subjects mean that you learn stuff you didn't expect to. Given how much I've been presenting lately, and with the conferences piling on top of each other back-to-back leaving little time for preparation, I had decided not to speak at the open conference, but to sit and learn for a change - it's a great opportunity for new speakers to present for a start.  But that resolution lasted all of 3.54 milliseconds.  After all, if people don't like the sessions I propose, they won't come, so I lose nothing by suggesting some. Photo by Ged Byrne First up, it was a very great ...

On the same day Stephen Chin came to see me at the 10gen offices, we also ran a NightHacking session in the evening with the London Java Community.  Not many people turned up (maybe I need to work on my signage to the office?) but it was a great session. In fact, having less people meant we could all be involved. Expect Raspberry Pi s and JavaFX .

Time for another ad-hoc update on what I'm up to: Thur Oct 25th: LJC JavaOne Circleback Event Thur Nov 1st: The Problem With Women - A Technical Approach Wed 14th November - Devoxx : Why Open Source Your Secrets , Agile++: When Agile Goes Well Sat 24th November: LJC Open Conference Thur 29th November: My first MongoDB Webinar .   I'm also going to be in New York for training from the 5th - 9th November, but I can't swear to my availability during that time - apparently training is going to take up the days, and the evenings I'm going to try and get a jump start on some actual code.

Seemed like a quiet conference this year.  Not really sure why, maybe it was the layout of the massive (and extremely dark) main room; maybe it was the awkward L-shape of the communal space; or maybe this year people were more interested in listening to the (really very good) sessions rather than participating or meeting other people.  Whatever the reason, it felt quiet and almost low-key. Performance seemed pretty high on the agenda, as you'd expect from a London conference, with a number of things on offer: A great keynote from Kirk Pepperdine and Martijn Verburg , covering a massive range of things to care about when thinking about performance on the first night A high-level talk about Java Performance from yours truly (which I may run again for the LJC if there's interest, but it's more likely to be a one-off) A deep dive into writing lock-free coding by Mike Barker And a talk from Kirk exploring your GC logs. It was great to see a number of LJC regulars p...

Well this is exciting!  JavaOne 2011 is the first conference I spoke at, so this the first time I've covered the same conference two years running.  I think. It's very nice to be back at JavaOne.   Last year  it was my first opportunity to meet so many people - the guys at Oracle who work really hard to make sure Java has its own identity; the JUG Leaders and Duchess folk; the JCP EC committee members; and loads of people who live and work in the area who I wouldn't normally get a chance to speak to in person. This year I'm here with several other  London Java Community  people, and it's great to be a member of the Alumni, to have the privilege of showing other guys around and introducing people to each other.  It's nice to run into people I met here for the first time last year, some of whom I've had a chance to see at other events this year. Today, Sunday, is an interesting day.  The focus is on community, so I get to hear what other ...

I was interviewed at GOTO Copenhagen, about Java, the Disruptor, the Graduate Developer Community & London Java Community, and a whole host of other things.  So to make up for the lack of blogging this month, here it is:

Topping off my mini-tour at the end of May, I was invited to Rotterdam to  present to a brand new community of developers.  I was really interested in attending because my experience with user groups is pretty much limited to the London Java Community , and I knew this would be different due to being a) across a wider range of technologies and b) shiny and new. It was hosted (rather awesomely) in a brewery, and until then I'd never given a presentation in a pub.  Frankly it's something I'm keen to do more of.  Due to a total technology fail on the part of all of us, we couldn't get the projector working with any of the various laptops.  However, with 30-odd techies, free wireless and slides available on Slideshare , we managed a novel and collaborative presentation approach, with people clustered around the laptops with the largest screens, and someone at each one valiantly keeping up with my quick pace through over 100 slides of stick-men drawings ...

A few weeks ago, I presented my new "User's Guide to the Disruptor" talk to the London Java Community .  Since it was very kindly hosted at Skillsmatter, there is a video of the presentation available, and the slides are below. Concurrent Programming Using the Disruptor View more presentations from Trisha Gee The presentation is a little different to the ones we've done before.  Previously we've gone into how it works and why it's fast.  This time I wanted to step back a little from the internals and show how real developers might actually use it.  The example is somewhat contrived, but the idea is to give some hints on how to break your problem down into something that will work with a Disruptor at the heart of it. I thought the event went really well.  It was a tiny bit completely intimidating, as there were no lightning talks and I was the only attraction.  Seeing over a hundred people turn up after work, before beer, to hear you talk is a...

Saturday was, hopefully, my last conference of the year.  My lucky readers should start to see some posts which are not simply me gushing about another opportunity to hang out with awesome people and learn about interesting "stuff". Who wants to propose a session? In many ways the London Java Community Open Conference was my favourite one so far, and not just because it's near home and I helped to organise it.  One of the awesome things about both Java One and Devoxx was the opportunity to travel, to see new places and to meet people you might not meet in London.  The scale, and the opportunities to meet key players in the Java world, were the things I probably appreciated the most from both of those conferences.  And you can tell from my posts I really enjoyed them. But the LJC conference was probably perfect as my last one for 2011: "How do you spell 'lightning'?" Being on home turf with awesome people who have really helped drag...

Stephan wearing the Brazilian flag at the opening keynote European conferences are different (and cool) because you get to hear even more languages spoken than you usually do in London (apparently the most diverse city in the world for spoken languages).  I think the idea of a Paris Devoxx with 75% of the talks in French is brilliant - I'm always banging on about diversity, we shouldn't expect developers to learn in English only. Really great to meet up with some of the people I met at Java One and am starting to feel more a part of the global community. Seems to me there are slightly more women here than at the other conferences I've been to, and not just because Regina and I pulled together four women for a panel on women technologists.  And once again, a lot of guys asking why this is, because they want things to change. A highlight was seeing my namesake, AutoTrish, up on a cinema-sized screen in front of hundreds of people at Dave Farley 's Continuous Deli...

A couple of weeks ago, I was at JAX London along with a number of the London Java Community regulars ( Martijn / Ben / John / Sandro / Simon / Zoe I'm looking at you....) My purpose for attending was largely to present the Hardcore Concurrency for Beginners talk that Mike and I debuted at an LJC event a few weeks back. Almost as important was catching up with the aforementioned LJCers and meeting with as many people as would talk to me. After the disappointment of the sessions at Java One, sitting in a room being talked at was quite low down on my list of priorities. Sometimes it's nice to be wrong. The sessions at JAX were of a very high standard, and I learnt something from every one. I was pleasantly surprised by the calibre of international speakers that were there, and the sessions seemed to be pitched right for me personally, which was nice. Downsides: I'm going to cover these first because I like to end on a high note.  Firstly, although I was inte...

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...

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. ...

So, I'm off to JavaOne next week! This is an unexpected and very pleasant surprise.  I'll be there with Martin (of the Disruptor fame), and Martijn (that's not going to get confusing at all).  Martin will be talking about the Disruptor on Thursday, and Martijn is busy talking about... everything.  Most importantly for the LJC he's representing us in our shiny new JCP Executive Committee role. I'm really looking forward to meeting pretty much anyone and everyone who'll talk to me.  It's the first international conference I've been to and I'm hoping to meet people I wouldn't normally get a chance to see in London.  It's also really cool to be able to represent both LMAX and the London Java Community. Hopefully it won't lead to some sort of split personality syndrome. Almost more excitingly, I'll be doing a spot of shopping in New York on the way there and back. Because, well, it would be rude to fly over to the States and n...

Remember a while back I talked about my first public appearance ? Well, I chased down the video, because I'm masochistic, and here it is for you all to enjoy.  Pleasingly my mannerisms are slightly less of a camp man trapped in a woman's body, which was my impression the last time I saw myself presenting.  It helps that YouTube has made the video so dark you can't see me. Slides are available for all to enjoy . Special thanks to Playfish for hosting the event - as always, their hospitality was awesome.  The fact that they didn't serve wine is probably a Good Thing.

I nominated LMAX for a couple of JAX Innovation Awards, but unfortunately we did not get shortlisted :( However, the London Java Community did!  So if you have a second please vote for the LJC for Top Java Ambassador

I'm finally moving up from working behind the scenes to actually doing a (short) presentation for the LJC. I'm going to be giving a lightning talk on Wednesday at the AWS Elastic Beanstalk event , on the JCP - what it is and what our election to the executive committee means.   Ben and Martin's post  gives a little more background on the subject. Another LMAX LJC member  Mike will also be giving a lightning talk, on Project Coin. Now all I have to do is write it...

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".

As an associate member of the London Java Community (LJC), I'm very pleased with the news that we won an Open seat on the Java SE/EE executive committee.   The results show that we got an astonishing 47.5% of the vote - if an MP got voted in with that percentage the newspapers would probably be using the word "landslide". It's quite exciting to be one of the two user groups involved.  We hope to balance some of the larger corporate organisations, we're the voice of real life Java developers who use the language every day, for enterprise development or open source projects. You can argue Java is dying, but the community is not.  And I think we're exactly the people to guide its future. PS (Warning: gratuitous plug incoming) If you're at all Java-curious and you like drinking and attempting to be social, join us this Tuesday for our monthly Developer Sessions at the Porterhouse in Covent Garden.