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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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Excuses excuses.

Isn't a shame that actual day-to-day work always seems to get in the way of progress?  How you're always too busy fire-fighting to actually perform the critical thing that might actually improve affairs. All this is basically a setup for a roundabout excuse for why this blog has been neglected so shortly after it was begun.  I was a bit too busy doing the day job. Still, people like Joel and Scott manage regular pronouncements and I'm sure they're much busier than I!
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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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QCon: TODO list inspired by the conference

Investigate Maven 2 Have a glance at TestNG Potentially play with JMock for current testing framework Play with GWT Sign up for Pragmatic Architect event Check out JavaBlackBelt site - what is provided, and what are the feelings of professionals (or, more importantly, recruiters) towards these qualifications? Look into getting Visual Studio .NET again so you can have a go at GUI development in it. Go to technorati . Investigate JUnit 4 changes/improvements
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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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QCon: Initial thoughts

Things I took out of QCon: I want to play with Ajax .  Maybe I've "grown out" of front end development but that doesn't prevent it from being (potentially) extremely cool Selenium looks like a good place to start for automated website testing It can take up to 7 years to move away from a legacy architecture.  Depressing, but at least it shows it can be done and it's worth the effort I'm going to become a certified Scrum Master Mistress .  I believe Agile in some form or other is the most efficient way to run software development, but there are a LOT of lessons to learn in order to get it right.  And number one lesson is you need the right team.
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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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