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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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Lean Software and Systems Conference 2010 (Bletchley Park)

This is just a summary of the points I took from the Lean conference at Bletchley.  They all need expanding, this is just the stuff that struck me that I want to record. A Kanban Multiverse – Karl Scotland Points from his talk Meaning = visualise; interact; persist Kanban provides the translation between communities Remove columns from the Kanban board - no more chucking things over the wall to people Flip charts for design models Dots on cards for every day in dev, crosses for every day in test Exploration of UI is part of the card Ideas applicable for my project Add broken acceptance tests to the Kanban Board? Start doing task breakdowns again Add issues and impediments to Kanban board? Mingle should be updated to reflect the Kanban, at the moment the states are incorrect Converting a Scrum Team to Kanban - Mattias Skarin Points from his talk Moved from releases per iterations to releases per week Shifted motivation from delivering at end of iteration towards del...
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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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Sexism in IT?

Let's celebrate our IT women "Everyone" knows that there are more men than women in IT.  That it's a "boys" job.  Not a lot of people know that the first programmer was a woman.  Not a lot of people realise the number of women in IT is DECREASING.  And has been since the 80s.  In a working world where I honestly believe that *in general* there are more opportunities for women (OK, inline with the other stuff I've been reading I'll caveat this with white, middle-class women), it seems shocking that such a growth industry as IT is actually losing women, and appears unable to determine why, or stop the flow. I get asked a lot, as a girl programmer, why there aren't more women in IT.  This is a complicated issue and one I've been thinking about for years and still don't have any good answers, but I personally think it's more about perception than anything else. I don't think it's because you get more outright sexism and l...
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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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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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