Trisha's Ramblings

And now, after an absence of several weeks, you get to see how long it takes me to write some of these posts. I was putting up the Christmas decorations one Saturday when my worst fear was realised 1 - one of my three strings of lights was not working. The first two went up fine.  The third lit up when I plugged it in, and in less than a second went out.  Curses.  This is not what I wanted, this was supposed to be a short exercise in making my tiny little flat look festive. So I set about the tedious task of starting from the end closest to the plug and replacing every bulb, one by one, with a spare one to see if it magically lit up again.  When it doesn't, you take the spare back out and replace it with the original bulb.  I remember my parents going through this ritual every Christmas, the tediousness of this activity is more memorable than the fleeting joy of shinies. While I was doing this, my mind was back on the job I'd been doing at work the p...

If you have a Parleys subscription, you can watch the whole "Why we shouldn't target women" panel from Devoxx 2011 a month or so ago.  Watch me attempt to monopolise the whole panel as if it was my idea or something...

When you're applying for a job at LMAX , your CV (or résumé, for our American readers) usually comes through me and I decide whether to call you for a technical phone screen. I'm going to let you into a secret. I'm going to tell you the criteria I use when judging your CV. Now, you could say this is a foolish thing for me to do, because now when you apply you'll be "cheating" and writing your CV to pass these guidelines. Good. LMAX isn't the only company that's going to judge your CV based on these criteria. I firmly believe that an increase in quality of the CVs in our industry can only be A Good Thing.  An increase in the quality of your CV is definitely A Good Thing for you . Even more importantly, if I get CVs that do not pass these basic criteria, now I know you either don't read the LMAX blogs (shame on you), or you're not able to follow simple instructions (bodes poorly for your ability to learn within the company). The t...

At JAX London Mike and I presented "Understanding the Disruptor - A Beginner's Guide to Hardcore Concurrency".  This is the session we initially previewed to the London Java Community a few weeks earlier.  The content is the same, but the feel of the presentation was quite different to us - the venue for the LJC event was more intimate, and it was easier to interact with the audience.  At JAX, we were up on stage, which was pretty cool actually, but meant that it felt more like a lecture and it was less easy to connect with the audience. We received some really great feedback on this presentation, and it was brilliant to see a lot of the speakers from JAX there watching us.

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....

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...

I'm back from Devoxx, having had lots of food for thought.  In particular, my panel on Why We Shouldn't Target Women generated a lot of discussion and I'm still trying to process it all. Martijn Verburg; Regina ten Bruggencate; Trisha Gee; Antonio Goncalves; Claude Falguière; Kim Ross  The panel went really well, we got decent interaction from the audience, and of course my fellow panel members were awesome.  I managed to restrain myself from using the opportunity as my own personal soap box and allowed other people to speak occasionally.  Sadly the only male on the panel stole the show somewhat, so Antonio won't be invited in future... Actually in seriousness, it was great to have a guy on the panel to present his point of view.  It was interesting that he's a father, highlighting that parenting issues are not the same as women's issues, and conflating those two concerns hurts both genders. But Antonio's hair is far too shiny and pretty and he's ...