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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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Tips for Presenters

...or, tips-for-Trisha-because-she-has-the-memory-of-a-goldfish. Do not drink too much coffee beforehand. Do not replace coffee with Diet Coke, it is not better... Do not drink too much coffee and drink diet coke and forget to eat. Check skirt length before prancing around on stage. Check desktop background for public-display-appropriateness. Close down applications that have popup notifications.  Do you really want hundreds of people seeing that tweet...? Plug in your laptop power.  Re-typing your password every time the screen powers down is boring. Remember your Mac-to-VGA dongle thingie.  Bring one even if you don't use a Mac - there might be a cute/friendly/senior/cool speaker who needs one, and you can help them. Bring your slides/laptop.  Not that important, especially if you've put it on dropbox.
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JavaOne: User Group Sunday

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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 ...
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The Strange Loop

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Last week (was it only last week?) I was at Strange Loop , presenting a workshop on the Disruptor . I didn't really have any expectations from the conference, I've never been before and, if I'm honest, hadn't heard of it before.  So everything was a pleasant surprise. It's a very geeky conference.  I mean that as a compliment, of course.  Lots of very smart people talking about stuff that's waaaay more advanced than you frequently get in the conferences employers would be happy to pay for.  The themes I mostly saw were functional programming and the (insert horribly abused term) Big Data space. So nothing about Spring and Hibernate or any of their ilk, of course.  Almost nothing about Java actually, as if a language that is actually used by millions of developers is somehow too passé.  But this was extremely liberating - if there's nothing that's going to be applicable to my day job, I can go and see talks on things I'm actually interested in...
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Strangeloop Disruptor Workshop Materials

On Sunday I gave my very first workshop on the Disruptor.  The aim was to give people some hands-on coding experience using the syntax.  Because time was limited (you can't get people to build an entire application architecture in 2.5 hours) the example is somewhat contrived, and needs a big leap to make it into a proper application context.  But the workshop should: Give an overview of the Disruptor Show how to create a simple one producer, one consumer example. Show how to wire up a parallel event handler Show how to how (and why) to create a diamond dependency graph. Extrapolate beyond these very simple examples to something closer to a real world architecture. Requirements are: Basic Java skills Java 7 update 7 (Optionally) IntelliJ . The slides (not all that useful, I'll grant you, without me talking) are available, and you can download the code . If you want to work through the examples yourself, start with com.mechanitis.towerdefense.TowerDefe...
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Upcoming Events

So yeah... in keeping with this year's theme of basically only blogging about the exciting conferences I've been to, I'm going to blog about the exciting conferences I am attending in the future.  I haven't been great at doing that, the disconnect between the time I submit a presentation and the actual announcement means that I often forget I haven't told anyone about what I'm up to. Firstly, I'm back in the States this month to present my very first workshop - An Introduction to the Disruptor  at Strangeloop.  I've been given a mere 6 months to prepare it (note: sarcasm) and it's still a work in progress.  So, if you're coming, feel free to suggest things you want to see covered.  If you are coming, I'd love to hear from you. Secondly, I'm back in the States again a minute and a half later for several presentations at JavaOne.  I really enjoyed JavaOne last year, it was my first international conference, my first speaking gig, and a ...
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Apologies for the interruption to your service

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Interviewed at GOTO Copenhagen

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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:
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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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