Trisha's Ramblings

Quick update on my scheduled events this year.  Please feel free to suggest your MUG or JUG or other tech group as somewhere for me to visit on this Grand World Tour if I'm in your city. 17-21st June - In New York - woohoo!  Getting to know Justin Lee , the newest member of the Java team, doing some pair programming (hopefully) and meeting people at the MongoDB Masters' Summit on Thursday. 24th June - STAC Summit , London - I'm not presenting, but I'll be there "networking" (a.k.a. drinking) 27th June - Technology Transformation Network , London.  Tiny bit concerned about this event now (don't tell anyone) because I'm hoping to run break out sessions on how to approach design, and I'm not sure I can do this alone.... 1-5th July - In Dublin, hoping to talk to a MUG or JUG while I'm there.  Invite me! 22-25th July - JavaOne Shanghai (CON1148). I've never been east of Europe before, very exciting. August - Going to be in Seville (Spain), a...

I'm going to be in Dublin 1st-5th July.  While I'm there, I thought I'd visit appropriate user groups if there are any.  I can't see a JUG registered on the JUG Map , but I was thinking a city like Dublin must have a few tech meetup groups. Any suggestions?  Anyone out there and keen for me to gatecrash their party?

One of the most obvious differences I faced when I moved from LMAX to 10gen were the working conditions. I don't mean like being deep underground in some dangerous situation vs being pampered by beautiful slave boys and girls. What I mean is that the working practices at one company necessitated being in the office for core hours, and at the other flexible hours and remote-working are practically mandatory. At at LMAX we pair-programmed most days, and that meant that being co-located: being in the same office, at the same computer, was pretty important. We could work from home when needed, but pairing is pretty tricky when you’re in a different room. The drivers' team at 10gen, on the other hand, is a very distributed team. Sure, I'm based in London, and we have an office here. But my main Java "pair" is in Boston, working from his home office. The other driver developers are distributed around the New York, Palo Alto and London offices, with m...

You know how I keep banging on about attracting different types of people into programming?  You know how we say we need to get them young? Typical Mathematician? A little while back I decided to put my money where my mouth was, so I signed up to be a STEM Ambassador .  STEMNET is an organisation that aims to inspire children to go into Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths careers, and it does this by creating a network of mentors (people like you and me) and schools.  So schools can publicise the sorts of events they're running, and find mentors in an appropriate field for this event. I was a STEM Ambassador years ago, when I worked at Ford STEMNET came there looking for people like the graduates to come and talk to kids - STEMNET likes to have a large proportion of their ambassadors close(ish) to the age of the kids, so they grab graduates working in large organisations and apprentices.  Those just starting out in their careers often think they don't ...

Last week I was in Krakow, Poland for GeeCON .  Which was excellent!  I find it really interesting that conferences all have their own personalities, that they are not all the same. GeeCON had its own distinct personality.  If you're a Java/JVM person based in Poland, I would highly recommend it - more than 90% of the attendees were Polish (probably the remainder were largely speakers) so this conference is very much for you.  The quality of the speakers was really good too, I learnt a lot off many of them. From a speaker's point of view, there were some cultural things which took a bit of getting used to.  One of the good things was that the audience was very keen on asking questions, they were much more interactive than a typical London audience (for example).  However, I'm accustomed to quite short questions, and I found that the audience liked to give a lot of detail in their questions and frequently ask more than one at once - this meant that all...

So, like one of my presentations, I have a question for you.  Actually, I have more than one question for you.  I'm not going to bother with survey monkey or whatever, I want to share the answers so please, answers in the comments: Are you using the Java driver for MongoDB in your application? Are you using the Java driver directly, or are you using a third party library like Morphia, Spring Data, the Scala driver, your own abstraction layer, etc? If you're using a third party library, why did you choose that over using the Java driver directly? If you're using the Java driver directly, what do you like about it?  If you're using the Java driver directly, are there any areas that give you pain?  Areas for improvement? Which version of Java are you using? Feel free to leave additional information if you have it.  And this is a public blog, so if you're really mean I'll just delete your comment.  So there.

Last Tuesday I went to a London Java Community talk which promised to debunk the hype around NoSQL.  Whether you're already bought into a NoSQL technology, or you're just wondering what all the noise is about, it's worth an hour out of your day to see Akmal Chaudhri's comprehensive summary of the technologies out there. Skillsmatter recorded the whole thing, as usual, so you can watch the presentation for yourself .  I promise neither I nor anyone else from 10gen paid him to mention MongoDB so much.