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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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First presentation at the Virtual JUG!

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Yesterday I had the privilege of presenting the very first session for vJUG, a new virtual Java User Group that allows us to span geographies when sharing talks and stories.  I'm really interested in the vJUG idea, especially now I'm not in London - if we can find good ways to share knowledge without having to travel, that will help us reach people who don't normally go to conferences or don't have a local user group to go to.  Not to mention cutting travel costs and saving the environment. See the event, and the record of the IRC chat, here:   The slides are also online, but obviously they're part of the video as well: Design is a process, not a Document from Trisha Gee
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JAX London & MongoDB Tutorial

In previous years, JAX London would have been an easy, local conference to go to.  This time it took me most of Sunday to get there, and not because of the Super Storm .  Still, that gave me the day to finish off the tutorial I was running there on Monday morning.  Not that I would be so unprofessional as to leave preparing things until the last minute, oh no.... But as in previous years, the main benefit of this conference for me was meeting most of the usual suspects from the London Java Community.  For example, presenting were: Andy Piper ; Barry Cranford ; Jim Gough ; Peter Lawrey ; Sandro Mancuso ;  Simon Maple ;  Martijn Verburg ;  John Oliver : John Stevenson ; Richard Warburton . The Community Night in particular also drew a lot of LJC members (including some first-timers) to JAX, and it was a really good "networking opportunity" (i.e. chance to have free drinks, catch up with friends and make new ones).  I really enjoyed hanging out wit...
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LinkedIn Etiquette

For no reason other than LinkedIn communications are starting to irritate me, here's my personal LinkedIn Etiquette guide.  Feel free to disagree with it all. I'm not going to accept invitations from recruiters.  Not just because I'm not looking for a job (who knows what the future holds?), but because I believe it shows a lack of respect to my network to bring recruiters one step closer to being able to contact them all.  It's not about Evil or Good recruiters, but I really don't want to make it easier for lazy recruiters to spam people I respect (caveat: there are people who are technically recruiters who I have added into my network, either because I know them personally or because they have proved their worth). If I get an invite without an introduction message from someone who's name I don't immediately recognise, I'm going to check out that profile to see if we have employers in common or common connections, but usually I won't acce...
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JavaOne 2013

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So, I thought a few months ago that my blog would become more of a travel blog than a tech blog because of the amount of conferences I was going to.  Turned out that I was so busy writing / updating / practicing talks and workshops and, er, travelling, that I never got around to doing retrospectives on the events I'd been to. So, JavaOne, again, my third year there.  I'll always have a fondness for it - because of Martin Thompson , it was the first conference I presented at.  I know people always start with "it's not what it used to be" or "why isn't it in the Moscone?".  But not having ever been in the good ol' pre-Oracle days, I don't have that to compare it to. I do have the previous two years to compare it to, however.  This year, I think the quality of the presentations was much better compared to the previous two years (although I can't accurately speak for last year as I spent the whole time running between my presentation...
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Make the Future Java

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I think this is a nice example of how to showcase technology and make it relevant and exciting for people.  Something with this approach could do more for increasing the number of people interested in programming as a career than any of the traditional approaches of getting kids and "minorities" interested in IT.
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Kids These Days

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I'm a great believer in getting kids to code early - after all, I'm of that generation that was taught  at the age of 9.  There are quite a few approaches to teaching today's kids in an engaging way, but I'm a bit wary of the sandbox solutions that teach kids things like how to navigate a virtual thingie around the screen, or lets them create things in a limited virtual world.  I don't think kids will easily make the leap between these sort of games to seeing the full potential of programming - they're too limited and have no context for the kids.  It's just another game. Kids need to understand how programming fits into their world, they need to understand the context of coding, if they're going to fall in love with it. I like Jason Gorman 's comparison of programming to music.  Most people learn an instrument because they want to make the sort of music they hear on the radio.  But you give them a recorder and teach them to play ...
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JavaZone, Oslo

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For the rest of 2013, this blog will mostly be masquerading as a travel blog. This week I've been in Oslo, and I liked it.  Actually, you'll be hard-pushed to find somewhere I've visited that I didn't like in one way or another, but Oslo does make my "definitely going back there" list.  If Seville, where I've been for the last month, is stuffed full of History, Oslo is overflowing with Geography.  I've noticed a pattern in that my favourite places were sunny when I visited them first, which subconsciously prompts me to love them (as a vitamin-D-deprived Englishwoman).  Oslo was NOT one of those places, it was overcast and extremely chilly compared to the south of Spain.  But the countryside around it is really pretty, and it's very green and mountainy and watery.  Not like Spain, or the UK for that matter. I found the Norwegians really friendly, and as with all the Nordic countries their English is better than you'll find in an int...
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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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