November 23, 2014

It's not waste, it's learning

In one my rare weekends at home, I found myself on a pottery course (this is the sort of thing that happens when you’re a “yes” person).

October 22, 2014

MongoDB London

TL;DR MongoDB London, 6th November, 50% off with discount code 50Trisha.

October 7, 2014

Using Groovy to import XML into MongoDB

This year I’ve been demonstrating how easy it is to create modern web apps using AngularJS, Java and MongoDB. I also use Groovy during this demo to do the sorts of things Groovy is really good at - writing descriptive tests, and creating scripts. Due to the time pressures in the demo, I never really get a chance to go into the details of the script I use, so the aim of this long-overdue blog post is to go over this Groovy script in a bit more detail.

September 30, 2014

JavaOne 2014, Day One

Well, I’m at JavaOne again, and after only one day I’ve already learnt stuff. And, of course, had a great time catching up with interesting people. Here’s a summary of the first day.

August 14, 2014

Getting Started with MongoDB and Java

We’ve been missing an introduction to using MongoDB from Java for a little while now - there’s plenty of information in the documentation, but we were lacking a step-by-step guide to getting started as a Java developer.

I sought to rectify this with a couple of blog posts for the MongoDB official blog: the first, an introduction to using MongoDB from Java, including a non-comprehensive list of some of the libraries you can use; the second, an introductory guide to simple CRUD operations using the Java driver:

August 11, 2014

...but most of all, it's fun

I loved this analogy: Cycling is awfully similar to being a woman. It nicely describes how it feels to be marginalised and not quite “normal”. But there are some things that I’d like to add:

August 1, 2014

Sevilla Java User Group Java 8 Launch Party

Last night at the Sevilla JUG we officially celebrated the launch of Java 8 - yay!

Partay

Don’t be fooled by the picture, people had more fun than it looks. Honest.

For anyone who missed the session, or who was there and wants access to the materials, here they are:

July 2, 2014

Readable, Succinct, or Just Plain Short?

Which is more readable?

releaseVersion = version.substring(0, version.indexOf('-SNAPSHOT'))

releaseVersion = version[0..-10]

June 30, 2014

The Handover

Yesterday I walked into the kitchen to see how lunch was going and my boyfriend handed me a knife, a part-chopped hard boiled egg and said “finish this, I need to have a shower”. As you do. Apparently there were two things that needed doing - “this” needed finishing, and I needed to keep an eye on the fish.

Fine.

April 23, 2014

Nighthacking at Sevilla Java User Group

Last Saturday Mr Stephen Chin came to Sevilla on his crazy European tour to show us Lego and Robots. This was our largest turnout yet for a Java User Group event in Sevilla, which surprised me as it was on a weekend, and the weekend before the spectacle that is Semana Santa in Sevilla.

April 16, 2014

Upcoming Events 2014

It’s been a while since I updated you on my travel plans, so now I’ve had some more conferences confirmed, I thought I would pass the information on.

March 20, 2014

Converting Blogger to Markdown

I’ve been using Blogger happily for three years or so, since I migrated the blog from LiveJournal and decided to actually invest some time writing. I’m happy with it because I just type stuff into Blogger and It Just Works. I’m happy because I can use my Google credentials to sign in. I’m happy because now I can pretend my two Google+ accounts exist for a purpose, by getting Blogger to automatically share my content there.

March 19, 2014

Sevilla MUG March Madness

Last night the Sevilla MUG had our March Madness event. This was our largest event yet, with 36 people signed up. Although the aim of March Madness is to have a MongoDB Engineer at all the user groups this month, that’s not such a big deal for us as I live here, so this was also the first event where I wasn’t the main attraction - [Javier] (https://twitter.com/JvrBaena) gave a really great talk about the lessons learnt at SocialBro after using MongoDB in production for the last couple of years.

March 11, 2014

QCon London 2014

Wow. My 4th QCon London. That’s not bad. And every time, it’s a different experience (if you must, see my blogs for 2013, 2012, and even 2007 (part 1 & part 2 - how cute was I? “agile seems like a jolly good idea; automated testing appears to be important”)). I can’t even tell you what I did on the first day, I was mostly panicking about my presentation - I was inspired after my trip to New York last month to change my talk at the last (responsible?

March 10, 2014

Sparking innovation in an established company

I’ve been running into BSkyB a bunch this week - firstly I was invited to kick off their innovation tech talks series last Monday, then I kept meeting Sky people (that makes it sound like they’re aliens) at QCon.

March 8, 2014

The Joy of Coding

I’m on a plane (there’s a surprise) on my way back from The Joy of Coding. It’s the title that attracted me to this conference, and it was a great little one day event with awesome people like Dan North, Erik Meijer and Dick Wall presenting. What I liked about the themes is they were broadly technology agnostic, pulling back to a level which made me remember why I’m a developer. It inspired me to do more research and more thinking, and less panicking and trying to write code. That might seem odd, as someone who goes to as many conferences as I do should get loads more research and thinking time than most developers living under the whip, but I seem to spend so much time bouncing from thing to thing I don’t get space to just sit and think, or to read things in any depth.

March 3, 2014

In my day...

Web development has changed a lot. I was aware that there have been many changes in the last few years, and I’ve seen maturity come to web platforms in the form of standardisation and common reusable libraries and frameworks - and I don’t mean reusable in the way we used to “reuse” stuff by nicking it off other people’s websites when we saw something cool. I used to be a web developer.

February 10, 2014

Should you notice I'm a woman? Should I care?

So, following on from my observations of being an outsider at FOSDEM because I’m not an open source developer, I do have another story to tell where my female-ness is actually relevant.

February 8, 2014

Feel like an outsider?

So, FOSDEM.

I’ve heard great things about this conference, so I was pretty exited to go

Now I know people talk about impostor syndrome whenever they mention the woeful lack of diversity at tech conferences. Interestingly, I felt like an impostor at FOSDEM - not because I’m a woman (there were quite a few techy women around at FOSDEM, more than I expected) but because I’m not an open source person.

January 31, 2014

Sevilla MUG, first event

Last night was the inaugural meeting of the Sevilla MongoDN User Group. An event organised with just over 48 hours notice, in a city where I don’t speak the language and where even my best-connected contacts aren’t sure they’re fully plugged in to the tech scene.

January 23, 2014

Introduction to MongoDB and Big Data

I wrote an article for the latest edition of Java Magazine which is an introduction to MongoDB for Java developers, and a nod to why it’s good in the “Big Data” space. Look inside >MongoDB and Big Data

January 20, 2014

Why is it News when a woman becomes CEO?

I’m pleased to see that GM has hired the “best person for the job” as their new CEO - that does seem like a good idea. I’m happy her gender did not get in the way. What makes me uncomfortable is the international news coverage of the decision of this large manufacturer to hire a woman as their CEO - if she were a man (and/or black/gay/disabled) would the headline read “The camera loves her.

January 2, 2014

Goodbye 2013, you were good to me...

Well, if I thought 2012 was the fastest disappearing year on record, that record was smashed into the ground by 2013. What a year! And because I didn’t manage to write this on time to publish elsewhere, I can do a more personal reflection of the year here on my very own blog.

Apparently, reading over last year’s article, I had goals for 2013:

December 23, 2013

YOW

December disappeared in a rush of vacation and a fleeting tour of Australia. It’s hard to believe that it’s the eve of Christmas Eve already, it’s almost impossible to feel Christmassy when you’re getting sunburnt on a boat and seeing people in swim-suits wearing santa hats. A mid-winter festival (complete with trees and fake snow) just feels very odd in summer.

December 20, 2013

Spock: Data Driven Testing

In the last two articles on Spock I’ve covered mocking and stubbing. And I was pretty sold on Spock just based on that. But for a database driver, there’s a killer feature: Data Driven Testing.

November 7, 2013

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….

November 6, 2013

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.

November 5, 2013

JavaOne 2013

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.

October 9, 2013

Make the Future Java

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.

September 25, 2013

Kids These Days

I’m a great believer in getting kids to code early - after all, I’m of that generation that was taught

10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10

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.