September 16, 2013

JavaZone, Oslo

For the rest of 2013, this blog will mostly be masquerading as a travel blog.

August 31, 2013

How to get started with the new MongoDB Java Driver

The second in my short series of blogs about the new Java driver is now available for your perusal. In it, there’s some guidance on how to get started using the new driver, whether you want to use the new (unfinished) API, the existing “classic” API, or a blend of both.

August 30, 2013

Interviewed by Stephen Chin about JavaOne 2013

Yesterday Stephen Chin, one of Oracle’s Java Evangelists and the JavaOne content chair, interviewed me via a live stream about JavaOne, the new MongoDB Java driver, and my plans to Change The World.

August 29, 2013

Life on both sides of the interview table

InfoQ has posted the video of Dan North and I opining on the subject of hiring. Most of the talk is spent on how to be a good interviewer, and touches on how to market your company to prospective hires. We spend less time on how to do well as an interviewee, but in theory if you know what’s going through the interviewer’s mind, you should be in a much better position to take control of the interview and shine.

August 27, 2013

Autumn World Tour

It’s nearly the end of August already (how is summer allowed to go by so fast?) so it’s time to start thinking about the autumn conference scene. It feels like I’m going to be at most of them this year, so hopefully I’ll see you at one of them? 11-12th Sept - JavaZone, Oslo - Design is a Process, not a Document 16-20th Sept - New York - meeting and working with the MongoDB JVM and .

August 13, 2013

The 3.0 Java Driver - Design Goals

I feel slightly like a traitor to my own blog, as I’ve written a blog post for Somewhere Else. I’ve written about the design goals for the 3.0 MongoDB Java Driver in the official MongoDB blog (seems sensible, right?). I’m not sure how I feel about cross-posting the entire contents, so I’m just linking you to them instead. Anyone who’s been to my Backwards Compatibility presentation this year might notice something familiar about the content.

July 31, 2013

JavaOne Shanghai

So, I was in China last week. It’s not really what I expected, but then my knowledge of China comes almost entirely from visiting various Chinatowns and watching martial arts movies, so I guess I wasn’t all that well prepared for a modern Asian city like Shanghai.

July 30, 2013

Can't. Take. Much. More.

Inspired by Your App Makes Me Fat, I was going to write a blog post about decision fatigue. It’s a topic very close to my heart right now as I try to plan for my upcoming speaking engagements, continue working on the new Java driver, try to finish the last couple of blogs on Spock, and last but not least plan for moving home this week. But since my cognitive resources are at a low point right now, I’ll just leave you with a gif instead:

July 10, 2013

Spock passes the next test - Painless Stubbing

In the last post I talked about our need for some improved testing tools, our choice of Spock as something to spike, and how mocking looks in Spock.

As that blog got rather long, I saved the next installment for a separate post.

July 9, 2013

Spock is awesome! Seriously Simplified Mocking

We’re constantly fighting a battle when developing the new MongoDB Java driver between using tools that will do heavy lifting for us and minimising the dependencies a user has to download in order to use our driver. Ideally, we want the number of dependencies to be zero.

July 5, 2013

Developers hate support, don't they?

I’m at the end of my first official week doing support for 10gen. My major achievements are:

June 12, 2013

Trisha's World Tour 2013

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.

June 4, 2013

Calling Dublin Tech User Groups!

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?

May 31, 2013

Adjusting to Working Remotely

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.

May 23, 2013

Be an Ambassador!

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?

May 22, 2013

My Summary of GeeCON, Krakow

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.

May 16, 2013

How are you using MongoDB with Java?

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?

May 13, 2013

Good overview of the NoSQL hype for Real Developers

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.

May 10, 2013

2013 is looking a lot busier than I planned...

So, despite promising myself that I would only do one event a month for the rest of this year, looks like I’m going to be a bit busier than that.

April 12, 2013

How Mechanical Sympathy got me to the airport on time

Lets talk about mechanical sympathy. Martin Thompson has been making this term very popular in software development, so it’s best to read his description of why he used the term.

April 2, 2013

Devoxx UK 2013

Last week was the first Devoxx UK, bringing the brand from Belgium and, more recently, France. And I think it was a HUGE success.

March 18, 2013

It Depends

Don’t you hate it when you ask a perfectly good question, and someone comes back with the answer “it depends”?

It’s so frustrating to think that in a world of ones and zeros, people can’t give absolute answers and you can’t rely on “best practice”.

March 11, 2013

The Coalescing Ring Buffer

For anyone who is interested in what LMAX is up to, and is still following my blog, have a look at this post about the latest tool they’ve open sourced: the Coalescing Ring Buffer.

March 6, 2013

QCon Day One

I like QCon London, I really do. Not only is it on home turf, but, as I’ve said before, it doesn’t just focus on technology, or a set of technologies.

February 20, 2013

Staying Ahead of the Curve

I had an interesting discussion last night at the LJC developer sessions, and it’s a topic that comes up again and again:

February 15, 2013

Upcoming Events (and Trisha Freaks Out A Bit)

My next few talks are where I finally start speaking about MongoDB. After 4 months working for 10gen, I still feel completely under-qualified to speak with any authority on the subject. It’s very different joining a company with an established and growing product, to joining a very young company and being in on the development since practically day one. But I’ve been working on designing the Brand New Java Driver, so that’s what I’m going to talk about.

January 11, 2013

Wrap up of 2012

Fortunately for me, the guys at JAXenter chased me for a summary of 2012 and my predictions for 2013 - I say “fortunately” because otherwise I never would have got around to doing it, and that would be another year slipping away silently into the abyss.

December 18, 2012

Devoxx: The Problem with Women - A Technical Approach

As well as talking about, you know, actual work-type-stuff, I was encouraged to give my “Technical Approach to Women” presentation at Devoxx. This went so well at JavaOne that I thought it would be difficult to top. Also, I wasn’t convinced it would work at Devoxx, because the theatres are not well suited to audience participation - the seats are warm and comfy, the room is dark, the speaker is on stage in front of a massive screen….

December 12, 2012

Agile++: When Agile Goes Well

If you see anything about LMAX - the Disruptor, Continuous Delivery, or even the selection criteria for hiring developers, you’ll see that LMAX is pretty keen on Agile. However, no-one’s documented the Agile process there, as far as I know. Although I personally had it on my todo list, I never had the motivation, the hook to do it. And I realised eventually that’s because I’m not sure it’s a process that would work very well for another team, in another company, working in another business.

December 5, 2012

Webinar: Processing High Volume Data Feeds with MongoDB

Hot on the heels of my very first MongoDB webinar, I was… encouraged… to do another. Here at 10gen we’ve been running a series of webinars around using MongoDB in the financial services domain. Yesterday was the last in the series, and was presented in association with C24 - John Davies, their CTO, did most of the talking, and demonstrated their product for automatically turning financial messages from one format into another.