November 30, 2012

My First Official MongoDB Appearance

Yesterday I had the ~~nerve-wracking~~ ~~dubious~~ ~~alarming~~ great pleasure of presenting my first official MongoDB-shaped talk. This was in the form of a webinar, which is an interesting and different format.

November 26, 2012

LJC Open Conference 2012

Saturday I had the pleasure of being part of the 5th London Java Community Open Conference. This is a great event to end the conference season on - it made me feel good about being part of the LJC, and got me excited about the prospects for 2013. The fantastic thing about an open conference is that a) you don’t have to prepare like mad for it and b) the short sessions and wide variety of subjects mean that you learn stuff you didn’t expect to.

November 22, 2012

Summary of Devoxx 2012

Devoxx 2012 from Roy van Rijn on Vimeo.

Devoxx topped off a crazy two months of conferences. I’ve heard people talk about the conference season in the past, and been slightly (OK, very) jealous of all that jet-setting. I’ll admit, however, to a slight feeling of relief that my focus until Christmas is pretty much going to be coding. I hope.

November 20, 2012

Brain Overload!

The moral of today’s story - be careful what you wish for.

November 12, 2012

Devoxx 2012

This week I’m at Devoxx for the whole week, and already I’ve achieved two things I didn’t manage last year: I drank Belgian Beer and I’ve spent some time in Antwerp itself.

November 6, 2012

NightHacking Tour: The LJC

On the same day Stephen Chin came to see me at the 10gen offices, we also ran a NightHacking session in the evening with the London Java Community. Not many people turned up (maybe I need to work on my signage to the office?) but it was a great session. In fact, having less people meant we could all be involved.

October 31, 2012

Interview and Hacking session with Stephen Chin

On Monday, Stephen Chin from Oracle visited me at the 10gen offices as part of his NightHacking tour. In the video we talk about my sessions at JavaOne and the Agile presentation I’m giving at Devoxx, and I do some very basic hacking using the MongoDB Java driver, attempting to showcase gradle at the same time. It was a fun experience, even if it’s scary being live-streamed and recorded!

October 23, 2012

NoSQL is a Stupid Name

So, I’ve finished my first full week in the new job and I’ve learnt lots of new stuff. Which is great, because that’s usually why you change jobs.

October 17, 2012

JAX London 2012

Seemed like a quiet conference this year. Not really sure why, maybe it was the layout of the massive (and extremely dark) main room; maybe it was the awkward L-shape of the communal space; or maybe this year people were more interested in listening to the (really very good) sessions rather than participating or meeting other people. Whatever the reason, it felt quiet and almost low-key.

Performance seemed pretty high on the agenda, as you’d expect from a London conference, with a number of things on offer:

October 11, 2012

And for my next trick....

The time has come, and I’m moving on from LMAX. I’ve had an incredible (nearly) four years working for one of the most radical finance firms in the world, during which time I feel I’ve learnt more than the rest of my work experience put together, and had the pleasure to work with some of the smartest and most interesting people I’ve ever met.

October 10, 2012

Introduction to the Disruptor Slides

I’ve produced a very cut down version of the presentation I’ve been giving at a lot of conferences, giving a high level overview to the Disruptor. This serves as a quick intro to the concepts behind it.

October 5, 2012

JavaOne: The Summary

So, JavaOne.

Taylor Street Cafe

I’m going to be controversial. I think this was my favourite conference of this year. I know that’s not trendy, and that Oracle-bashing is still a popular pastime. And I know I’ve also made a big deal about how much fun it is to meet people who program in different languages. But there is something very special about being surrounded by thousands of people from all around the world who use the same technology as you, some facing the same problems, some solving very different issues.

October 4, 2012

JavaOne: The Problem With Women - A Technical Approach

Yesterday dawned, with a sense of foreboding (actually it dawned with me coughing my lungs out, but we’ve heard enough about the sub-optimal state of my respiratory system this week). On this day, I was giving the talk I was dreading when I got asked to do it. It’s the talk I actually put more work into than any of the other sessions I was presenting at this JavaOne. It was the Women In IT talk.

October 2, 2012

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.

October 1, 2012

JavaOne: User Group Sunday

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.

September 30, 2012

The Strange Loop

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.

September 26, 2012

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:

September 2, 2012

Apologies for the interruption to your service

September 1, 2012

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.

August 23, 2012

Interviewed at GOTO Copenhagen

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:

July 27, 2012

On The Evil Of Stereotypes

I attended (one way or another) two events last week that got me thinking

The first was Girl Developers will Save the World - a session that had me a little confused as to whether that referred to me, or actual girls, i.e. those that are not yet legally classed as adults. The second was the Remarkable Women Twitter party the following day.

July 19, 2012

OSCON Day One

So, my first day at my very first OSCON. I have to say that when Ben and Martijn told me I had to do OSCON, that it was one of the conferences to go to, I was sceptical - not because I thought it would be rubbish, but because I have enjoyed all the conferences I’ve been to for different reasons.

But I’m really impressed so far.

June 24, 2012

The subject of women programmers is boring

I’ve been challenged to do a session at a very large conference around women in programming. Which leads to two reactions from me 1) wow, what an honour! and 2) sigh.

June 16, 2012

Overheard: Development Myths

Continuing the theme of Things I Have Heard I Don’t Think I Agree With. To developers technologies are everything I can’t remember the context of this, but I hear the same sentiment in different guises over and over again. Often from non-techies, but more alarmingly from developers. Is this true? It’s true for a certain tribe of techies, sure. And creating and effectively using new technologies is an important part of what drives the current information age forward.

June 9, 2012

The birth of a new community

Topping off my mini-tour at the end of May, I was invited to Rotterdam to present to a brand new community of developers. I was really interested in attending because my experience with user groups is pretty much limited to the London Java Community, and I knew this would be different due to being a) across a wider range of technologies and b) shiny and new.

June 6, 2012

QCon London: Disruptor presentation video

The “User’s Guide to the Disruptor” presentation I gave at QCon London is now available on the InfoQ site. This is the same presentation as the one I gave at Skillsmatter in March, but the questions are different. Plus since I’m winging it every time, I probably cover slightly different things or explain some stuff better / worse.

May 31, 2012

GOTO Amsterdam

Three airports and three hotels in a week, and I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. Add to that a mere four hours sleep last night, and this might resemble the ramblings of a mad woman (more than usual that is).

GOTO Amsterdam was a different affair to GOTO Copenhagen, which is not necessarily a bad thing - it’s great that the events have their own personalities and aren’t cookie cutter versions of the same thing.

May 24, 2012

GOTO Copenhagen

So, before everything gets pushed out of my head, GOTO Copenhagen.

It was my first conference “alone”, in that I didn’t have friends and colleagues from LMAX or the London Java Community there with me. And certainly at the start of the conference, I wasn’t the only one who was standing around, hoping someone would talk to me (in all honesty some of the photos above are a little unfair - the schedule was a very nice, simple phone app so most people spent a lot of time playing with their phones).

May 19, 2012

What Do You Do and How Did You Get There?

So yet another interview with me is available, but this one is in written form. It’s for the Graduate Developer Community, the aim is to show undergraduates and graduates what real techies jobs are like, and how people doing them they got there.

It’s long, but if you know anyone just starting out their career who wants to get a feel for where they might want to go, please point them at it. The site has a number of interviews with people in different roles so it’s quite a good way to showcase the diversity of what’s available.

(Update: 15 Dec 2020: Original article doesn’t seem to be around any more, so I’ve reproduced the content here)

May 17, 2012

Why Open Source Your Secrets

Here’s a video of my Open Conference session on the business benefits of open sourcing your software. Given that the conference was at a weekend and had a very intimate feel, I think I was a teeny bit more honest than I usually am. Enjoy.