I have been struggling with .NET. Actually, I have been fighting pitched battles with it.

All I want to do is take our existing Java client example code and write an equivalent in C#. Easy, right?

Trisha’s Guide to Converting Java to C#

Turns out writing the actual C# is relatively straightforward. Putting to one side the question of writing optimal code (these are very basic samples after all), to get the examples to compile and run was a simple process:

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

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

When you’re applying for a job at LMAX, your CV (or résumé, for our American readers) usually comes through me and I decide whether to call you for a technical phone screen.

I’m going to let you into a secret.

Hmm. I have been so busy trying to think of “good” things to write here, and not having the time to actually write, that I see it’s been 6 months since the last post. If anyone is still out there though, I need help. I need a good Certified Scrum Master course in New York or London, preferably in April or May. Any suggestions? The one I wanted to go on was vetoed and now I find it’s not running in NY again until Autumn.

Now I’ve been speaking at (mostly Java) conferences for a while (six years now), I get asked to present at a lot of conferences. Obviously all these conferences are mostly interested in my terribly educational talks, but it’s also because I’m a technical woman and there aren’t very many technical women speaking at conferences.

In my experience, conferences want to do the right thing - they want a diverse line up of speakers, they want to attract diverse attendees. Often this is not as easy as it may seem, and frequently conferences are Twitter-shamed for not having enough women speakers. When it gets to this point (and often before), conferences frequently ask me for advice on speakers they could invite, and how to attract more women.

Mandatory initial exclamation about how little I have blogged here lately. Over a year without updates, oh dear! But a) I have been blogging quite a lot for the IntelliJ IDEA and Upsource blogs, and b) I had another baby, which kept me quite busy.

So on that topic (more or less) I get a lot of questions about my job: what’s involved in the job, what’s it like working for JetBrains, what does a Developer Advocate do, what’s it like working remotely etc etc. Given I also rather generously¹ recently offered to answer people’s questions about my job, I thought the most scalable way was to write-once-read-many, i.e. write it in a single blog post for everyone to read.

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.

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!

I was flattered to be interviewed for InfoQ at QCon London. It was a fun interview actually, and didn’t feel anything like the half an hour it actually took. In it, I get to talk about Agile at LMAX, the Disruptor (of course) and diversity in IT (again).

After attending a number of conferences and events, and performing numerous interviews, I’m starting to hear the same things again and again. Since Dan North challenged all my assumptions at QCon, I’m reluctant to outright ridicule them, but I will put forward my personal opinion.

Note: these are things I have heard from multiple sources, so with any luck I am not breaking the sanctity of the confessional interview.

Last week I went to get my hair cut (yes, sorry, this is a story about hair). I had thought long and hard about what I wanted. I researched, checked styles online, and bought a magazine so I could show my hairdresser exactly what I was after and there would be no confusion. I was determined I would not be spending that ridiculous amount of money on something I was not going to be happy with. I was even bold enough to ask for some changes to it at the end, which I have never ever had the courage to do before.

We are hiring! If you think we’re doing something interesting, or if you think you can help us do our thing even better, come join us. Your boss will be the dude who wrote Continuous Delivery, you’ll get a chance to experience what Danny calls meta-Agile (or Agile Agile), and you’ll really start to care about Domain-Driven Design. Ideally we’re after Java people, but at the heart of it we want people who are dead passionate about development.

As a survival trait for living and working in the cites¹ of London, I have a set of rituals to avoid hangovers. If you are not a single person living in a city like London, you might not understand how vital this is. Most networking, particularly in the financial services industry, is done in the presence of alcohol.

So preventing the inevitable hangover is quite important to the other part of the job – the actual working bit. I’ll let you into a secret and tell you my nightly ritual:

Having experienced Flaccid Scrum, I find this article interesting, and agree with most of it. I’d also like to add though, that if you do the scrum practices (story cards, stand ups, retrospectives, etc) but don’t buy into the fundamental principals, you will not succeed. And that means everyone on the team, not just the people in charge. In particular, if the team is not empowered, is not committing to the estimates and the iteration plan in its heart, and and does not trust, then you are probably better off using traditional processes.

This is a bloody good idea. It builds upon my own Virgoen tendancies to write lists and tick things off, but what the list model lacks is the “in progress” state. Plus occasionally my lists get confused. See today’s notebook page:

…there are a number of points in this interview with Paul Oldfield which are interesting to consider when thinking about “doing Agile right”. It seems to be compatible with my “people over process” view - I’m not stating that having good people negates the need for any form of process or discipline, I have seen that this is simply not the case. I do however think that agile techniques in particular rely heavily upon the “right” people / team, for some nebulous definition of “right”.

You may have noticed that the more I go to conferences, the less I write about them. I could claim lack of time, but the fact is that all my write-ups will be something along the lines of “Loved <city>, went to talks that made me think, met interesting people, gave a talk or two that seemed to go well”. Not sure if people get bored of reading that, but I get bored of writing it.

That’s not to say I’m bored of conferences. On the contrary - since I work from home, travelling to new places and meeting Real Human Beings keeps me sane. Plus conferences are fun.

But I went to a conference on Saturday that makes me feel compelled to write something, and not just because it was organised by my two fellow Sevilla JUG organisers. @IsraKaos and @RGDav are both doing more Android day-to-day than server-side Java, so this is an area they’re interested in learning more about. Not content with organising Android events every other month, they decided they had so many interesting speakers they wanted to have speaking here in Sevilla that they wanted to run a whole day, single track conference, on behalf of GDG Sevilla. Android Xtended was born.

Because I was missing coding, and because my friend and I had an awesome phone app idea at the weekend, I thought I’d try my hand at developing an Android application this week.

I want to give a quick overview of my preliminary thoughts on getting started on this endeavour.

Background: I’ve got more than 10 years Java experience, but any UI for the applications I’ve worked on was always a web UI. I am completely new to mobile app development.

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.

Today I would like to document my experiences implementing caching with Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) and annotations.

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:

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

I nominated LMAX for a couple of JAX Innovation Awards, but unfortunately we did not get shortlisted :( However, the London Java Community did! So if you have a second please vote for the LJC for Top Java Ambassador

I know there are arguments against certification, and I definitely think that using certifiction to determine whether to interview or recruit people is downright daft, because frankly learning a bunch of answers isn’t all that difficult. But I personally find that completing a certification really helps to round out my knowledge in an area. I guess my thoughts are that a fairly recent certification combined with the work experience to back it up is something that would make your CV more interesting to recruiters.

Today, I found this blog post very useful.

Remember I posted about having to write .NET? Well, the code and the tutorial are available for you, my lucky readers, to rip to pieces view. I am not the only person responsible for this code though, so be kind.

I have been struggling with .NET. Actually, I have been fighting pitched battles with it.

All I want to do is take our existing Java client example code and write an equivalent in C#. Easy, right?

Trisha’s Guide to Converting Java to C#

Turns out writing the actual C# is relatively straightforward. Putting to one side the question of writing optimal code (these are very basic samples after all), to get the examples to compile and run was a simple process:

Today I would like to document my experiences implementing caching with Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) and annotations.

Mandatory initial exclamation about how little I have blogged here lately. Over a year without updates, oh dear! But a) I have been blogging quite a lot for the IntelliJ IDEA and Upsource blogs, and b) I had another baby, which kept me quite busy.

So on that topic (more or less) I get a lot of questions about my job: what’s involved in the job, what’s it like working for JetBrains, what does a Developer Advocate do, what’s it like working remotely etc etc. Given I also rather generously¹ recently offered to answer people’s questions about my job, I thought the most scalable way was to write-once-read-many, i.e. write it in a single blog post for everyone to read.

How do you keep your skills up to date in this fast-moving and turbulant industry?

So, I get asked a lot about how I got into technical advocacy / evangelism¹, so it seems like the most cost-effective way to answer this question is to write a post about it. Warning: it’s a long one!

Just over two years ago, I embarked upon a journey as a developer / evangelist for a company who was then called 10gen (who got fed up of saying “the MongoDB people”, and transformed into MongoDB Inc). My goals for this role were: to learn what it was like working for a company that produced a technology product; to discover what impact working in an open source fashion has; and to level up my advocacy skills.

Last Thursday I gave a keynote at GOTO Berlin to address the problems of deciding how to learn a new technology/framework/process (Spoiler Alert: it’s not by putting it into production).

Since I have a tendency to bang on every now and again about how we, as developers, could do better in managing our careers (for example, by creating CVs that don’t suck, and by staying ahead of the curve), Dave Thomas asked me to speak for a mere 50 minutes on the subject at GOTO Aarhus, a talk I wasn’t enormously happy with as there was no way to cover a lifetime of hard-fought experience in such a short time.

I was flattered a couple of weeks ago to be interviewed by Google as part of their women techmaker’s series, as it moves over to Europe. In this video I talk about going to Mars, education, planning your career, being a developer, and the impact of technology on our lives. So, not much…

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

When you’re applying for a job at LMAX, your CV (or résumé, for our American readers) usually comes through me and I decide whether to call you for a technical phone screen.

I’m going to let you into a secret.

One developer’s journey to find the perfect job.

As a survival trait for living and working in the cites¹ of London, I have a set of rituals to avoid hangovers. If you are not a single person living in a city like London, you might not understand how vital this is. Most networking, particularly in the financial services industry, is done in the presence of alcohol.

So preventing the inevitable hangover is quite important to the other part of the job – the actual working bit. I’ll let you into a secret and tell you my nightly ritual:

What are our thoughts on putting all the letters after your name in a CV/resume? Pretentious? Or the only reasonable time to use all those letters?

I know there are arguments against certification, and I definitely think that using certifiction to determine whether to interview or recruit people is downright daft, because frankly learning a bunch of answers isn’t all that difficult. But I personally find that completing a certification really helps to round out my knowledge in an area. I guess my thoughts are that a fairly recent certification combined with the work experience to back it up is something that would make your CV more interesting to recruiters.

Which is more readable?

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

or

releaseVersion = version[0..-10]

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.

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!

Remember I posted about having to write .NET? Well, the code and the tutorial are available for you, my lucky readers, to rip to pieces view. I am not the only person responsible for this code though, so be kind.

I have been struggling with .NET. Actually, I have been fighting pitched battles with it.

All I want to do is take our existing Java client example code and write an equivalent in C#. Easy, right?

Trisha’s Guide to Converting Java to C#

Turns out writing the actual C# is relatively straightforward. Putting to one side the question of writing optimal code (these are very basic samples after all), to get the examples to compile and run was a simple process:

So if java generics slightly disappointed me lately, what have I found cool? I’m currently working on a web application using Spring MVC, which probably doesn’t come as a big surprise, it seems to be all the rage these days. Since this is my baby, I got to call the shots as to a lot of the framework choices. When it came to looking at implementing validation, I refused to believe I’d have to go through the primitive process of looking at all the values on the request and deciding if they pass muster, with some huge if statement.

When I first started playing with Java 1.5, I thought generics were the best thing since sliced bread. No more untidy casting, lovely type-safe Collections, and when combined with the new for loop, a lot of the tedious tasks associated with Collections became easier and, most importantly, aesthetically pleasing.

This article was originally a guest post for FogBugz.

As developers, we all know that code reviews are a good thing in theory. They should help us:

• Find bugs and security issues early
• Improve the readability of our code
• Provide a safety net to ensure all tasks are fully completed

The reality is that code reviews can frequently be an uncomfortable experience for everyone involved, leading to reviews that are combative, ineffective, or even worse, simply not happening.

Here is a quick guide to help you to create an effective code review process.

(Updated 23 July, 2020)

We know that Code Reviews are a Good Thing. We probably have our own personal lists of things we look for in the code we review, while also fearing what others might say about our code. How to we ensure that code reviews are actually benefiting the team, and the application? How do we decide who does the reviews? What does “done” look like?

In this talk, Trisha will identify some best practices to follow. She’ll talk about what’s really important in a code review, and set out some guidelines to follow in order to maximise the value of the code review and minimise the pain.

Content and resources for the Code Review Matters and Manners talk, including links to additional information and supporting material.

So I came to the blog to update my upcoming events (at least something stays up to date) only to find it’s been nearly a year since I last blogged! This is terrible!

It’s not that I haven’t written anything in a year, it’s that a lot of my writing energy goes into stuff for the actual day job. Which is good, because that’s pretty much what I wanted from the day job, but the blog makes it look like I don’t write any more.

So I’m going to cheat. Here’s the stuff I’ve written in the last 12 months.

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).

From spellfecker today: Certifiction (n.) : a professional endorsement which states only that the holder had the money to pay for the exam. …which reminded me of this debate, particularly the first comment.

Last Tuesday Mike and I unveiled our brand shiny new presentation: Understanding the Disruptor, a Beginner’s Guide to Hardcore Concurrency. This was a preview of the talk we’ll be doing at JAX London on the 2nd November. A video of the session is available, as are the slides. I promise not to say “so” anywhere near as many times when I repeat my performance at JAX (is there anything more painful than watching yourself on video?

Martin recently announced version 2.0 of the Disruptor - basically there have been so many changes since we first open-sourced it that it’s time to mark that officially. His post goes over all the changes, the aim of this article is to attempt to translate my previous blog posts into new-world-speak, since it’s going to take a long time to re-write each of them all over again. Now I see the disadvantage of hand-drawing everything.

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.

We mention the phrase Mechanical Sympathy quite a lot, in fact it’s even Martin’s blog title. It’s about understanding how the underlying hardware operates and programming in a way that works with that, not against it.

We get a number of comments and questions about the mysterious cache line padding in the RingBuffer, and I referred to it in the last post. Since this lends itself to pretty pictures, it’s the next thing I thought I would tackle.

Martin Fowler has written a really good article describing not only the Disruptor, but also how it fits into the architecture at LMAX. This gives some of the context that has been missing so far, but the most frequently asked question is still “What is the Disruptor?”.

I’m working up to answering that. I’m currently on question number two: “Why is it so fast?”.

So now I’ve covered the ring buffer itself, reading from it and writing to it.

Logically the next thing to do is to wire everything up together.

I talked about multiple producers - they have the producer barrier to keep them in order and under control. I’ve talked about consumers in a simple situation. Multiple consumers can get a little more involved. We’ve done some clever stuff to allow the consumers to be dependent on each other and the ring buffer. Like a lot of applications, we have a pipeline of things that need to happen before we can actually get on with the business logic - for example, we need to make sure the messages have been journalled to disk before we can do anything.

The Disruptor paper and the performance tests cover some basic configurations that you might want. I’m going to go over the most interesting one, mostly because I needed the practice with the graphics tablet.

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.

The next in the series of understanding the Disruptor pattern developed at LMAX.

After the last post we all understand ring buffers and how awesome they are. Unfortunately for you, I have not said anything about how to actually populate them or read from them when you’re using the Disruptor.

It’s been a while since I wrote a conference write up. The short version of “why” is because I got a bit bored of doing it. Plus, I found I was attending conferences as a speaker “on the circuit”, and my experience of hanging out, catching up with my friends, chatting to other attendees to see what they’re up to and so forth, didn’t seem as useful to share with people who might want to find out whether a conference is worth attending from a content or atmosphere point of view.

But I feel compelled to blog about JavaZone. I presented there back in 2013, but every year since then haven’t made it for one reason or another (the fact that it’s near my birthday in no way impacts my scheduling…). I made the effort this year, and I’m so pleased. Now I’ve been to many more conferences, of various sizes, various themes, all around the world, and I can definitely state that JavaZone is up there as one of the best conferences around.

Why?

You may have noticed that the more I go to conferences, the less I write about them. I could claim lack of time, but the fact is that all my write-ups will be something along the lines of “Loved <city>, went to talks that made me think, met interesting people, gave a talk or two that seemed to go well”. Not sure if people get bored of reading that, but I get bored of writing it.

That’s not to say I’m bored of conferences. On the contrary - since I work from home, travelling to new places and meeting Real Human Beings keeps me sane. Plus conferences are fun.

But I went to a conference on Saturday that makes me feel compelled to write something, and not just because it was organised by my two fellow Sevilla JUG organisers. @IsraKaos and @RGDav are both doing more Android day-to-day than server-side Java, so this is an area they’re interested in learning more about. Not content with organising Android events every other month, they decided they had so many interesting speakers they wanted to have speaking here in Sevilla that they wanted to run a whole day, single track conference, on behalf of GDG Sevilla. Android Xtended was born.

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.

At GOTO Chicago, I was given the chance to chat a bit about the presentation I was giving, which happens to be the same one I’m giving at a number of conferences this year (although of course I’m evolving it as I go along).

While the list in the talks section of my blog covers past presentations, this page should list my confirmed upcoming events.

Yeah… I’m not planning to travel anywhere for 2020 at this time.

This is a selection of talks and their abstracts. For conferences that are interested in having me present, these are generally the talks I’m available to give.

I’ve spoken at JavaOne (2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016) and have received the JavaOne Rock Star award several times. I’ve presented many times at QCon London, and other notable conferences include QCon New York, Devoxx BE and UK, JavaZone, CraftConf OSCON and various GOTO conferences. I also regularly present to user groups around the world, and am a leader of the Sevilla Java User Group. See my full list of past presentations here (includes links to videos).

Now I’ve been speaking at (mostly Java) conferences for a while (six years now), I get asked to present at a lot of conferences. Obviously all these conferences are mostly interested in my terribly educational talks, but it’s also because I’m a technical woman and there aren’t very many technical women speaking at conferences.

In my experience, conferences want to do the right thing - they want a diverse line up of speakers, they want to attract diverse attendees. Often this is not as easy as it may seem, and frequently conferences are Twitter-shamed for not having enough women speakers. When it gets to this point (and often before), conferences frequently ask me for advice on speakers they could invite, and how to attract more women.

Since publishing yesterday’s post, I’ve had a lot of great comments, so I thought I’d write yet another post to answer them.

Last month at Devoxx I was in a session discussing what we can do to encourage more diversity in our speakers (specifically, although not limited to, increasing the number of women speakers). I’m going to outline the things I remember being discussed, although as usual we did not find the answer to the problem, only identify some issues and explore some options. This is a very chaotic blog post, because if I don’t post it now I’ll never post it, and it’s better if my thoughts are scrawled down and posted than if this all goes to die in my drafts folder.

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

YOW recorded me, yet again, talking about the adventure that is the design of the new Java Driver for MongoDB. This is the same talk I gave at GeeCON and DevoxxUK, with some updates based on our Journey So Far. In it, I cover the architecture of the new driver and some of our current thoughts around where we want the API to go.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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….

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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….

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

…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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Just a quick note to say I was interviewed for another podcast (Update 2020: apparently no longer available), again to talk about all-female events. It’s only a short one and there’s probably not much in there that I haven’t said before, either on here or in person. From the 21st May, I’m at GOTO, both Copenhagen and Amsterdam. I’ll be talking about code & the Disruptor, thank goodness, and will be trying not to rant about the subject of women in technology.

This week’s BBC Outriders podcast features yours truly venting about The Subject That Won’t Go Away, Women in Technology. I was interviewed at Sunday’s Girl Geek conference, and got a chance to voice my opinions once again. For those who can’t be bothered to listen, they can probably be summarised as: There are genuine problems that face people in our industry, let’s talk about those that you have actually faced, not ones that you imagine exist.

Today I was at the Girl Geek Meetup conference. I didn’t advertise it much because I’ve said in the past I don’t really agree with women-only events, and actually I felt quite uncomfortable telling you guys I was going to be there, knowing the majority of my readers weren’t allowed to attend.

It’s probably worth explaining why I went, so a) I can give you guys and excuse but b) conference organisers can see what people like me are looking for in a conference.

I’m late with my write-up of QCon, and what’s worse, it will be partial - “sadly” I was in Lanzarote on a training week with the running club from the Thursday (8th) so I missed most of it. A sacrifice I had to make for 7 days in the sunshine…

In theory, I am busy writing material for my upcoming speaking events, rather than writing terribly illuminating posts on my blog (see what I did there?). In actuality I am being lazy and have pretty much taken January off for a recharge.

In the spirit of doing something which ticks both the event-speaking and blogging boxes, this is a quick update on the conferences I’m confirmed for so far. Put the following dates in your diary - these are my first international solo speaking events:

If you have a Parleys subscription, you can watch the whole “Why we shouldn’t target women” panel from Devoxx 2011 a month or so ago. Watch me attempt to monopolise the whole panel as if it was my idea or something…

At JAX London Mike and I presented “Understanding the Disruptor - A Beginner’s Guide to Hardcore Concurrency”. This is the session we initially previewed to the London Java Community a few weeks earlier. The content is the same, but the feel of the presentation was quite different to us - the venue for the LJC event was more intimate, and it was easier to interact with the audience. At JAX, we were up on stage, which was pretty cool actually, but meant that it felt more like a lecture and it was less easy to connect with the audience.

Saturday was, hopefully, my last conference of the year. My lucky readers should start to see some posts which are not simply me gushing about another opportunity to hang out with awesome people and learn about interesting “stuff”.

Panel with: Martijn Verburg; Regina ten Bruggencate; Trisha Gee; Antonio Goncalves; Claude Falguière; Kim Ross

I’m back from Devoxx, having had lots of food for thought. In particular, my panel on Why We Shouldn’t Target Women generated a lot of discussion and I’m still trying to process it all.

The panel went really well, we got decent interaction from the audience, and of course my fellow panel members were awesome. I managed to restrain myself from using the opportunity as my own personal soap box and allowed other people to speak occasionally. Sadly the only male on the panel stole the show somewhat, so Antonio won’t be invited in future… Actually in seriousness, it was great to have a guy on the panel to present his point of view. It was interesting that he’s a father, highlighting that parenting issues are not the same as women’s issues, and conflating those two concerns hurts both genders. But Antonio’s hair is far too shiny and pretty and he’s funnier than I am, so I’m not standing next to him again.

Stephan wearing the Brazilian flag at the opening keynote European conferences are different (and cool) because you get to hear even more languages spoken than you usually do in London (apparently the most diverse city in the world for spoken languages). I think the idea of a Paris Devoxx with 75% of the talks in French is brilliant - I’m always banging on about diversity, we shouldn’t expect developers to learn in English only.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at JAX London along with a number of the London Java Community regulars (Martijn/Ben/John/Sandro/Simon/Zoe I’m looking at you….)

My purpose for attending was largely to present the Hardcore Concurrency for Beginners talk that Mike and I debuted at an LJC event a few weeks back. Almost as important was catching up with the aforementioned LJCers and meeting with as many people as would talk to me. After the disappointment of the sessions at Java One, sitting in a room being talked at was quite low down on my list of priorities. Sometimes it’s nice to be wrong.

“What… exactly… were you guys looking to get out of today’s event? Because…” “Because we’re girls?” “Um… yes…” Kim impetuously opts for The Truth: “We’re here to meet men.” Our interrogator looks round dubiously. “No, really, why are you here?” Phew. My reputation is intact1 Kim eloquently describes what her situation is as Product Manager and the criteria she’s measuring third party products against. I explain how LMAX aims to be the fastest retail exchange in the world, and therefore low latency is a tiny bit important to us.

It must be time for me to move on from talking about Java One, it has dominated my blog of late. But also I want to talk about JAX London from this week. But before I move on, it’s probably worth rounding off with the last two resources from the conference. 1) Martin Thompson and I are interviewed about the Disruptor winning the Duke Award (we come in halfway through):

I discovered, through the power of the search words that lead to my blog, that there was an incident at JavaOne that once again opens the can of worms that is Sexism In IT.

This Makes Me Sad. I had a really positive experience at JavaOne. In fact, I would say it was the one conference I’ve been to in the last 12 months where I felt like my gender wasn’t a problem - I even got away with wearing hotpants (tweed is business-casual, right??) without being mistaken for anything other than a developer.

Having been back in London for a few days I’ve had some time to digest the madness that was last week.

My lasting impression of JavaOne is almost entirely positive. Granted, it was my first major conference, so maybe I’m just not jaded yet. But let me tell you what I loved about it (yes, I did cover some of these in my last post):

Here’s a photo of me representing LMAX as I pick up the Duke Award we won for the Disruptor (Thanks to Martijn for taking the photo)

So I’ve been at JavaOne for the better part of three days, it’s time to record some of my observations so far:

So, I’m off to JavaOne next week! This is an unexpected and very pleasant surprise. I’ll be there with Martin (of the Disruptor fame), and Martijn (that’s not going to get confusing at all). Martin will be talking about the Disruptor on Thursday, and Martijn is busy talking about… everything. Most importantly for the LJC he’s representing us in our shiny new JCP Executive Committee role. I’m really looking forward to meeting pretty much anyone and everyone who’ll talk to me.

On Wednesday I tagged along to the STAC London Summit to provide backup for Mike, who was on the “The Future of Messaging Middleware” panel.

The panel consisted of two messaging providers, one hardware (Solace Systems) and one software (29West/Informatica), and two “users”, Citihub and LMAX. Obviously both providers were arguing that theirs was the best solution. But what I found interesting is that I came away with the impression that everyone was really on the same side - everyone wants to use or to provide the best system, but there are different approaches. Which one you adopt is likely to be influenced by how your team work and the hardware you have (or can obtain).

I attended TradeTech last week, an annual event about Equities and Derivatives trading. I assumed from the title that there would be a reasonable focus on technology, but I found it was more “Trade” and less “Tech”.

Last Thursday I was fortunate enough to get a place on the FogBugz and Kiln World Tour. I booked it before I moved jobs, and I’ll be honest I had no real interest in the software. I’ve been reading Joel’s books and blogs since my friend Brent bought me Joel on Software and made me read it (he had the foresight to know I’d want to hang on to his copy if he’d lent it to me!). I wanted to see the man in the flesh and hear what he had to say about his software. Because really, do we honestly need yet another bug-tracking / project-management tool?

This is just a summary of the points I took from the Lean conference at Bletchley. They all need expanding, this is just the stuff that struck me that I want to record.

Today, I found this blog post very useful.

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).

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.

First, an apology. I will be using the British spelling for “centre”, because, well, I’m British. But it gets really confusing because you have to use the American spelling in the code. And doesn’t “Centring” just look wrong?

One of the aims of this series is to highlight some stupid gotchas in support for CSS in the different browsers.

Today’s gotcha is table borders.

Yes, yes, I said don’t use tables. What I means is, don’t use tables for layout. But you can use tables for, you know, tabular data. Like, for examples, lists of instruments and their bid and ask prices.

But you should know that even when you use strict mode, Internet Explorer has slightly… eccentric… rendering behaviour for tables. Actually to be specific, it’s IE7 only.

This is a continuation of my series of CSS hints / tips / cheats for developers (and other technical-but-not-UI people).

The screenshots are in Chrome on a Mac. The originals were on Firefox on Ubuntu so I can tell you the behaviour is identical.

As promised, the Long Awaited Follow-Up to CSS for Developers Part One! Well, long-awaited if you’re as afflicted with NADD as I am.

Quick recap - the aim of this series is to provide a quick and easy how-to around the magic that is CSS. It’s primarily aimed at developers, although I would hope it’s comprehensible to a range of tech-savvy people.

I’m a Java Developer. But I’m also a Web Developer. Web Developers have been so badly maligned over the last decade or so that I always feel wary (and sometimes slightly ashamed) admitting this. There’s some sort of assumption that Web Developers (and Front End Developers) aren’t real programmers. Similarly, “real” developers don’t like to be tainted by coming into contact with that nasty “front end stuff” in case someone mistakes them for a designer.

Trust me, no-one is going to mistake a Java Developer for a designer. For a start, when designers wear geeky glasses it’s ironic. Or chic. Or something.

But developers will be forced to do something around the front end at some point in their lives. Even if it’s because they’re sick of manually kicking off some process and want to give the users a big red button to press instead.

Living and working in central London, you quickly learn that the fastest way around town is to cycle.

My extensive research into this activity has shown there are a number of different cycling tribes. Of course, I have split them into the two groups that are most appropriate to me: 1) slower than me and 2) faster than me. You can probably tell what sort of a cyclist I am by my attitude to the two groups.

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 heart of the pattern, the clever bit about the Disruptor is controlling access to it.

We are hiring! If you think we’re doing something interesting, or if you think you can help us do our thing even better, come join us. Your boss will be the dude who wrote Continuous Delivery, you’ll get a chance to experience what Danny calls meta-Agile (or Agile Agile), and you’ll really start to care about Domain-Driven Design. Ideally we’re after Java people, but at the heart of it we want people who are dead passionate about development.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

Tori Wieldt from the Oracle Technology Network interviewed me at Devoxx. Because I was there to be on the Why We Shouldn’t Target Women panel, the interview is just another platform for me to air my views on this subject again. Yes, I am actually wearing pink….

Panel with: Martijn Verburg; Regina ten Bruggencate; Trisha Gee; Antonio Goncalves; Claude Falguière; Kim Ross

I’m back from Devoxx, having had lots of food for thought. In particular, my panel on Why We Shouldn’t Target Women generated a lot of discussion and I’m still trying to process it all.

The panel went really well, we got decent interaction from the audience, and of course my fellow panel members were awesome. I managed to restrain myself from using the opportunity as my own personal soap box and allowed other people to speak occasionally. Sadly the only male on the panel stole the show somewhat, so Antonio won’t be invited in future… Actually in seriousness, it was great to have a guy on the panel to present his point of view. It was interesting that he’s a father, highlighting that parenting issues are not the same as women’s issues, and conflating those two concerns hurts both genders. But Antonio’s hair is far too shiny and pretty and he’s funnier than I am, so I’m not standing next to him again.

Stephan wearing the Brazilian flag at the opening keynote European conferences are different (and cool) because you get to hear even more languages spoken than you usually do in London (apparently the most diverse city in the world for spoken languages). I think the idea of a Paris Devoxx with 75% of the talks in French is brilliant - I’m always banging on about diversity, we shouldn’t expect developers to learn in English only.

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.

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:

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.

I was flattered to be interviewed for InfoQ at QCon London. It was a fun interview actually, and didn’t feel anything like the half an hour it actually took. In it, I get to talk about Agile at LMAX, the Disruptor (of course) and diversity in IT (again).

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.

I’m late with my write-up of QCon, and what’s worse, it will be partial - “sadly” I was in Lanzarote on a training week with the running club from the Thursday (8th) so I missed most of it. A sacrifice I had to make for 7 days in the sunshine…

This month’s Java Magazine features an article by yours truly, which is yet another intro to the Disruptor. It’s basically a summary of the stuff I’ve written in this blog, updated for version 2.7 - so the names of the classes should be up to date and the responsibilities follow the simplified pattern we use now. If you were looking for an more recent version of my introduction blog posts, this article gives a reasonable overview.

A few weeks ago, I presented my new “User’s Guide to the Disruptor” talk to the London Java Community. Since it was very kindly hosted at Skillsmatter, there is a video of the presentation available, and the slides are below.

In theory, I am busy writing material for my upcoming speaking events, rather than writing terribly illuminating posts on my blog (see what I did there?). In actuality I am being lazy and have pretty much taken January off for a recharge.

In the spirit of doing something which ticks both the event-speaking and blogging boxes, this is a quick update on the conferences I’m confirmed for so far. Put the following dates in your diary - these are my first international solo speaking events:

At JAX London Mike and I presented “Understanding the Disruptor - A Beginner’s Guide to Hardcore Concurrency”. This is the session we initially previewed to the London Java Community a few weeks earlier. The content is the same, but the feel of the presentation was quite different to us - the venue for the LJC event was more intimate, and it was easier to interact with the audience. At JAX, we were up on stage, which was pretty cool actually, but meant that it felt more like a lecture and it was less easy to connect with the audience.

Saturday was, hopefully, my last conference of the year. My lucky readers should start to see some posts which are not simply me gushing about another opportunity to hang out with awesome people and learn about interesting “stuff”.

Last Tuesday Mike and I unveiled our brand shiny new presentation: Understanding the Disruptor, a Beginner’s Guide to Hardcore Concurrency. This was a preview of the talk we’ll be doing at JAX London on the 2nd November. A video of the session is available, as are the slides. I promise not to say “so” anywhere near as many times when I repeat my performance at JAX (is there anything more painful than watching yourself on video?

Having been back in London for a few days I’ve had some time to digest the madness that was last week.

My lasting impression of JavaOne is almost entirely positive. Granted, it was my first major conference, so maybe I’m just not jaded yet. But let me tell you what I loved about it (yes, I did cover some of these in my last post):

Here’s a photo of me representing LMAX as I pick up the Duke Award we won for the Disruptor (Thanks to Martijn for taking the photo)

So I’ve been at JavaOne for the better part of three days, it’s time to record some of my observations so far:

Martin recently announced version 2.0 of the Disruptor - basically there have been so many changes since we first open-sourced it that it’s time to mark that officially. His post goes over all the changes, the aim of this article is to attempt to translate my previous blog posts into new-world-speak, since it’s going to take a long time to re-write each of them all over again. Now I see the disadvantage of hand-drawing everything.

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.

We mention the phrase Mechanical Sympathy quite a lot, in fact it’s even Martin’s blog title. It’s about understanding how the underlying hardware operates and programming in a way that works with that, not against it.

We get a number of comments and questions about the mysterious cache line padding in the RingBuffer, and I referred to it in the last post. Since this lends itself to pretty pictures, it’s the next thing I thought I would tackle.

Martin Fowler has written a really good article describing not only the Disruptor, but also how it fits into the architecture at LMAX. This gives some of the context that has been missing so far, but the most frequently asked question is still “What is the Disruptor?”.

I’m working up to answering that. I’m currently on question number two: “Why is it so fast?”.

So now I’ve covered the ring buffer itself, reading from it and writing to it.

Logically the next thing to do is to wire everything up together.

I talked about multiple producers - they have the producer barrier to keep them in order and under control. I’ve talked about consumers in a simple situation. Multiple consumers can get a little more involved. We’ve done some clever stuff to allow the consumers to be dependent on each other and the ring buffer. Like a lot of applications, we have a pipeline of things that need to happen before we can actually get on with the business logic - for example, we need to make sure the messages have been journalled to disk before we can do anything.

The Disruptor paper and the performance tests cover some basic configurations that you might want. I’m going to go over the most interesting one, mostly because I needed the practice with the graphics tablet.

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.

The next in the series of understanding the Disruptor pattern developed at LMAX.

After the last post we all understand ring buffers and how awesome they are. Unfortunately for you, I have not said anything about how to actually populate them or read from them when you’re using the Disruptor.

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 heart of the pattern, the clever bit about the Disruptor is controlling access to it.

This month’s Java Magazine features an article by yours truly, which is yet another intro to the Disruptor. It’s basically a summary of the stuff I’ve written in this blog, updated for version 2.7 - so the names of the classes should be up to date and the responsibilities follow the simplified pattern we use now. If you were looking for an more recent version of my introduction blog posts, this article gives a reasonable overview.

Martin recently announced version 2.0 of the Disruptor - basically there have been so many changes since we first open-sourced it that it’s time to mark that officially. His post goes over all the changes, the aim of this article is to attempt to translate my previous blog posts into new-world-speak, since it’s going to take a long time to re-write each of them all over again. Now I see the disadvantage of hand-drawing everything.

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.

We mention the phrase Mechanical Sympathy quite a lot, in fact it’s even Martin’s blog title. It’s about understanding how the underlying hardware operates and programming in a way that works with that, not against it.

We get a number of comments and questions about the mysterious cache line padding in the RingBuffer, and I referred to it in the last post. Since this lends itself to pretty pictures, it’s the next thing I thought I would tackle.

Martin Fowler has written a really good article describing not only the Disruptor, but also how it fits into the architecture at LMAX. This gives some of the context that has been missing so far, but the most frequently asked question is still “What is the Disruptor?”.

I’m working up to answering that. I’m currently on question number two: “Why is it so fast?”.

So now I’ve covered the ring buffer itself, reading from it and writing to it.

Logically the next thing to do is to wire everything up together.

I talked about multiple producers - they have the producer barrier to keep them in order and under control. I’ve talked about consumers in a simple situation. Multiple consumers can get a little more involved. We’ve done some clever stuff to allow the consumers to be dependent on each other and the ring buffer. Like a lot of applications, we have a pipeline of things that need to happen before we can actually get on with the business logic - for example, we need to make sure the messages have been journalled to disk before we can do anything.

The Disruptor paper and the performance tests cover some basic configurations that you might want. I’m going to go over the most interesting one, mostly because I needed the practice with the graphics tablet.

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.

The next in the series of understanding the Disruptor pattern developed at LMAX.

After the last post we all understand ring buffers and how awesome they are. Unfortunately for you, I have not said anything about how to actually populate them or read from them when you’re using the Disruptor.

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 heart of the pattern, the clever bit about the Disruptor is controlling access to it.

It’s 2018, and we still Have conferences with only one woman speaker Regularly see all-male panels See only a small subset of ethnicities represented Use language that excludes people from job advertisements By now we’ve heard that diversity makes for better teams, better products, and better leadership, and it seems like the industry has been beating itself up about it for some time now. Why isn’t it fixed? What can we do?

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.

List of resources for those trying to make the switch from Eclipse to IntelliJ IDEA:

While the list in the talks section of my blog covers past presentations, this page should list my confirmed upcoming events.

Yeah… I’m not planning to travel anywhere for 2020 at this time.

This is a selection of talks and their abstracts. For conferences that are interested in having me present, these are generally the talks I’m available to give.

I’ve spoken at JavaOne (2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016) and have received the JavaOne Rock Star award several times. I’ve presented many times at QCon London, and other notable conferences include QCon New York, Devoxx BE and UK, JavaZone, CraftConf OSCON and various GOTO conferences. I also regularly present to user groups around the world, and am a leader of the Sevilla Java User Group. See my full list of past presentations here (includes links to videos).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Last Tuesday Mike and I unveiled our brand shiny new presentation: Understanding the Disruptor, a Beginner’s Guide to Hardcore Concurrency. This was a preview of the talk we’ll be doing at JAX London on the 2nd November. A video of the session is available, as are the slides. I promise not to say “so” anywhere near as many times when I repeat my performance at JAX (is there anything more painful than watching yourself on video?

I’m finally moving up from working behind the scenes to actually doing a (short) presentation for the LJC. I’m going to be giving a lightning talk on Wednesday at the AWS Elastic Beanstalk event, on the JCP - what it is and what our election to the executive committee means. Ben and Martin’s post gives a little more background on the subject. Another LMAX LJC member Mike will also be giving a lightning talk, on Project Coin.

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)

For years I’ve avoided talking about the topic of what to wear when presenting. I didn’t want to cover it because I didn’t want people to think that I only worried about this topic because I was a woman. I also didn’t want other women to inherit any of my neuroses around deciding what to wear. I’m the sort of person who always enjoyed thinking long and hard about what to wear the next day at work, and I know that’s not how everyone works.

I realise I have a bunch of experience and advice for speakers and potential speakers that I simply haven’t written down or shared. Here’s the first piece on things to consider that you might not have thought about. Note: as usual, my advice is from the point of view of a woman (me) and is aimed mostly at women, but also as usual it’s probably useful for others to know too.

It’s 2018, and we still Have conferences with only one woman speaker Regularly see all-male panels See only a small subset of ethnicities represented Use language that excludes people from job advertisements By now we’ve heard that diversity makes for better teams, better products, and better leadership, and it seems like the industry has been beating itself up about it for some time now. Why isn’t it fixed? What can we do?

Now I’ve been speaking at (mostly Java) conferences for a while (six years now), I get asked to present at a lot of conferences. Obviously all these conferences are mostly interested in my terribly educational talks, but it’s also because I’m a technical woman and there aren’t very many technical women speaking at conferences.

In my experience, conferences want to do the right thing - they want a diverse line up of speakers, they want to attract diverse attendees. Often this is not as easy as it may seem, and frequently conferences are Twitter-shamed for not having enough women speakers. When it gets to this point (and often before), conferences frequently ask me for advice on speakers they could invite, and how to attract more women.

So, I wrote a long email to the London Java Community in answer to an excellent question: “What can men do to support Women in Technology?”.

It’s a bit of a brain dump, by no means comprehensive, and is in answer to a specific question in a specific context, but I’ve been asked to make the information public so it can be useful in a broader context. So here it is.

Since publishing yesterday’s post, I’ve had a lot of great comments, so I thought I’d write yet another post to answer them.

Off the back of yesterday’s post, I received a number of comments and questions around blind CFPs (Call For Papers - usually to get into a conference you submit to a CFP) for conferences. I often hear it said that a blind CFP will fix, or at least improve, the diversity imbalance at conferences.

I don’t believe this.

We work so hard to promote equality, to fight for the rights of people who are not middle-class white men, and time and again it just feels like we’re not getting anywhere. International Women’s Day highlights the issues that face women all around the world, and make our women-in-tech problem look like a genuine First World Problem, and yet we can’t even get that right.

Last month at Devoxx I was in a session discussing what we can do to encourage more diversity in our speakers (specifically, although not limited to, increasing the number of women speakers). I’m going to outline the things I remember being discussed, although as usual we did not find the answer to the problem, only identify some issues and explore some options. This is a very chaotic blog post, because if I don’t post it now I’ll never post it, and it’s better if my thoughts are scrawled down and posted than if this all goes to die in my drafts folder.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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….

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.

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.

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.

I was flattered to be interviewed for InfoQ at QCon London. It was a fun interview actually, and didn’t feel anything like the half an hour it actually took. In it, I get to talk about Agile at LMAX, the Disruptor (of course) and diversity in IT (again).

Just a quick note to say I was interviewed for another podcast (Update 2020: apparently no longer available), again to talk about all-female events. It’s only a short one and there’s probably not much in there that I haven’t said before, either on here or in person. From the 21st May, I’m at GOTO, both Copenhagen and Amsterdam. I’ll be talking about code & the Disruptor, thank goodness, and will be trying not to rant about the subject of women in technology.

This week’s BBC Outriders podcast features yours truly venting about The Subject That Won’t Go Away, Women in Technology. I was interviewed at Sunday’s Girl Geek conference, and got a chance to voice my opinions once again. For those who can’t be bothered to listen, they can probably be summarised as: There are genuine problems that face people in our industry, let’s talk about those that you have actually faced, not ones that you imagine exist.

Today I was at the Girl Geek Meetup conference. I didn’t advertise it much because I’ve said in the past I don’t really agree with women-only events, and actually I felt quite uncomfortable telling you guys I was going to be there, knowing the majority of my readers weren’t allowed to attend.

It’s probably worth explaining why I went, so a) I can give you guys and excuse but b) conference organisers can see what people like me are looking for in a conference.

If you have a Parleys subscription, you can watch the whole “Why we shouldn’t target women” panel from Devoxx 2011 a month or so ago. Watch me attempt to monopolise the whole panel as if it was my idea or something…

Tori Wieldt from the Oracle Technology Network interviewed me at Devoxx. Because I was there to be on the Why We Shouldn’t Target Women panel, the interview is just another platform for me to air my views on this subject again. Yes, I am actually wearing pink….

Panel with: Martijn Verburg; Regina ten Bruggencate; Trisha Gee; Antonio Goncalves; Claude Falguière; Kim Ross

I’m back from Devoxx, having had lots of food for thought. In particular, my panel on Why We Shouldn’t Target Women generated a lot of discussion and I’m still trying to process it all.

The panel went really well, we got decent interaction from the audience, and of course my fellow panel members were awesome. I managed to restrain myself from using the opportunity as my own personal soap box and allowed other people to speak occasionally. Sadly the only male on the panel stole the show somewhat, so Antonio won’t be invited in future… Actually in seriousness, it was great to have a guy on the panel to present his point of view. It was interesting that he’s a father, highlighting that parenting issues are not the same as women’s issues, and conflating those two concerns hurts both genders. But Antonio’s hair is far too shiny and pretty and he’s funnier than I am, so I’m not standing next to him again.

Stephan wearing the Brazilian flag at the opening keynote European conferences are different (and cool) because you get to hear even more languages spoken than you usually do in London (apparently the most diverse city in the world for spoken languages). I think the idea of a Paris Devoxx with 75% of the talks in French is brilliant - I’m always banging on about diversity, we shouldn’t expect developers to learn in English only.

“What… exactly… were you guys looking to get out of today’s event? Because…” “Because we’re girls?” “Um… yes…” Kim impetuously opts for The Truth: “We’re here to meet men.” Our interrogator looks round dubiously. “No, really, why are you here?” Phew. My reputation is intact1 Kim eloquently describes what her situation is as Product Manager and the criteria she’s measuring third party products against. I explain how LMAX aims to be the fastest retail exchange in the world, and therefore low latency is a tiny bit important to us.

It must be time for me to move on from talking about Java One, it has dominated my blog of late. But also I want to talk about JAX London from this week. But before I move on, it’s probably worth rounding off with the last two resources from the conference. 1) Martin Thompson and I are interviewed about the Disruptor winning the Duke Award (we come in halfway through):

I discovered, through the power of the search words that lead to my blog, that there was an incident at JavaOne that once again opens the can of worms that is Sexism In IT.

This Makes Me Sad. I had a really positive experience at JavaOne. In fact, I would say it was the one conference I’ve been to in the last 12 months where I felt like my gender wasn’t a problem - I even got away with wearing hotpants (tweed is business-casual, right??) without being mistaken for anything other than a developer.

…“what do female programmers look like”: Well, sometimes… If there are any girl programmers out there who are interested in being part of a montage showing who we are, I’d be dead (see what I did there…?) interested in putting us all on one page. And not just because I’m narcissistic. Although that helps.

Gah!! This is exactly what I was talking about - it’s pink, it mentions shoes, and it’s about as patronising as you can get.

Would the chart be different if your possible outcomes were Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Linus Torvalds? I bet for a start it wouldn’t mention Jimmy Choos or choice of handbags. And it probably wouldn’t be in baby blue either.

(First, let me say this post contains opinion, stereotyping and sweeping generalisations. But that’s sort of the point. Also I don’t pretend for one moment to speak for all girl programmers, I can only speak for myself)

When I first started this blog, I wanted to just post “proper” technical information. I wanted to prove that there are girls out there doing “real” programming.

I specifically didn’t want to talk about my gender. I wanted to prove by silence that gender is incidental to what I do.

But, it doesn’t really work that way, does it?

Firstly because one of the first things I get asked by guys when I meet them in this industry is “why aren’t there more girl programmers?” (that’s after they ask “do you work in HR?” followed by “are you a real programmer?” - I’m not joking, this happened this week).

I have not (yet) seen the presentation this post is referring to. But I think many of the comments Ted makes are very valid, and our industry as a whole should occasionally stop and think. I’ve seen Ted speak at QCon, and I’ve had a lot of time for his comments ever since. I’m aware that this blog is rapidly filling with comments about gender and perceptions and people-y stuff, when I originally wanted it to be a purely technical blog.

Let’s celebrate our IT women “Everyone” knows that there are more men than women in IT. That it’s a “boys” job. Not a lot of people know that the first programmer was a woman. Not a lot of people realise the number of women in IT is DECREASING. And has been since the 80s. In a working world where I honestly believe that in general there are more opportunities for women (OK, inline with the other stuff I’ve been reading I’ll caveat this with white, middle-class women), it seems shocking that such a growth industry as IT is actually losing women, and appears unable to determine why, or stop the flow.

I’m very interested in the subject of gender stereotyping, which probably isn’t surprising as I’m a girl in a predominantly male industry. And I like cars, and sports, and get irritated if people assume I’m not “allowed” to be interested in these things.

Far from being discriminated against, however, I find many people ask me why there aren’t more women in the industry and what can be done to encourage girls into IT. If these questions were easy to answer, they wouldn’t have to be asked.

Let’s celebrate our IT women “Everyone” knows that there are more men than women in IT. That it’s a “boys” job. Not a lot of people know that the first programmer was a woman. Not a lot of people realise the number of women in IT is DECREASING. And has been since the 80s. In a working world where I honestly believe that in general there are more opportunities for women (OK, inline with the other stuff I’ve been reading I’ll caveat this with white, middle-class women), it seems shocking that such a growth industry as IT is actually losing women, and appears unable to determine why, or stop the flow.

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).

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.

Resources for my “Is Groovy Better Than Java for Testing?” talk.

Setup required for the AngularJS/HTML5/Groovy/Java/MongoDB tutorial for QCon London 2015. Sign up with code SPEAKGEE100 for £100 off the price!

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.

Which is more readable?

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

or

releaseVersion = version[0..-10]

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wrote a piece for the Java Advent Blog, about how developers aren’t just communing with the computer, they also need to feel listened to by real human beings.

Read it here

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.

At LMAX we adopted Google Web Toolkit pretty early on. One of the motivations for using it was so we only had to worry about recruiting Java guys, and then we could all work on every part of the application including the web UI. Sure, you can learn a bunch of different skills if you want to, but it reduced context-switching and kept the skill set we were hiring for to a nice short list.

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.

At LMAX we adopted Google Web Toolkit pretty early on. One of the motivations for using it was so we only had to worry about recruiting Java guys, and then we could all work on every part of the application including the web UI. Sure, you can learn a bunch of different skills if you want to, but it reduced context-switching and kept the skill set we were hiring for to a nice short list.

Setup required for the AngularJS/HTML5/Groovy/Java/MongoDB tutorial for QCon London 2015. Sign up with code SPEAKGEE100 for £100 off the price!

I have been struggling with .NET. Actually, I have been fighting pitched battles with it.

All I want to do is take our existing Java client example code and write an equivalent in C#. Easy, right?

Trisha’s Guide to Converting Java to C#

Turns out writing the actual C# is relatively straightforward. Putting to one side the question of writing optimal code (these are very basic samples after all), to get the examples to compile and run was a simple process:

(Updated 15 Dec 2020 with correct completed status!) Investigate Maven 2 for builds Have a glance at TestNG unit testing (completed 2013) Potentially play with JMock for current testing framework (completed ~2009) Play with GWT. (completed 2009-2013) Sign up for Pragmatic Architect event Check out JavaBlackBelt site - what is provided, and what are the feelings of professionals (or, more importantly, recruiters) towards these qualifications? Look into getting Visual Studio .

Things I took out of QCon: I want to play with Ajax. Maybe I’ve “grown out” of front end development but that doesn’t prevent it from being (potentially) extremely cool Selenium looks like a good place to start for automated website testing It can take up to 7 years to move away from a legacy architecture. Depressing, but at least it shows it can be done and it’s worth the effort I’m going to become a certified Scrum Master Mistress.

Video and resources for the Update on IntelliJ IDEA talk from FOSDEM 2020.

Abstract

With releases of Java coming thick and fast every six months, it’s a full time job staying on top of the features. If your IDE can help you here, it’s one less thing to worry about. IntelliJ IDEA Community has three releases every year, each one improves the support for modern versions of Java, but that’s not the only thing on offer.

Join this session to see what’s new in IntelliJ IDEA Community (the free one!). This is not limited to just supporting new language features, which some of us might not get to use for ages, but better support for things developers do every day, and improved performance and stability, because an all-singing, all-dancing IDE is all well and good, but if it’s not usable those features mean nothing.

We should invest more time in the skill of reading code.

It’s exhausting staying up to date with the evolution of Java and the myriad other JVM languages. Is it worth it? What do modern languages give us?

How is Java 9 going to change the way developers work?

Looking ahead to what functionality is available in Java 9, and IntelliJ IDEA’s support (current and future) for it.

List of resources for those trying to make the switch from Eclipse to IntelliJ IDEA:

Apparently, I’m all about Continuous Learning - after I wrote the last post about IntelliJ Tips, I carried on through my trawl of the documentation and, of course, discovered a load more things I didn’t know. And this is all just in the Quick Start section!

So here’s the next batch (although once again I’m not sure how many are only applicable to IntelliJ 14). All shortcuts are for Windows unless otherwise stated, and Mac users should be able to replace the Ctrl key with Cmd in all these cases.

Day three of my brand new job - woohoo! One of my first tasks is checking the documentation of IntelliJ, since I’m already a “Power User”, to see if there’s stuff missing that someone like me might want to see. Firstly, a confession - I’m not sure I’ve actually read the IntelliJ documentation before. I mean, really read it. Of course, I’ve dipped into it when I needed to know something, I’ve searched for help with specific items, but like many developers, I tend to use something first rather than read the documentation first.

But I’ll tell you what, today I’ve learnt a whole bunch of useful things IntelliJ can do that I hadn’t previously known, and they’re the sorts of things you would only stumble over if a) you read the docs (pah!) or b) you watched someone else using the tool and saw them doing something you didn’t know was possible.

Just over two years ago, I embarked upon a journey as a developer / evangelist for a company who was then called 10gen (who got fed up of saying “the MongoDB people”, and transformed into MongoDB Inc). My goals for this role were: to learn what it was like working for a company that produced a technology product; to discover what impact working in an open source fashion has; and to level up my advocacy skills.

At GOTO Chicago, I was given the chance to chat a bit about the presentation I was giving, which happens to be the same one I’m giving at a number of conferences this year (although of course I’m evolving it as I go along).

While I was at QCon London, I was grabbed for an interview with InfoQ. It’s always a pleasure to be interviewed by Charles, I think he brings out the best in me. You can see the video here. At the start of the interview we refer to the first time we met, which, if you’re interested, you can also watch.

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.

I was flattered a couple of weeks ago to be interviewed by Google as part of their women techmaker’s series, as it moves over to Europe. In this video I talk about going to Mars, education, planning your career, being a developer, and the impact of technology on our lives. So, not much…

Yolande Poirier from OTN interviewed me at Devoxx about my new job at 10gen, Women in IT (bet that surprises you), how to be a role model, and Agile. Enjoy.

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!

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:

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)

I was flattered to be interviewed for InfoQ at QCon London. It was a fun interview actually, and didn’t feel anything like the half an hour it actually took. In it, I get to talk about Agile at LMAX, the Disruptor (of course) and diversity in IT (again).

Just a quick note to say I was interviewed for another podcast (Update 2020: apparently no longer available), again to talk about all-female events. It’s only a short one and there’s probably not much in there that I haven’t said before, either on here or in person. From the 21st May, I’m at GOTO, both Copenhagen and Amsterdam. I’ll be talking about code & the Disruptor, thank goodness, and will be trying not to rant about the subject of women in technology.

This week’s BBC Outriders podcast features yours truly venting about The Subject That Won’t Go Away, Women in Technology. I was interviewed at Sunday’s Girl Geek conference, and got a chance to voice my opinions once again. For those who can’t be bothered to listen, they can probably be summarised as: There are genuine problems that face people in our industry, let’s talk about those that you have actually faced, not ones that you imagine exist.

Tori Wieldt from the Oracle Technology Network interviewed me at Devoxx. Because I was there to be on the Why We Shouldn’t Target Women panel, the interview is just another platform for me to air my views on this subject again. Yes, I am actually wearing pink….

New versions of Java are coming out every 6 months now. What has changed, should we upgrade, and if so, how?

(Updated 3 Dec, 2020)

Video and resources for the Update on IntelliJ IDEA talk from FOSDEM 2020.

Abstract

With releases of Java coming thick and fast every six months, it’s a full time job staying on top of the features. If your IDE can help you here, it’s one less thing to worry about. IntelliJ IDEA Community has three releases every year, each one improves the support for modern versions of Java, but that’s not the only thing on offer.

Join this session to see what’s new in IntelliJ IDEA Community (the free one!). This is not limited to just supporting new language features, which some of us might not get to use for ages, but better support for things developers do every day, and improved performance and stability, because an all-singing, all-dancing IDE is all well and good, but if it’s not usable those features mean nothing.

We should invest more time in the skill of reading code.

It’s exhausting staying up to date with the evolution of Java and the myriad other JVM languages. Is it worth it? What do modern languages give us?

How is Java 9 going to change the way developers work?

Looking ahead to what functionality is available in Java 9, and IntelliJ IDEA’s support (current and future) for it.

Content and resources for the Code Review Matters and Manners talk, including links to additional information and supporting material.

• Understand how to improve performance with your Java code using Java 8 language features.
• Learn hands on techniques to discover and implement common Java 8 refactorings.
• Understand when you should and should not apply key refactorings in Java 8.

Last night was the final get-together to discuss the Java 8 MOOC. Any event hosted in August in a city that is regularly over 40°C is going to face challenges, so it was great that we had attendees from earlier sessions plus new people too.

As I mentioned last week, the Sevilla Java User Group is working towards completing the Java 8 MOOC on lambdas and streams. We’re running three sessions to share knowledge between people who are doing the course.

The Sevilla Java User Group is working together towards completing the Java 8 MOOC on lambdas and streams. As part of this, we’re running three sessions during the course so we can, as a group, ask questions about the lectures, get help with the homework, and (if we’re feeling very smart!) help people who may be struggling (or might not have watched the videos).

I was asked three simple questions about my thoughts on Java turning 20, and ended up writing a guest post for Voxxed. No wonder I can’t seem to find the time to write these days.

Resources for my “Is Groovy Better Than Java for Testing?” talk.

I think living in a beautiful city in a fantastic climate has its advantages. Not just the obvious ones, but we find people unusually keen to come and visit us on the pretence of presenting at the Sevilla Java User Group (and please, DO come and present at our JUG, we love visitors).

This week we were really lucky, we had Georges Saab and Aurelio Garcia-Ribeyro giving us an update on where Java is now and where it looks like it’s going in the future.

Setup required for the AngularJS/HTML5/Groovy/Java/MongoDB tutorial for QCon London 2015. Sign up with code SPEAKGEE100 for £100 off the price!

This year I’ve been giving an evolving live demonstration of coding a Fully Buzz Word Compliant, mobile-friendly web application. The aim of the demo is to show, via a real-world application rather than snippets or a toy example, where these popular technologies sit in your architecture, and how they interact with each other.

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:

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

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:

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.

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.

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

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.

Information related to the currently-ongoing effort to redesign the Java driver for MongoDB.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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”.

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.

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!

This month’s Java Magazine features an article by yours truly, which is yet another intro to the Disruptor. It’s basically a summary of the stuff I’ve written in this blog, updated for version 2.7 - so the names of the classes should be up to date and the responsibilities follow the simplified pattern we use now. If you were looking for an more recent version of my introduction blog posts, this article gives a reasonable overview.

Saturday was, hopefully, my last conference of the year. My lucky readers should start to see some posts which are not simply me gushing about another opportunity to hang out with awesome people and learn about interesting “stuff”.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at JAX London along with a number of the London Java Community regulars (Martijn/Ben/John/Sandro/Simon/Zoe I’m looking at you….)

My purpose for attending was largely to present the Hardcore Concurrency for Beginners talk that Mike and I debuted at an LJC event a few weeks back. Almost as important was catching up with the aforementioned LJCers and meeting with as many people as would talk to me. After the disappointment of the sessions at Java One, sitting in a room being talked at was quite low down on my list of priorities. Sometimes it’s nice to be wrong.

Last Tuesday Mike and I unveiled our brand shiny new presentation: Understanding the Disruptor, a Beginner’s Guide to Hardcore Concurrency. This was a preview of the talk we’ll be doing at JAX London on the 2nd November. A video of the session is available, as are the slides. I promise not to say “so” anywhere near as many times when I repeat my performance at JAX (is there anything more painful than watching yourself on video?

Here’s a photo of me representing LMAX as I pick up the Duke Award we won for the Disruptor (Thanks to Martijn for taking the photo)

So I’ve been at JavaOne for the better part of three days, it’s time to record some of my observations so far:

We are hiring! If you think we’re doing something interesting, or if you think you can help us do our thing even better, come join us. Your boss will be the dude who wrote Continuous Delivery, you’ll get a chance to experience what Danny calls meta-Agile (or Agile Agile), and you’ll really start to care about Domain-Driven Design. Ideally we’re after Java people, but at the heart of it we want people who are dead passionate about development.

Martin recently announced version 2.0 of the Disruptor - basically there have been so many changes since we first open-sourced it that it’s time to mark that officially. His post goes over all the changes, the aim of this article is to attempt to translate my previous blog posts into new-world-speak, since it’s going to take a long time to re-write each of them all over again. Now I see the disadvantage of hand-drawing everything.

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.

We mention the phrase Mechanical Sympathy quite a lot, in fact it’s even Martin’s blog title. It’s about understanding how the underlying hardware operates and programming in a way that works with that, not against it.

We get a number of comments and questions about the mysterious cache line padding in the RingBuffer, and I referred to it in the last post. Since this lends itself to pretty pictures, it’s the next thing I thought I would tackle.

Martin Fowler has written a really good article describing not only the Disruptor, but also how it fits into the architecture at LMAX. This gives some of the context that has been missing so far, but the most frequently asked question is still “What is the Disruptor?”.

I’m working up to answering that. I’m currently on question number two: “Why is it so fast?”.

So now I’ve covered the ring buffer itself, reading from it and writing to it.

Logically the next thing to do is to wire everything up together.

I talked about multiple producers - they have the producer barrier to keep them in order and under control. I’ve talked about consumers in a simple situation. Multiple consumers can get a little more involved. We’ve done some clever stuff to allow the consumers to be dependent on each other and the ring buffer. Like a lot of applications, we have a pipeline of things that need to happen before we can actually get on with the business logic - for example, we need to make sure the messages have been journalled to disk before we can do anything.

The Disruptor paper and the performance tests cover some basic configurations that you might want. I’m going to go over the most interesting one, mostly because I needed the practice with the graphics tablet.

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.

The next in the series of understanding the Disruptor pattern developed at LMAX.

After the last post we all understand ring buffers and how awesome they are. Unfortunately for you, I have not said anything about how to actually populate them or read from them when you’re using the Disruptor.

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 heart of the pattern, the clever bit about the Disruptor is controlling access to it.

I have been struggling with .NET. Actually, I have been fighting pitched battles with it.

All I want to do is take our existing Java client example code and write an equivalent in C#. Easy, right?

Trisha’s Guide to Converting Java to C#

Turns out writing the actual C# is relatively straightforward. Putting to one side the question of writing optimal code (these are very basic samples after all), to get the examples to compile and run was a simple process:

As an associate member of the London Java Community (LJC), I’m very pleased with the news that we won an Open seat on the Java SE/EE executive committee. The results show that we got an astonishing 47.5% of the vote - if an MP got voted in with that percentage the newspapers would probably be using the word “landslide”. It’s quite exciting to be one of the two user groups involved.

At LMAX we adopted Google Web Toolkit pretty early on. One of the motivations for using it was so we only had to worry about recruiting Java guys, and then we could all work on every part of the application including the web UI. Sure, you can learn a bunch of different skills if you want to, but it reduced context-switching and kept the skill set we were hiring for to a nice short list.

Today I would like to document my experiences implementing caching with Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) and annotations.

When I first started playing with Java 1.5, I thought generics were the best thing since sliced bread. No more untidy casting, lovely type-safe Collections, and when combined with the new for loop, a lot of the tedious tasks associated with Collections became easier and, most importantly, aesthetically pleasing.

Content and resources for the Java 8 in Anger presentation.

This vJUG video of Java 8 in Anger shows the Java 8 version of this talk in its clearest form. Here I also have links to other material I’ve published on this topic, and to the resources I used to create the code.

In 2016 this talk has evolved to also contain some Java 9 features too, and the latest version even shows how to use TDD to help figure out which stream operations you need. The video of the latest version is not yet available.

Last night was the final get-together to discuss the Java 8 MOOC. Any event hosted in August in a city that is regularly over 40°C is going to face challenges, so it was great that we had attendees from earlier sessions plus new people too.

As I mentioned last week, the Sevilla Java User Group is working towards completing the Java 8 MOOC on lambdas and streams. We’re running three sessions to share knowledge between people who are doing the course.

The Sevilla Java User Group is working together towards completing the Java 8 MOOC on lambdas and streams. As part of this, we’re running three sessions during the course so we can, as a group, ask questions about the lectures, get help with the homework, and (if we’re feeling very smart!) help people who may be struggling (or might not have watched the videos).

I think living in a beautiful city in a fantastic climate has its advantages. Not just the obvious ones, but we find people unusually keen to come and visit us on the pretence of presenting at the Sevilla Java User Group (and please, DO come and present at our JUG, we love visitors).

This week we were really lucky, we had Georges Saab and Aurelio Garcia-Ribeyro giving us an update on where Java is now and where it looks like it’s going in the future.

While I was at QCon London, I was grabbed for an interview with InfoQ. It’s always a pleasure to be interviewed by Charles, I think he brings out the best in me. You can see the video here. At the start of the interview we refer to the first time we met, which, if you’re interested, you can also watch.

How is Java 9 going to change the way developers work?

Looking ahead to what functionality is available in Java 9, and IntelliJ IDEA’s support (current and future) for it.

Spring Framework 5 brings full reactive support to developers everywhere. What better way to demo reactive programming than to actually build something live? Trisha will live code an end-to-end application using Spring Framework 5, Spring Boot, Reactor, Kotlin, JavaFX, and maybe even some MongoDB, all built using IntelliJ IDEA. During this session, we’ll see how these different components can work together really easily using Spring. What could possibly go wrong?

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.

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.

It must be time for me to move on from talking about Java One, it has dominated my blog of late. But also I want to talk about JAX London from this week. But before I move on, it’s probably worth rounding off with the last two resources from the conference. 1) Martin Thompson and I are interviewed about the Disruptor winning the Duke Award (we come in halfway through):

I discovered, through the power of the search words that lead to my blog, that there was an incident at JavaOne that once again opens the can of worms that is Sexism In IT.

This Makes Me Sad. I had a really positive experience at JavaOne. In fact, I would say it was the one conference I’ve been to in the last 12 months where I felt like my gender wasn’t a problem - I even got away with wearing hotpants (tweed is business-casual, right??) without being mistaken for anything other than a developer.

Having been back in London for a few days I’ve had some time to digest the madness that was last week.

My lasting impression of JavaOne is almost entirely positive. Granted, it was my first major conference, so maybe I’m just not jaded yet. But let me tell you what I loved about it (yes, I did cover some of these in my last post):

Here’s a photo of me representing LMAX as I pick up the Duke Award we won for the Disruptor (Thanks to Martijn for taking the photo)

So I’ve been at JavaOne for the better part of three days, it’s time to record some of my observations so far:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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….

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.

At JAX London Mike and I presented “Understanding the Disruptor - A Beginner’s Guide to Hardcore Concurrency”. This is the session we initially previewed to the London Java Community a few weeks earlier. The content is the same, but the feel of the presentation was quite different to us - the venue for the LJC event was more intimate, and it was easier to interact with the audience. At JAX, we were up on stage, which was pretty cool actually, but meant that it felt more like a lecture and it was less easy to connect with the audience.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at JAX London along with a number of the London Java Community regulars (Martijn/Ben/John/Sandro/Simon/Zoe I’m looking at you….)

My purpose for attending was largely to present the Hardcore Concurrency for Beginners talk that Mike and I debuted at an LJC event a few weeks back. Almost as important was catching up with the aforementioned LJCers and meeting with as many people as would talk to me. After the disappointment of the sessions at Java One, sitting in a room being talked at was quite low down on my list of priorities. Sometimes it’s nice to be wrong.

Having been back in London for a few days I’ve had some time to digest the madness that was last week.

My lasting impression of JavaOne is almost entirely positive. Granted, it was my first major conference, so maybe I’m just not jaded yet. But let me tell you what I loved about it (yes, I did cover some of these in my last post):

Remember a while back I talked about my first public appearance? Well, I chased down the video, because I’m masochistic, and here it is for you all to enjoy. Pleasingly my mannerisms are slightly less of a camp man trapped in a woman’s body, which was my impression the last time I saw myself presenting. It helps that YouTube has made the video so dark you can’t see me.

Mandatory initial exclamation about how little I have blogged here lately. Over a year without updates, oh dear! But a) I have been blogging quite a lot for the IntelliJ IDEA and Upsource blogs, and b) I had another baby, which kept me quite busy.

So on that topic (more or less) I get a lot of questions about my job: what’s involved in the job, what’s it like working for JetBrains, what does a Developer Advocate do, what’s it like working remotely etc etc. Given I also rather generously¹ recently offered to answer people’s questions about my job, I thought the most scalable way was to write-once-read-many, i.e. write it in a single blog post for everyone to read.

Just over two years ago, I embarked upon a journey as a developer / evangelist for a company who was then called 10gen (who got fed up of saying “the MongoDB people”, and transformed into MongoDB Inc). My goals for this role were: to learn what it was like working for a company that produced a technology product; to discover what impact working in an open source fashion has; and to level up my advocacy skills.

Since I have a tendency to bang on every now and again about how we, as developers, could do better in managing our careers (for example, by creating CVs that don’t suck, and by staying ahead of the curve), Dave Thomas asked me to speak for a mere 50 minutes on the subject at GOTO Aarhus, a talk I wasn’t enormously happy with as there was no way to cover a lifetime of hard-fought experience in such a short time.

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

When you’re applying for a job at LMAX, your CV (or résumé, for our American readers) usually comes through me and I decide whether to call you for a technical phone screen.

I’m going to let you into a secret.

We are hiring! If you think we’re doing something interesting, or if you think you can help us do our thing even better, come join us. Your boss will be the dude who wrote Continuous Delivery, you’ll get a chance to experience what Danny calls meta-Agile (or Agile Agile), and you’ll really start to care about Domain-Driven Design. Ideally we’re after Java people, but at the heart of it we want people who are dead passionate about development.

I’ve learnt a lot professionally and personally during my time here in New York, but the time has come to go back “home”.I’ll be relocating to London in September. I guess it won’t hurt to mention on here that I’ll be looking for an exciting new job when I get back there. Check out my LinkedIn profile if you are in the market for a Java tech team lead.

Last Thursday I was fortunate enough to get a place on the FogBugz and Kiln World Tour. I booked it before I moved jobs, and I’ll be honest I had no real interest in the software. I’ve been reading Joel’s books and blogs since my friend Brent bought me Joel on Software and made me read it (he had the foresight to know I’d want to hang on to his copy if he’d lent it to me!). I wanted to see the man in the flesh and hear what he had to say about his software. Because really, do we honestly need yet another bug-tracking / project-management tool?

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.

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.

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

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:

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.

This is just a summary of the points I took from the Lean conference at Bletchley. They all need expanding, this is just the stuff that struck me that I want to record.

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.

Spring Framework 5 brings full reactive support to developers everywhere. What better way to demo reactive programming than to actually build something live? Trisha will live code an end-to-end application using Spring Framework 5, Spring Boot, Reactor, Kotlin, JavaFX, and maybe even some MongoDB, all built using IntelliJ IDEA. During this session, we’ll see how these different components can work together really easily using Spring. What could possibly go wrong?

It’s exhausting staying up to date with the evolution of Java and the myriad other JVM languages. Is it worth it? What do modern languages give us?

This is just a summary of the points I took from the Lean conference at Bletchley. They all need expanding, this is just the stuff that struck me that I want to record.

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:

Information related to the currently-ongoing effort to redesign the Java driver for MongoDB.

As I constantly talk about in my how-to-get-more-women-into-technology talks, we, the developers, the people who do this job, need to get out there and tell people what’s so great about what we do.

A hastily thrown-together list of some of the places to get more information on how to write performant code.

Just a quick note to say I was interviewed for another podcast (Update 2020: apparently no longer available), again to talk about all-female events. It’s only a short one and there’s probably not much in there that I haven’t said before, either on here or in person. From the 21st May, I’m at GOTO, both Copenhagen and Amsterdam. I’ll be talking about code & the Disruptor, thank goodness, and will be trying not to rant about the subject of women in technology.

Tori Wieldt from the Oracle Technology Network interviewed me at Devoxx. Because I was there to be on the Why We Shouldn’t Target Women panel, the interview is just another platform for me to air my views on this subject again. Yes, I am actually wearing pink….

Last Tuesday Mike and I unveiled our brand shiny new presentation: Understanding the Disruptor, a Beginner’s Guide to Hardcore Concurrency. This was a preview of the talk we’ll be doing at JAX London on the 2nd November. A video of the session is available, as are the slides. I promise not to say “so” anywhere near as many times when I repeat my performance at JAX (is there anything more painful than watching yourself on video?

Remember I posted about having to write .NET? Well, the code and the tutorial are available for you, my lucky readers, to rip to pieces view. I am not the only person responsible for this code though, so be kind.

I’m honoured to now be listed on three aggregated blog feeds: The new and somewhat embryonic blogs.lmax.com. The London Java Community Aggrity. ThoughtWorks Alumni, along with a whole host of distinguished names. The pressure’s on to try and write useful stuff. Oh OK, I’ll settle for “entertaining”.

I have not (yet) seen the presentation this post is referring to. But I think many of the comments Ted makes are very valid, and our industry as a whole should occasionally stop and think. I’ve seen Ted speak at QCon, and I’ve had a lot of time for his comments ever since. I’m aware that this blog is rapidly filling with comments about gender and perceptions and people-y stuff, when I originally wanted it to be a purely technical blog.

…in fact, it’s actually a good thing.

Having experienced Flaccid Scrum, I find this article interesting, and agree with most of it. I’d also like to add though, that if you do the scrum practices (story cards, stand ups, retrospectives, etc) but don’t buy into the fundamental principals, you will not succeed. And that means everyone on the team, not just the people in charge. In particular, if the team is not empowered, is not committing to the estimates and the iteration plan in its heart, and and does not trust, then you are probably better off using traditional processes.

Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy

I’m very interested in the subject of gender stereotyping, which probably isn’t surprising as I’m a girl in a predominantly male industry. And I like cars, and sports, and get irritated if people assume I’m not “allowed” to be interested in these things.

Far from being discriminated against, however, I find many people ask me why there aren’t more women in the industry and what can be done to encourage girls into IT. If these questions were easy to answer, they wouldn’t have to be asked.

This is a great example of what happens when you try to incentivise intelligent people on very simple metrics. They cheat. This was well described in Freakonomics, and something Mr On Software bangs on about regularly. It’s clear that there isn’t really a good answer to the problem - actually that’s not true. The answer to the problem is to have everyone working in a job they are happy in and proud of, one where they are intrinsically motivated, and give them enough information to allow them to make the correct calls when it comes to prioritising work.

This is a bloody good idea. It builds upon my own Virgoen tendancies to write lists and tick things off, but what the list model lacks is the “in progress” state. Plus occasionally my lists get confused. See today’s notebook page:

I might be too late in writing my own thoughts on QCon, but a bunch of other people have done a pretty good job.

From spellfecker today: Certifiction (n.) : a professional endorsement which states only that the holder had the money to pay for the exam. …which reminded me of this debate, particularly the first comment.

…there are a number of points in this interview with Paul Oldfield which are interesting to consider when thinking about “doing Agile right”. It seems to be compatible with my “people over process” view - I’m not stating that having good people negates the need for any form of process or discipline, I have seen that this is simply not the case. I do however think that agile techniques in particular rely heavily upon the “right” people / team, for some nebulous definition of “right”.

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….

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.

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.

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:

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.

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:

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.

A few weeks ago, I presented my new “User’s Guide to the Disruptor” talk to the London Java Community. Since it was very kindly hosted at Skillsmatter, there is a video of the presentation available, and the slides are below.

Saturday was, hopefully, my last conference of the year. My lucky readers should start to see some posts which are not simply me gushing about another opportunity to hang out with awesome people and learn about interesting “stuff”.

Stephan wearing the Brazilian flag at the opening keynote European conferences are different (and cool) because you get to hear even more languages spoken than you usually do in London (apparently the most diverse city in the world for spoken languages). I think the idea of a Paris Devoxx with 75% of the talks in French is brilliant - I’m always banging on about diversity, we shouldn’t expect developers to learn in English only.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at JAX London along with a number of the London Java Community regulars (Martijn/Ben/John/Sandro/Simon/Zoe I’m looking at you….)

My purpose for attending was largely to present the Hardcore Concurrency for Beginners talk that Mike and I debuted at an LJC event a few weeks back. Almost as important was catching up with the aforementioned LJCers and meeting with as many people as would talk to me. After the disappointment of the sessions at Java One, sitting in a room being talked at was quite low down on my list of priorities. Sometimes it’s nice to be wrong.

Last Tuesday Mike and I unveiled our brand shiny new presentation: Understanding the Disruptor, a Beginner’s Guide to Hardcore Concurrency. This was a preview of the talk we’ll be doing at JAX London on the 2nd November. A video of the session is available, as are the slides. I promise not to say “so” anywhere near as many times when I repeat my performance at JAX (is there anything more painful than watching yourself on video?

Having been back in London for a few days I’ve had some time to digest the madness that was last week.

My lasting impression of JavaOne is almost entirely positive. Granted, it was my first major conference, so maybe I’m just not jaded yet. But let me tell you what I loved about it (yes, I did cover some of these in my last post):

So, I’m off to JavaOne next week! This is an unexpected and very pleasant surprise. I’ll be there with Martin (of the Disruptor fame), and Martijn (that’s not going to get confusing at all). Martin will be talking about the Disruptor on Thursday, and Martijn is busy talking about… everything. Most importantly for the LJC he’s representing us in our shiny new JCP Executive Committee role. I’m really looking forward to meeting pretty much anyone and everyone who’ll talk to me.

Remember a while back I talked about my first public appearance? Well, I chased down the video, because I’m masochistic, and here it is for you all to enjoy. Pleasingly my mannerisms are slightly less of a camp man trapped in a woman’s body, which was my impression the last time I saw myself presenting. It helps that YouTube has made the video so dark you can’t see me.

I nominated LMAX for a couple of JAX Innovation Awards, but unfortunately we did not get shortlisted :( However, the London Java Community did! So if you have a second please vote for the LJC for Top Java Ambassador

I’m finally moving up from working behind the scenes to actually doing a (short) presentation for the LJC. I’m going to be giving a lightning talk on Wednesday at the AWS Elastic Beanstalk event, on the JCP - what it is and what our election to the executive committee means. Ben and Martin’s post gives a little more background on the subject. Another LMAX LJC member Mike will also be giving a lightning talk, on Project Coin.

I’m honoured to now be listed on three aggregated blog feeds: The new and somewhat embryonic blogs.lmax.com. The London Java Community Aggrity. ThoughtWorks Alumni, along with a whole host of distinguished names. The pressure’s on to try and write useful stuff. Oh OK, I’ll settle for “entertaining”.

As an associate member of the London Java Community (LJC), I’m very pleased with the news that we won an Open seat on the Java SE/EE executive committee. The results show that we got an astonishing 47.5% of the vote - if an MP got voted in with that percentage the newspapers would probably be using the word “landslide”. It’s quite exciting to be one of the two user groups involved.

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.

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.

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.

I’m late with my write-up of QCon, and what’s worse, it will be partial - “sadly” I was in Lanzarote on a training week with the running club from the Thursday (8th) so I missed most of it. A sacrifice I had to make for 7 days in the sunshine…

When you’re applying for a job at LMAX, your CV (or résumé, for our American readers) usually comes through me and I decide whether to call you for a technical phone screen.

I’m going to let you into a secret.

“What… exactly… were you guys looking to get out of today’s event? Because…” “Because we’re girls?” “Um… yes…” Kim impetuously opts for The Truth: “We’re here to meet men.” Our interrogator looks round dubiously. “No, really, why are you here?” Phew. My reputation is intact1 Kim eloquently describes what her situation is as Product Manager and the criteria she’s measuring third party products against. I explain how LMAX aims to be the fastest retail exchange in the world, and therefore low latency is a tiny bit important to us.

Here’s a photo of me representing LMAX as I pick up the Duke Award we won for the Disruptor (Thanks to Martijn for taking the photo)

So I’ve been at JavaOne for the better part of three days, it’s time to record some of my observations so far:

So, I’m off to JavaOne next week! This is an unexpected and very pleasant surprise. I’ll be there with Martin (of the Disruptor fame), and Martijn (that’s not going to get confusing at all). Martin will be talking about the Disruptor on Thursday, and Martijn is busy talking about… everything. Most importantly for the LJC he’s representing us in our shiny new JCP Executive Committee role. I’m really looking forward to meeting pretty much anyone and everyone who’ll talk to me.

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.

We mention the phrase Mechanical Sympathy quite a lot, in fact it’s even Martin’s blog title. It’s about understanding how the underlying hardware operates and programming in a way that works with that, not against it.

We get a number of comments and questions about the mysterious cache line padding in the RingBuffer, and I referred to it in the last post. Since this lends itself to pretty pictures, it’s the next thing I thought I would tackle.

Martin Fowler has written a really good article describing not only the Disruptor, but also how it fits into the architecture at LMAX. This gives some of the context that has been missing so far, but the most frequently asked question is still “What is the Disruptor?”.

I’m working up to answering that. I’m currently on question number two: “Why is it so fast?”.

So now I’ve covered the ring buffer itself, reading from it and writing to it.

Logically the next thing to do is to wire everything up together.

I talked about multiple producers - they have the producer barrier to keep them in order and under control. I’ve talked about consumers in a simple situation. Multiple consumers can get a little more involved. We’ve done some clever stuff to allow the consumers to be dependent on each other and the ring buffer. Like a lot of applications, we have a pipeline of things that need to happen before we can actually get on with the business logic - for example, we need to make sure the messages have been journalled to disk before we can do anything.

The Disruptor paper and the performance tests cover some basic configurations that you might want. I’m going to go over the most interesting one, mostly because I needed the practice with the graphics tablet.

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.

The next in the series of understanding the Disruptor pattern developed at LMAX.

After the last post we all understand ring buffers and how awesome they are. Unfortunately for you, I have not said anything about how to actually populate them or read from them when you’re using the Disruptor.

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 heart of the pattern, the clever bit about the Disruptor is controlling access to it.

On Wednesday I tagged along to the STAC London Summit to provide backup for Mike, who was on the “The Future of Messaging Middleware” panel.

The panel consisted of two messaging providers, one hardware (Solace Systems) and one software (29West/Informatica), and two “users”, Citihub and LMAX. Obviously both providers were arguing that theirs was the best solution. But what I found interesting is that I came away with the impression that everyone was really on the same side - everyone wants to use or to provide the best system, but there are different approaches. Which one you adopt is likely to be influenced by how your team work and the hardware you have (or can obtain).

I’m honoured to now be listed on three aggregated blog feeds: The new and somewhat embryonic blogs.lmax.com. The London Java Community Aggrity. ThoughtWorks Alumni, along with a whole host of distinguished names. The pressure’s on to try and write useful stuff. Oh OK, I’ll settle for “entertaining”.

I have been struggling with .NET. Actually, I have been fighting pitched battles with it.

All I want to do is take our existing Java client example code and write an equivalent in C#. Easy, right?

Trisha’s Guide to Converting Java to C#

Turns out writing the actual C# is relatively straightforward. Putting to one side the question of writing optimal code (these are very basic samples after all), to get the examples to compile and run was a simple process:

I attended TradeTech last week, an annual event about Equities and Derivatives trading. I assumed from the title that there would be a reasonable focus on technology, but I found it was more “Trade” and less “Tech”.

At LMAX we adopted Google Web Toolkit pretty early on. One of the motivations for using it was so we only had to worry about recruiting Java guys, and then we could all work on every part of the application including the web UI. Sure, you can learn a bunch of different skills if you want to, but it reduced context-switching and kept the skill set we were hiring for to a nice short list.

We went live with ‘real’ customers this week just gone. It’s the culmination of nearly two years work for me personally, and three years for our company. It’s really nice to be live at last, and to have our name out there. It might (in fact, should) change the focus of our work. Without paying customers it’s much more difficult to prioritise work based on what they might need or want.

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.

I’m late with my write-up of QCon, and what’s worse, it will be partial - “sadly” I was in Lanzarote on a training week with the running club from the Thursday (8th) so I missed most of it. A sacrifice I had to make for 7 days in the sunshine…

And now, a post for my long-neglected, less technical readers.

I took a week off in July to try and avoid that Oh My God I Missed Summer Again feeling. Granted, it’s easy to get that in the UK even if you’re not stuck in an office the entire time.

Really this is just an excuse to post some photos on the blog.

Today, I found this blog post very useful.

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.

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.

We mention the phrase Mechanical Sympathy quite a lot, in fact it’s even Martin’s blog title. It’s about understanding how the underlying hardware operates and programming in a way that works with that, not against it.

We get a number of comments and questions about the mysterious cache line padding in the RingBuffer, and I referred to it in the last post. Since this lends itself to pretty pictures, it’s the next thing I thought I would tackle.

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?

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)

This is a great example of what happens when you try to incentivise intelligent people on very simple metrics. They cheat. This was well described in Freakonomics, and something Mr On Software bangs on about regularly. It’s clear that there isn’t really a good answer to the problem - actually that’s not true. The answer to the problem is to have everyone working in a job they are happy in and proud of, one where they are intrinsically motivated, and give them enough information to allow them to make the correct calls when it comes to prioritising work.

Setup required for the AngularJS/HTML5/Groovy/Java/MongoDB tutorial for QCon London 2015. Sign up with code SPEAKGEE100 for £100 off the price!

Just over two years ago, I embarked upon a journey as a developer / evangelist for a company who was then called 10gen (who got fed up of saying “the MongoDB people”, and transformed into MongoDB Inc). My goals for this role were: to learn what it was like working for a company that produced a technology product; to discover what impact working in an open source fashion has; and to level up my advocacy skills.

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

This year I’ve been giving an evolving live demonstration of coding a Fully Buzz Word Compliant, mobile-friendly web application. The aim of the demo is to show, via a real-world application rather than snippets or a toy example, where these popular technologies sit in your architecture, and how they interact with each other.

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.

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:

YOW recorded me, yet again, talking about the adventure that is the design of the new Java Driver for MongoDB. This is the same talk I gave at GeeCON and DevoxxUK, with some updates based on our Journey So Far. In it, I cover the architecture of the new driver and some of our current thoughts around where we want the API to go.

While I was at QCon London, I was grabbed for an interview with InfoQ. It’s always a pleasure to be interviewed by Charles, I think he brings out the best in me. You can see the video here. At the start of the interview we refer to the first time we met, which, if you’re interested, you can also watch.

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.

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.

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

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….

Brief guide to running the MongoDB tutorial from QCon London and JAX London.

Information related to the currently-ongoing effort to redesign the Java driver for MongoDB.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And now, a post for my long-neglected, less technical readers.

I took a week off in July to try and avoid that Oh My God I Missed Summer Again feeling. Granted, it’s easy to get that in the UK even if you’re not stuck in an office the entire time.

Really this is just an excuse to post some photos on the blog.

Living and working in central London, you quickly learn that the fastest way around town is to cycle.

My extensive research into this activity has shown there are a number of different cycling tribes. Of course, I have split them into the two groups that are most appropriate to me: 1) slower than me and 2) faster than me. You can probably tell what sort of a cyclist I am by my attitude to the two groups.

Isn’t a shame that actual day-to-day work always seems to get in the way of progress? How you’re always too busy fire-fighting to actually perform the critical thing that might actually improve affairs. All this is basically a setup for a roundabout excuse for why this blog has been neglected so shortly after it was begun. I was a bit too busy doing the day job. Still, people like Joel and Scott manage regular pronouncements and I’m sure they’re much busier than I!

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.

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.

After the acquisition of a company with offices in New York, I pestered my company outrageously until they got fed up and finally relented – they agreed to send me to the US.

To ease the transition, I chose to move onto a project which would allow me to start working in London and continue on the same team after I had moved to New York.

In the extreme over-excitement that followed my relocation, it took me a little while to realise that effectively I was an offshore resource, no different really from any of our Indian test team, and the team needed to manage this appropriately.

I learnt a number of lessons whilst playing this game. Some of these points are also valid for teams with remote resources (e.g. people working from home).

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.

I wrote a piece for the Java Advent Blog, about how developers aren’t just communing with the computer, they also need to feel listened to by real human beings.

Read it here

After attending a number of conferences and events, and performing numerous interviews, I’m starting to hear the same things again and again. Since Dan North challenged all my assumptions at QCon, I’m reluctant to outright ridicule them, but I will put forward my personal opinion.

Note: these are things I have heard from multiple sources, so with any luck I am not breaking the sanctity of the confessional interview.

Having been back in London for a few days I’ve had some time to digest the madness that was last week.

My lasting impression of JavaOne is almost entirely positive. Granted, it was my first major conference, so maybe I’m just not jaded yet. But let me tell you what I loved about it (yes, I did cover some of these in my last post):

(First, let me say this post contains opinion, stereotyping and sweeping generalisations. But that’s sort of the point. Also I don’t pretend for one moment to speak for all girl programmers, I can only speak for myself)

When I first started this blog, I wanted to just post “proper” technical information. I wanted to prove that there are girls out there doing “real” programming.

I specifically didn’t want to talk about my gender. I wanted to prove by silence that gender is incidental to what I do.

But, it doesn’t really work that way, does it?

Firstly because one of the first things I get asked by guys when I meet them in this industry is “why aren’t there more girl programmers?” (that’s after they ask “do you work in HR?” followed by “are you a real programmer?” - I’m not joking, this happened this week).

I think living in a beautiful city in a fantastic climate has its advantages. Not just the obvious ones, but we find people unusually keen to come and visit us on the pretence of presenting at the Sevilla Java User Group (and please, DO come and present at our JUG, we love visitors).

This week we were really lucky, we had Georges Saab and Aurelio Garcia-Ribeyro giving us an update on where Java is now and where it looks like it’s going in the future.

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.

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.

Information related to the currently-ongoing effort to redesign the Java driver for MongoDB.

As I constantly talk about in my how-to-get-more-women-into-technology talks, we, the developers, the people who do this job, need to get out there and tell people what’s so great about what we do.

A hastily thrown-together list of some of the places to get more information on how to write performant code.

Last week I went to get my hair cut (yes, sorry, this is a story about hair). I had thought long and hard about what I wanted. I researched, checked styles online, and bought a magazine so I could show my hairdresser exactly what I was after and there would be no confusion. I was determined I would not be spending that ridiculous amount of money on something I was not going to be happy with. I was even bold enough to ask for some changes to it at the end, which I have never ever had the courage to do before.

• Understand how to improve performance with your Java code using Java 8 language features.
• Learn hands on techniques to discover and implement common Java 8 refactorings.
• Understand when you should and should not apply key refactorings in Java 8.

A hastily thrown-together list of some of the places to get more information on how to write performant code.

And now, after an absence of several weeks, you get to see how long it takes me to write some of these posts.

I was putting up the Christmas decorations one Saturday when my worst fear was realised¹ - one of my three strings of lights was not working.

The first two went up fine. The third lit up when I plugged it in, and in less than a second went out. Curses. This is not what I wanted, this was supposed to be a short exercise in making my tiny little flat look festive.

So I set about the tedious task of starting from the end closest to the plug and replacing every bulb, one by one, with a spare one to see if it magically lit up again. When it doesn’t, you take the spare back out and replace it with the original bulb. I remember my parents going through this ritual every Christmas, the tediousness of this activity is more memorable than the fleeting joy of shinies.

I’ve had a fantastic week of meeting with colleagues and friends, getting to know some of my organisation, brainstorming ideas for next year, working out how to prioritise and plan, being handed greater responsibility and freedom…

Right so yes. 2020, hello. One of my 2020 resolutions is to get back to my personal blog. Weekly. Yeah right. Let’s aim for weekly and be happy with monthly.

For my first post let’s do the obligatory look-back-over-last-year. Not because it’s trendy (I’m 41 now, I don’t care about being trendy any more), but because it’s super important for me to understand what I went through and what I achieved last year (every year), otherwise I get caught up in the hamster-wheel of the-next-thing-and-the-next-thing-and-the-next-thing. Progress should be celebrated, not just ignored for the next item on the ever growing, ever pressing TODO list. Also, looking back helps me to plan the next year. Doesn’t have to be super-planned, but setting some goals, objectives, ideas for which direction I’d prefer to go in helps me decide how to prioritise that ever-growing, ever-pressing TODO list.

And now, a post for my long-neglected, less technical readers.

I took a week off in July to try and avoid that Oh My God I Missed Summer Again feeling. Granted, it’s easy to get that in the UK even if you’re not stuck in an office the entire time.

Really this is just an excuse to post some photos on the blog.

…“what do female programmers look like”: Well, sometimes… If there are any girl programmers out there who are interested in being part of a montage showing who we are, I’d be dead (see what I did there…?) interested in putting us all on one page. And not just because I’m narcissistic. Although that helps.

This article was originally a guest post for FogBugz.

As developers, we all know that code reviews are a good thing in theory. They should help us:

• Find bugs and security issues early
• Improve the readability of our code
• Provide a safety net to ensure all tasks are fully completed

The reality is that code reviews can frequently be an uncomfortable experience for everyone involved, leading to reviews that are combative, ineffective, or even worse, simply not happening.

Here is a quick guide to help you to create an effective code review process.

How do you keep your skills up to date in this fast-moving and turbulant industry?

Content and resources for the Code Review Matters and Manners talk, including links to additional information and supporting material.

Resources for my “Is Groovy Better Than Java for Testing?” talk.

Last Thursday I gave a keynote at GOTO Berlin to address the problems of deciding how to learn a new technology/framework/process (Spoiler Alert: it’s not by putting it into production).

This year I’ve been giving an evolving live demonstration of coding a Fully Buzz Word Compliant, mobile-friendly web application. The aim of the demo is to show, via a real-world application rather than snippets or a toy example, where these popular technologies sit in your architecture, and how they interact with each other.

YOW recorded me, yet again, talking about the adventure that is the design of the new Java Driver for MongoDB. This is the same talk I gave at GeeCON and DevoxxUK, with some updates based on our Journey So Far. In it, I cover the architecture of the new driver and some of our current thoughts around where we want the API to go.

Since I have a tendency to bang on every now and again about how we, as developers, could do better in managing our careers (for example, by creating CVs that don’t suck, and by staying ahead of the curve), Dave Thomas asked me to speak for a mere 50 minutes on the subject at GOTO Aarhus, a talk I wasn’t enormously happy with as there was no way to cover a lifetime of hard-fought experience in such a short time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

A few weeks ago, I presented my new “User’s Guide to the Disruptor” talk to the London Java Community. Since it was very kindly hosted at Skillsmatter, there is a video of the presentation available, and the slides are below.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at JAX London along with a number of the London Java Community regulars (Martijn/Ben/John/Sandro/Simon/Zoe I’m looking at you….)

My purpose for attending was largely to present the Hardcore Concurrency for Beginners talk that Mike and I debuted at an LJC event a few weeks back. Almost as important was catching up with the aforementioned LJCers and meeting with as many people as would talk to me. After the disappointment of the sessions at Java One, sitting in a room being talked at was quite low down on my list of priorities. Sometimes it’s nice to be wrong.

Remember a while back I talked about my first public appearance? Well, I chased down the video, because I’m masochistic, and here it is for you all to enjoy. Pleasingly my mannerisms are slightly less of a camp man trapped in a woman’s body, which was my impression the last time I saw myself presenting. It helps that YouTube has made the video so dark you can’t see me.

I’m finally moving up from working behind the scenes to actually doing a (short) presentation for the LJC. I’m going to be giving a lightning talk on Wednesday at the AWS Elastic Beanstalk event, on the JCP - what it is and what our election to the executive committee means. Ben and Martin’s post gives a little more background on the subject. Another LMAX LJC member Mike will also be giving a lightning talk, on Project Coin.

For blatant self-publicity, I’m making a note of all the presentations, panels, interviews, articles and other public-facing events I’ve been involved in. This is a non-exhaustive list.

When you’re a new speaker, or just starting to consider speaking at conferences or user groups for the first time, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by all the things you worry about when delivering a talk.

For years I’ve avoided talking about the topic of what to wear when presenting. I didn’t want to cover it because I didn’t want people to think that I only worried about this topic because I was a woman. I also didn’t want other women to inherit any of my neuroses around deciding what to wear. I’m the sort of person who always enjoyed thinking long and hard about what to wear the next day at work, and I know that’s not how everyone works.

I realise I have a bunch of experience and advice for speakers and potential speakers that I simply haven’t written down or shared. Here’s the first piece on things to consider that you might not have thought about. Note: as usual, my advice is from the point of view of a woman (me) and is aimed mostly at women, but also as usual it’s probably useful for others to know too.

Now I’ve been speaking at (mostly Java) conferences for a while (six years now), I get asked to present at a lot of conferences. Obviously all these conferences are mostly interested in my terribly educational talks, but it’s also because I’m a technical woman and there aren’t very many technical women speaking at conferences.

In my experience, conferences want to do the right thing - they want a diverse line up of speakers, they want to attract diverse attendees. Often this is not as easy as it may seem, and frequently conferences are Twitter-shamed for not having enough women speakers. When it gets to this point (and often before), conferences frequently ask me for advice on speakers they could invite, and how to attract more women.

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.

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.

After the acquisition of a company with offices in New York, I pestered my company outrageously until they got fed up and finally relented – they agreed to send me to the US.

To ease the transition, I chose to move onto a project which would allow me to start working in London and continue on the same team after I had moved to New York.

In the extreme over-excitement that followed my relocation, it took me a little while to realise that effectively I was an offshore resource, no different really from any of our Indian test team, and the team needed to manage this appropriately.

I learnt a number of lessons whilst playing this game. Some of these points are also valid for teams with remote resources (e.g. people working from home).

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.

This month’s Java Magazine features an article by yours truly, which is yet another intro to the Disruptor. It’s basically a summary of the stuff I’ve written in this blog, updated for version 2.7 - so the names of the classes should be up to date and the responsibilities follow the simplified pattern we use now. If you were looking for an more recent version of my introduction blog posts, this article gives a reasonable overview.

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?

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.

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.

I’m late with my write-up of QCon, and what’s worse, it will be partial - “sadly” I was in Lanzarote on a training week with the running club from the Thursday (8th) so I missed most of it. A sacrifice I had to make for 7 days in the sunshine…

I might be too late in writing my own thoughts on QCon, but a bunch of other people have done a pretty good job.

(Updated 15 Dec 2020 with correct completed status!) Investigate Maven 2 for builds Have a glance at TestNG unit testing (completed 2013) Potentially play with JMock for current testing framework (completed ~2009) Play with GWT. (completed 2009-2013) Sign up for Pragmatic Architect event Check out JavaBlackBelt site - what is provided, and what are the feelings of professionals (or, more importantly, recruiters) towards these qualifications? Look into getting Visual Studio .

Things I took out of QCon: I want to play with Ajax. Maybe I’ve “grown out” of front end development but that doesn’t prevent it from being (potentially) extremely cool Selenium looks like a good place to start for automated website testing It can take up to 7 years to move away from a legacy architecture. Depressing, but at least it shows it can be done and it’s worth the effort I’m going to become a certified Scrum Master Mistress.

Last week saw the first QCon London conference, an event “designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers”. The conference consisted of two days of tutorials followed by three days of talks covering technologies, vendor products, and processes. In addition there were numerous “networking” opportunities with plenty of break times to both absorb information and meet other people, plus evening events.

How important to you is your working environment?

• Type of desk
• What’s on it
• Position / type of mouse, keyboard, monitor(s)
• Music / background sound (or lack of it)
• Open plan vs team room vs cube vs personal office
• etc…

These physical items could be extended to include your virtual environment:

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.

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.

• Understand how to improve performance with your Java code using Java 8 language features.
• Learn hands on techniques to discover and implement common Java 8 refactorings.
• Understand when you should and should not apply key refactorings in Java 8.

First, an apology. I will be using the British spelling for “centre”, because, well, I’m British. But it gets really confusing because you have to use the American spelling in the code. And doesn’t “Centring” just look wrong?

One of the aims of this series is to highlight some stupid gotchas in support for CSS in the different browsers.

Today’s gotcha is table borders.

Yes, yes, I said don’t use tables. What I means is, don’t use tables for layout. But you can use tables for, you know, tabular data. Like, for examples, lists of instruments and their bid and ask prices.

But you should know that even when you use strict mode, Internet Explorer has slightly… eccentric… rendering behaviour for tables. Actually to be specific, it’s IE7 only.

This is a continuation of my series of CSS hints / tips / cheats for developers (and other technical-but-not-UI people).

The screenshots are in Chrome on a Mac. The originals were on Firefox on Ubuntu so I can tell you the behaviour is identical.

As promised, the Long Awaited Follow-Up to CSS for Developers Part One! Well, long-awaited if you’re as afflicted with NADD as I am.

Quick recap - the aim of this series is to provide a quick and easy how-to around the magic that is CSS. It’s primarily aimed at developers, although I would hope it’s comprehensible to a range of tech-savvy people.

I’m a Java Developer. But I’m also a Web Developer. Web Developers have been so badly maligned over the last decade or so that I always feel wary (and sometimes slightly ashamed) admitting this. There’s some sort of assumption that Web Developers (and Front End Developers) aren’t real programmers. Similarly, “real” developers don’t like to be tainted by coming into contact with that nasty “front end stuff” in case someone mistakes them for a designer.

Trust me, no-one is going to mistake a Java Developer for a designer. For a start, when designers wear geeky glasses it’s ironic. Or chic. Or something.

But developers will be forced to do something around the front end at some point in their lives. Even if it’s because they’re sick of manually kicking off some process and want to give the users a big red button to press instead.

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.

Last week I went to get my hair cut (yes, sorry, this is a story about hair). I had thought long and hard about what I wanted. I researched, checked styles online, and bought a magazine so I could show my hairdresser exactly what I was after and there would be no confusion. I was determined I would not be spending that ridiculous amount of money on something I was not going to be happy with. I was even bold enough to ask for some changes to it at the end, which I have never ever had the courage to do before.

Right so yes. 2020, hello. One of my 2020 resolutions is to get back to my personal blog. Weekly. Yeah right. Let’s aim for weekly and be happy with monthly.

For my first post let’s do the obligatory look-back-over-last-year. Not because it’s trendy (I’m 41 now, I don’t care about being trendy any more), but because it’s super important for me to understand what I went through and what I achieved last year (every year), otherwise I get caught up in the hamster-wheel of the-next-thing-and-the-next-thing-and-the-next-thing. Progress should be celebrated, not just ignored for the next item on the ever growing, ever pressing TODO list. Also, looking back helps me to plan the next year. Doesn’t have to be super-planned, but setting some goals, objectives, ideas for which direction I’d prefer to go in helps me decide how to prioritise that ever-growing, ever-pressing TODO list.

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.

Having experienced Flaccid Scrum, I find this article interesting, and agree with most of it. I’d also like to add though, that if you do the scrum practices (story cards, stand ups, retrospectives, etc) but don’t buy into the fundamental principals, you will not succeed. And that means everyone on the team, not just the people in charge. In particular, if the team is not empowered, is not committing to the estimates and the iteration plan in its heart, and and does not trust, then you are probably better off using traditional processes.

I think the statement that struck me the most when I was on the Certified Scrum Master course was:

The start of the project is when you know the least about what you’re doing

Which of course is absolutely true.

So why do we come up with extensive requirements, detailed design, and fixed plans at this point of time? We haven’t put anything into place yet, we haven’t played with the code, the customer hasn’t seen anything of what we’re promising to deliver.

Hmm. I have been so busy trying to think of “good” things to write here, and not having the time to actually write, that I see it’s been 6 months since the last post. If anyone is still out there though, I need help. I need a good Certified Scrum Master course in New York or London, preferably in April or May. Any suggestions? The one I wanted to go on was vetoed and now I find it’s not running in NY again until Autumn.

You may have noticed that the more I go to conferences, the less I write about them. I could claim lack of time, but the fact is that all my write-ups will be something along the lines of “Loved <city>, went to talks that made me think, met interesting people, gave a talk or two that seemed to go well”. Not sure if people get bored of reading that, but I get bored of writing it.

That’s not to say I’m bored of conferences. On the contrary - since I work from home, travelling to new places and meeting Real Human Beings keeps me sane. Plus conferences are fun.

But I went to a conference on Saturday that makes me feel compelled to write something, and not just because it was organised by my two fellow Sevilla JUG organisers. @IsraKaos and @RGDav are both doing more Android day-to-day than server-side Java, so this is an area they’re interested in learning more about. Not content with organising Android events every other month, they decided they had so many interesting speakers they wanted to have speaking here in Sevilla that they wanted to run a whole day, single track conference, on behalf of GDG Sevilla. Android Xtended was born.

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.

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.

I know there are arguments against certification, and I definitely think that using certifiction to determine whether to interview or recruit people is downright daft, because frankly learning a bunch of answers isn’t all that difficult. But I personally find that completing a certification really helps to round out my knowledge in an area. I guess my thoughts are that a fairly recent certification combined with the work experience to back it up is something that would make your CV more interesting to recruiters.

Last Thursday I gave a keynote at GOTO Berlin to address the problems of deciding how to learn a new technology/framework/process (Spoiler Alert: it’s not by putting it into production).

When you’re a new speaker, or just starting to consider speaking at conferences or user groups for the first time, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by all the things you worry about when delivering a talk.

For years I’ve avoided talking about the topic of what to wear when presenting. I didn’t want to cover it because I didn’t want people to think that I only worried about this topic because I was a woman. I also didn’t want other women to inherit any of my neuroses around deciding what to wear. I’m the sort of person who always enjoyed thinking long and hard about what to wear the next day at work, and I know that’s not how everyone works.

I realise I have a bunch of experience and advice for speakers and potential speakers that I simply haven’t written down or shared. Here’s the first piece on things to consider that you might not have thought about. Note: as usual, my advice is from the point of view of a woman (me) and is aimed mostly at women, but also as usual it’s probably useful for others to know too.

When you’re a new speaker, or just starting to consider speaking at conferences or user groups for the first time, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by all the things you worry about when delivering a talk.

For years I’ve avoided talking about the topic of what to wear when presenting. I didn’t want to cover it because I didn’t want people to think that I only worried about this topic because I was a woman. I also didn’t want other women to inherit any of my neuroses around deciding what to wear. I’m the sort of person who always enjoyed thinking long and hard about what to wear the next day at work, and I know that’s not how everyone works.

I realise I have a bunch of experience and advice for speakers and potential speakers that I simply haven’t written down or shared. Here’s the first piece on things to consider that you might not have thought about. Note: as usual, my advice is from the point of view of a woman (me) and is aimed mostly at women, but also as usual it’s probably useful for others to know too.

Resources for my “Is Groovy Better Than Java for Testing?” talk.

Setup required for the AngularJS/HTML5/Groovy/Java/MongoDB tutorial for QCon London 2015. Sign up with code SPEAKGEE100 for £100 off the price!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Spring Framework 5 brings full reactive support to developers everywhere. What better way to demo reactive programming than to actually build something live? Trisha will live code an end-to-end application using Spring Framework 5, Spring Boot, Reactor, Kotlin, JavaFX, and maybe even some MongoDB, all built using IntelliJ IDEA. During this session, we’ll see how these different components can work together really easily using Spring. What could possibly go wrong?

Today, I found my own blog useful. I was configuring Spring validation on my new project, and had to remind myself how to do it. We configured validation on the new project in less than an hour, which beats the two days it took me to work out how to do it the first time. And I impressed one of my new work collegues. Apparently I am now the Spring Guru.

Today I would like to document my experiences implementing caching with Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) and annotations.

So if java generics slightly disappointed me lately, what have I found cool? I’m currently working on a web application using Spring MVC, which probably doesn’t come as a big surprise, it seems to be all the rage these days. Since this is my baby, I got to call the shots as to a lot of the framework choices. When it came to looking at implementing validation, I refused to believe I’d have to go through the primitive process of looking at all the values on the request and deciding if they pass muster, with some huge if statement.

Spring Framework 5 brings full reactive support to developers everywhere. What better way to demo reactive programming than to actually build something live? Trisha will live code an end-to-end application using Spring Framework 5, Spring Boot, Reactor, Kotlin, JavaFX, and maybe even some MongoDB, all built using IntelliJ IDEA. During this session, we’ll see how these different components can work together really easily using Spring. What could possibly go wrong?

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.

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.

Gah!! This is exactly what I was talking about - it’s pink, it mentions shoes, and it’s about as patronising as you can get.

Would the chart be different if your possible outcomes were Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Linus Torvalds? I bet for a start it wouldn’t mention Jimmy Choos or choice of handbags. And it probably wouldn’t be in baby blue either.

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.

This is a bloody good idea. It builds upon my own Virgoen tendancies to write lists and tick things off, but what the list model lacks is the “in progress” state. Plus occasionally my lists get confused. See today’s notebook page:

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.

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

Last night was the final get-together to discuss the Java 8 MOOC. Any event hosted in August in a city that is regularly over 40°C is going to face challenges, so it was great that we had attendees from earlier sessions plus new people too.

As I mentioned last week, the Sevilla Java User Group is working towards completing the Java 8 MOOC on lambdas and streams. We’re running three sessions to share knowledge between people who are doing the course.

The Sevilla Java User Group is working together towards completing the Java 8 MOOC on lambdas and streams. As part of this, we’re running three sessions during the course so we can, as a group, ask questions about the lectures, get help with the homework, and (if we’re feeling very smart!) help people who may be struggling (or might not have watched the videos).

I think living in a beautiful city in a fantastic climate has its advantages. Not just the obvious ones, but we find people unusually keen to come and visit us on the pretence of presenting at the Sevilla Java User Group (and please, DO come and present at our JUG, we love visitors).

This week we were really lucky, we had Georges Saab and Aurelio Garcia-Ribeyro giving us an update on where Java is now and where it looks like it’s going in the future.

This article was originally a guest post for FogBugz.

As developers, we all know that code reviews are a good thing in theory. They should help us:

• Find bugs and security issues early
• Improve the readability of our code
• Provide a safety net to ensure all tasks are fully completed

The reality is that code reviews can frequently be an uncomfortable experience for everyone involved, leading to reviews that are combative, ineffective, or even worse, simply not happening.

Here is a quick guide to help you to create an effective code review process.

This presentation is about how to change a team’s attitude towards writing automated tests. The talk covers the same case study as Groovy vs Java for Testing, adopting Spock in MongoDB, but this is a more process/agile/people perspective, not a technical look at the merits of one language over another.

Resources for my “Is Groovy Better Than Java for Testing?” talk.

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.

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.

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.

And now, after an absence of several weeks, you get to see how long it takes me to write some of these posts.

I was putting up the Christmas decorations one Saturday when my worst fear was realised¹ - one of my three strings of lights was not working.

The first two went up fine. The third lit up when I plugged it in, and in less than a second went out. Curses. This is not what I wanted, this was supposed to be a short exercise in making my tiny little flat look festive.

So I set about the tedious task of starting from the end closest to the plug and replacing every bulb, one by one, with a spare one to see if it magically lit up again. When it doesn’t, you take the spare back out and replace it with the original bulb. I remember my parents going through this ritual every Christmas, the tediousness of this activity is more memorable than the fleeting joy of shinies.

I didn’t see what an enormous impact Mum made on my life, because she was always there. There’s a quote in the book Good Omens: “It’s for the same reason you can’t see England when you’re in Trafalgar Square” - Mum was a constant, important, dependable presence for my whole life.

I wrote something for Mum while I was on the plane from Spain to spend what was to be our last two weeks together. I’d like to share some of that with you all now.

This July my Mum passed away, apparently cancer was the one opponent she couldn’t beat in an argument. Mum had a huge impact on my life, as you might expect, not only personally but professionally too. Maybe I’ll talk about that some more in time. For now, I want to publish the poem my very talented cousin Izzi Giles wrote in tribute.

I’m honoured to now be listed on three aggregated blog feeds: The new and somewhat embryonic blogs.lmax.com. The London Java Community Aggrity. ThoughtWorks Alumni, along with a whole host of distinguished names. The pressure’s on to try and write useful stuff. Oh OK, I’ll settle for “entertaining”.

Gah!! This is exactly what I was talking about - it’s pink, it mentions shoes, and it’s about as patronising as you can get.

Would the chart be different if your possible outcomes were Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Linus Torvalds? I bet for a start it wouldn’t mention Jimmy Choos or choice of handbags. And it probably wouldn’t be in baby blue either.

This is a bloody good idea. It builds upon my own Virgoen tendancies to write lists and tick things off, but what the list model lacks is the “in progress” state. Plus occasionally my lists get confused. See today’s notebook page:

(Updated 15 Dec 2020 with correct completed status!) Investigate Maven 2 for builds Have a glance at TestNG unit testing (completed 2013) Potentially play with JMock for current testing framework (completed ~2009) Play with GWT. (completed 2009-2013) Sign up for Pragmatic Architect event Check out JavaBlackBelt site - what is provided, and what are the feelings of professionals (or, more importantly, recruiters) towards these qualifications? Look into getting Visual Studio .

Last Thursday I was fortunate enough to get a place on the FogBugz and Kiln World Tour. I booked it before I moved jobs, and I’ll be honest I had no real interest in the software. I’ve been reading Joel’s books and blogs since my friend Brent bought me Joel on Software and made me read it (he had the foresight to know I’d want to hang on to his copy if he’d lent it to me!). I wanted to see the man in the flesh and hear what he had to say about his software. Because really, do we honestly need yet another bug-tracking / project-management tool?

On Thursday I was at Simon Brown’s Effective Sketches session at Skillsmatter. Just because my pictures are pretty awesome doesn’t mean there’s no opportunity for continuous learning.

The points Simon made in the session really made sense to me, and I wish I could have had something like that as a primer when they taught us UML at university. Without the context of what the diagrams were supposed to mean, to convey, all the boxes and lines made no sense to me back then. I’m still not a fan of large chunks of UML because I think the convention sometimes gets in the way of real meaning.

My take-away points were:

Hmm. I have been so busy trying to think of “good” things to write here, and not having the time to actually write, that I see it’s been 6 months since the last post. If anyone is still out there though, I need help. I need a good Certified Scrum Master course in New York or London, preferably in April or May. Any suggestions? The one I wanted to go on was vetoed and now I find it’s not running in NY again until Autumn.

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?

So, I’m off to JavaOne next week! This is an unexpected and very pleasant surprise. I’ll be there with Martin (of the Disruptor fame), and Martijn (that’s not going to get confusing at all). Martin will be talking about the Disruptor on Thursday, and Martijn is busy talking about… everything. Most importantly for the LJC he’s representing us in our shiny new JCP Executive Committee role. I’m really looking forward to meeting pretty much anyone and everyone who’ll talk to me.

Setup required for the AngularJS/HTML5/Groovy/Java/MongoDB tutorial for QCon London 2015. Sign up with code SPEAKGEE100 for £100 off the price!

Brief guide to running the MongoDB tutorial from QCon London and JAX London.

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.

First, an apology. I will be using the British spelling for “centre”, because, well, I’m British. But it gets really confusing because you have to use the American spelling in the code. And doesn’t “Centring” just look wrong?

One of the aims of this series is to highlight some stupid gotchas in support for CSS in the different browsers.

Today’s gotcha is table borders.

Yes, yes, I said don’t use tables. What I means is, don’t use tables for layout. But you can use tables for, you know, tabular data. Like, for examples, lists of instruments and their bid and ask prices.

But you should know that even when you use strict mode, Internet Explorer has slightly… eccentric… rendering behaviour for tables. Actually to be specific, it’s IE7 only.

This is a continuation of my series of CSS hints / tips / cheats for developers (and other technical-but-not-UI people).

The screenshots are in Chrome on a Mac. The originals were on Firefox on Ubuntu so I can tell you the behaviour is identical.

At LMAX we adopted Google Web Toolkit pretty early on. One of the motivations for using it was so we only had to worry about recruiting Java guys, and then we could all work on every part of the application including the web UI. Sure, you can learn a bunch of different skills if you want to, but it reduced context-switching and kept the skill set we were hiring for to a nice short list.

As promised, the Long Awaited Follow-Up to CSS for Developers Part One! Well, long-awaited if you’re as afflicted with NADD as I am.

Quick recap - the aim of this series is to provide a quick and easy how-to around the magic that is CSS. It’s primarily aimed at developers, although I would hope it’s comprehensible to a range of tech-savvy people.

I’m a Java Developer. But I’m also a Web Developer. Web Developers have been so badly maligned over the last decade or so that I always feel wary (and sometimes slightly ashamed) admitting this. There’s some sort of assumption that Web Developers (and Front End Developers) aren’t real programmers. Similarly, “real” developers don’t like to be tainted by coming into contact with that nasty “front end stuff” in case someone mistakes them for a designer.

Trust me, no-one is going to mistake a Java Developer for a designer. For a start, when designers wear geeky glasses it’s ironic. Or chic. Or something.

But developers will be forced to do something around the front end at some point in their lives. Even if it’s because they’re sick of manually kicking off some process and want to give the users a big red button to press instead.

I’m reading Joel Spolsky’s User Interface Design for Programmers. A thought that’s struck me is about architecture. It’s easy to get fooled into thinking building software is a bit like being the architect for a building. I’m not even going to go into the differences between engineering practices à la building design and good practice software design. I’m going to start from the easy point, the stuff you can see.

Content and resources for the Code Review Matters and Manners talk, including links to additional information and supporting material.

I wrote a post for the JetBrains Upsource blog about some of the things you should be looking for when you do code reviews (and some of the things you should not be looking at).

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.

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.

Daniel Bryant and I did a keynote at Devoxx UK about how individuals can add something to a team to make the team more productive, and overall more awesome.

While I was at QCon New York (probably my business conference this year!) I was interviewed by Ralph Winzinger for InfoQ. It felt like a short interview at the time, but we covered a lot of ground - Java 8, Java vs other JVM languages, the effectiveness of the JCP, and the future of Java.

Video and the transcript are available on InfoQ.

At GOTO Chicago, I was given the chance to chat a bit about the presentation I was giving, which happens to be the same one I’m giving at a number of conferences this year (although of course I’m evolving it as I go along).

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.

YOW recorded me, yet again, talking about the adventure that is the design of the new Java Driver for MongoDB. This is the same talk I gave at GeeCON and DevoxxUK, with some updates based on our Journey So Far. In it, I cover the architecture of the new driver and some of our current thoughts around where we want the API to go.

Since I have a tendency to bang on every now and again about how we, as developers, could do better in managing our careers (for example, by creating CVs that don’t suck, and by staying ahead of the curve), Dave Thomas asked me to speak for a mere 50 minutes on the subject at GOTO Aarhus, a talk I wasn’t enormously happy with as there was no way to cover a lifetime of hard-fought experience in such a short time.

While I was at QCon London, I was grabbed for an interview with InfoQ. It’s always a pleasure to be interviewed by Charles, I think he brings out the best in me. You can see the video here. At the start of the interview we refer to the first time we met, which, if you’re interested, you can also watch.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I was flattered a couple of weeks ago to be interviewed by Google as part of their women techmaker’s series, as it moves over to Europe. In this video I talk about going to Mars, education, planning your career, being a developer, and the impact of technology on our lives. So, not much…

Yolande Poirier from OTN interviewed me at Devoxx about my new job at 10gen, Women in IT (bet that surprises you), how to be a role model, and Agile. Enjoy.

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….

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.

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!

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:

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.

I was flattered to be interviewed for InfoQ at QCon London. It was a fun interview actually, and didn’t feel anything like the half an hour it actually took. In it, I get to talk about Agile at LMAX, the Disruptor (of course) and diversity in IT (again).

If you have a Parleys subscription, you can watch the whole “Why we shouldn’t target women” panel from Devoxx 2011 a month or so ago. Watch me attempt to monopolise the whole panel as if it was my idea or something…

At JAX London Mike and I presented “Understanding the Disruptor - A Beginner’s Guide to Hardcore Concurrency”. This is the session we initially previewed to the London Java Community a few weeks earlier. The content is the same, but the feel of the presentation was quite different to us - the venue for the LJC event was more intimate, and it was easier to interact with the audience. At JAX, we were up on stage, which was pretty cool actually, but meant that it felt more like a lecture and it was less easy to connect with the audience.

Tori Wieldt from the Oracle Technology Network interviewed me at Devoxx. Because I was there to be on the Why We Shouldn’t Target Women panel, the interview is just another platform for me to air my views on this subject again. Yes, I am actually wearing pink….

It must be time for me to move on from talking about Java One, it has dominated my blog of late. But also I want to talk about JAX London from this week. But before I move on, it’s probably worth rounding off with the last two resources from the conference. 1) Martin Thompson and I are interviewed about the Disruptor winning the Duke Award (we come in halfway through):

Remember a while back I talked about my first public appearance? Well, I chased down the video, because I’m masochistic, and here it is for you all to enjoy. Pleasingly my mannerisms are slightly less of a camp man trapped in a woman’s body, which was my impression the last time I saw myself presenting. It helps that YouTube has made the video so dark you can’t see me.

For blatant self-publicity, I’m making a note of all the presentations, panels, interviews, articles and other public-facing events I’ve been involved in. This is a non-exhaustive list.

This year I’ve been giving an evolving live demonstration of coding a Fully Buzz Word Compliant, mobile-friendly web application. The aim of the demo is to show, via a real-world application rather than snippets or a toy example, where these popular technologies sit in your architecture, and how they interact with each other.

At GOTO Chicago, I was given the chance to chat a bit about the presentation I was giving, which happens to be the same one I’m giving at a number of conferences this year (although of course I’m evolving it as I go along).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Having experienced Flaccid Scrum, I find this article interesting, and agree with most of it. I’d also like to add though, that if you do the scrum practices (story cards, stand ups, retrospectives, etc) but don’t buy into the fundamental principals, you will not succeed. And that means everyone on the team, not just the people in charge. In particular, if the team is not empowered, is not committing to the estimates and the iteration plan in its heart, and and does not trust, then you are probably better off using traditional processes.

Now I’ve been speaking at (mostly Java) conferences for a while (six years now), I get asked to present at a lot of conferences. Obviously all these conferences are mostly interested in my terribly educational talks, but it’s also because I’m a technical woman and there aren’t very many technical women speaking at conferences.

In my experience, conferences want to do the right thing - they want a diverse line up of speakers, they want to attract diverse attendees. Often this is not as easy as it may seem, and frequently conferences are Twitter-shamed for not having enough women speakers. When it gets to this point (and often before), conferences frequently ask me for advice on speakers they could invite, and how to attract more women.

Due to a combination of my restlessness, my consulting experience, and employers that insist on moving offices frequently, I’ve had the dubious honour of working in a variety of environments.

Today I will teach you, the employer, how to show your staff just how much you hate them.

How important to you is your working environment?

• Type of desk
• What’s on it
• Position / type of mouse, keyboard, monitor(s)
• Music / background sound (or lack of it)
• Open plan vs team room vs cube vs personal office
• etc…

These physical items could be extended to include your virtual environment:

Setup required for the AngularJS/HTML5/Groovy/Java/MongoDB tutorial for QCon London 2015. Sign up with code SPEAKGEE100 for £100 off the price!

Brief guide to running the MongoDB tutorial from QCon London and JAX London.

Nine Things Developer Want More Than Money Read if you’re a developer and wondering what’s missing from your job. Read if you’re a manager and you’re looking to recruit the right types of developers. In particular be honest with yourself over whether your organisation is more aligned to “hygiene” or “motivation”. At least one of the poor job decisions I have made is because the role was mis-sold as one and turned out to be the other.

YOW recorded me, yet again, talking about the adventure that is the design of the new Java Driver for MongoDB. This is the same talk I gave at GeeCON and DevoxxUK, with some updates based on our Journey So Far. In it, I cover the architecture of the new driver and some of our current thoughts around where we want the API to go.

Since I have a tendency to bang on every now and again about how we, as developers, could do better in managing our careers (for example, by creating CVs that don’t suck, and by staying ahead of the curve), Dave Thomas asked me to speak for a mere 50 minutes on the subject at GOTO Aarhus, a talk I wasn’t enormously happy with as there was no way to cover a lifetime of hard-fought experience in such a short time.

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.