Posts

Showing posts from October, 2011

This Blog Has Moved!

Right, so yes, five years ago I moved to github pages, and never bothered to redirect any of these pages there. Now I've moved on from there, and... Finally I am using my real domain, trishagee.com . My blog is now at trishagee.com/blog .  See you there!

On The Similarities Between Girls And Aliens

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. I know incidents like this cause a lot of tension, and I want to explore why.  Get ready for some gross generalisations: women get upset because they feel they're being marginalised or treated differently; men get upset because they think we're being over-sensitive, especially when the cause is something unintentional.  I sometimes wonder, as I'm sure other people do, if perhaps picking up every incident harms our cause more than advancing it.  But then I feel that

Mike and I debut our new Disruptor presentation

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 thought the session went really really well.  We got some great questions at the end, we had an audience that was engaged, and I was dead pleased we didn't lose anyone with the assembly language.  We had some very valuable feedback afterwards too. As well as our presentation, there were three great lightning talks: Somay Nakhal on Java Thread States - Somay gave a nice overview of thread lifecycles with code and some great diagrams.  I liked how he made this more applicable to the real world than the sort of book exampl

JavaOne 2011: Roundup

Image
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 and foremost, the people.  I don't remember meeting a single grumpy person. Everyone I spoke to was there to get the most out of the experience, regardless of how many times they'd been previously.  In my experience, techies are not conditioned to be socially comfortable, yet introductions were made and the conversations flowed easily. Of course it wasn't just the attendees who were friendly, the staff and organisers were approachable and helpful, and it was nice to have people hanging around to direct you. One of the (few) advantages of having the event over multiple hotels was the outdoor space between them.  It's un

JavaOne: Initial Observations

Image
So I've been at JavaOne for the better part of three days, it's time to record some of my observations so far: The wireless access is rubbish. <Gross generalisation> technical people are not natural public speakers.  Makes me feel better about the presentations I'm going to be giving (see A Beginner's Guide to Hardcore Concurrency ). The sessions are less useful than getting out and chatting.  I've had a really excellent time, I've met: people from other Java User Groups; the Duchess girls; other Duke Award winners; the Azul guys; guys (well, girls) from O'Reilly books; JCP members and many random and awesome people. Everyone thinks that Large is an acceptable default t-shirt size (it's not).  Vendors - if you're really serious about appealing to The Other Gender you need to stock XS, if not actual skinny tees. If you're running a conference, you should probably have your projection screens above the height of the audience members

Popular posts from this blog

Dissecting the Disruptor: What's so special about a ring buffer?

Dissecting the Disruptor: Writing to the ring buffer

Dissecting the Disruptor: Why it's so fast (part one) - Locks Are Bad