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 examples you get.
Ged Byrne on the shiny new LJC Book Club - Ged reminded us how great it is to read an actual, paper book. How committing to reading page by page forces you to learn in a different way to jumping around internet references that might not give you the context you need. I thought this was a great presentation with humour, and I liked the way he challenged us to "expand our minds". Although the actual book he was reviewing was Oracle Coherence 3.5, I've decided I need to read Beautiful Software, which Ged quoted at the end of the talk.
Peter Lawrey on Common Java Misconceptions - A session which plays well with what we're trying to preach when we talk about Tackling Folklore. He covered a few topics that are assumed to be "truth". For example, dealing with garbage collection is not a mandatory part of writing Java - you could write GC-friendly code for a start. Also it's naive to assume the JDK is written in an efficient way, anyone who's actually dug around it for a while will realise that newer, more efficient methods of programming have not been applied to all areas of the (massive) existing code base. I think it's great to have people out there talking about this stuff, it's too easy to make assumptions and take things for granted. The most important thing he said: "If you're told something, don't just believe it - test it yourself first".
All of us (me, Mike and the lightning talk presenters) got such a great response it has encouraged us at the LJC to try and push for more real developers presenting their experiences. We have a lot of great presentations from vendors, but what's more applicable to Java guys and girls across the board is other developers sharing the problems they're trying to solve and how they go about that process.
I'm very much looking forward to presenting this again at JAX.
