"What... exactly... were you guys looking to get out of today's event? Because..."
"Because we're girls?"
"Um... yes..."
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.
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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?).
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JavaOne 2011: Roundup
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):
JavaOne: Initial Observations
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:
JavaOne 2011
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. It's the first international conference I've been to and I'm hoping to meet people I wouldn't normally get a chance to see in London. It's also really cool to be able to represent both LMAX and the London Java Community. Hopefully it won't lead to some sort of split personality syndrome.
Almost more excitingly, I'll be doing a spot of shopping in New York on the way there and back. Because, well, it would be rude to fly over to the States and not drop in on my old home.
Maybe I'll get a chance to catch up with some of you in one of those amazing cities...?
First public appearance caught on video
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.
Slides are available for all to enjoy.
Special thanks to Playfish for hosting the event - as always, their hospitality was awesome.
The fact that they didn't serve wine is probably a Good Thing.
What my hangovers can teach you about Agile
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:
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Effective Sketches
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:
Disruptor 2.0 – All Change Please
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.