Developer Champion
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.
Now all I have to do is write it...
I'm honoured to now be listed on three aggregated blog feeds:
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?
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. We hope to balance some of the larger corporate organisations, we're the voice of real life Java developers who use the language every day, for enterprise development or open source projects.
You can argue Java is dying, but the community is not. And I think we're exactly the people to guide its future.
PS (Warning: gratuitous plug incoming) If you're at all Java-curious and you like drinking and attempting to be social, join us this Tuesday for our monthly Developer Sessions at the Porterhouse in Covent Garden.
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.
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”.
Continue reading "TradeTech 2011 – Not like a developer conference"
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?
Continue reading "CSS for Developers: Horizontal and Vertical Centring"
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.
Continue reading "How to show your employees how much you hate them"
The last two weeks, actual work has conspired to keep me away from the blog. How rude. I miss "the beach" already.
It seems only fair to summarise the lessons I have learnt whilst masquerading as an architect on a short consulting stint with Marc McNeill. Simon Brown at Coding the Architecture is much better at talking about this stuff than I am, but I need to update the blog with something!
Continue reading "For those who might want to make the leap from Developer to Architect"
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.
Continue reading "CSS for Developers: Cross Browser Table Border Behaviour"