Blog

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STAC London Summit

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).

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My first public appearance

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...

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Why Java developers hate .NET

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:

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The London Java Community elected to the JCP SE/EE Executive Committee

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.

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Cyclist tribes

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.

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For those who might want to make the leap from Developer to Architect

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!

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