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Posts containing tips, code, examples, and other useful technical stuff
We're constantly fighting a battle when developing the new MongoDB Java driver between using tools that will do heavy lifting for us and minimising the dependencies a user has to download in order to use our driver. Ideally, we want the number of dependencies to be zero.
Continue reading "Spock is awesome! Seriously Simplified Mocking"
For anyone who is interested in what LMAX is up to, and is still following my blog, have a look at this post about the latest tool they've open sourced: the Coalescing Ring Buffer.
So, I've finished my first full week in the new job and I've learnt lots of new stuff. Which is great, because that's usually why you change jobs.
I've produced a very cut down version of the presentation I've been giving at a lot of conferences, giving a high level overview to the Disruptor. This serves as a quick intro to the concepts behind it.
On Sunday I gave my very first workshop on the Disruptor. The aim was to give people some hands-on coding experience using the syntax. Because time was limited (you can't get people to build an entire application architecture in 2.5 hours) the example is somewhat contrived, and needs a big leap to make it into a proper application context. But the workshop should:
The "User's Guide to the Disruptor" presentation I gave at QCon London is now available on the InfoQ site. This is the same presentation as the one I gave at Skillsmatter in March, but the questions are different. Plus since I'm winging it every time, I probably cover slightly different things or explain some stuff better / worse.
This month's Java Magazine features an article by yours truly, which is yet another intro to the Disruptor. It's basically a summary of the stuff I've written in this blog, updated for version 2.7 - so the names of the classes should be up to date and the responsibilities follow the simplified pattern we use now. If you were looking for an more recent version of my introduction blog posts, this article gives a reasonable overview.
This is intended as part one of a series, as it's a basic and high-level view with no code examples. In fact, it probably could be used to document the C# version as well as the Java version, although I haven't taken a look at that for a while. Next, I would like to give some more code examples of how you use it - as always, any suggestions welcome.
And now, after an absence of several weeks, you get to see how long it takes me to write some of these posts.
I was putting up the Christmas decorations one Saturday when my worst fear was realised1 - one of my three strings of lights was not working.
The first two went up fine. The third lit up when I plugged it in, and in less than a second went out. Curses. This is not what I wanted, this was supposed to be a short exercise in making my tiny little flat look festive.
So I set about the tedious task of starting from the end closest to the plug and replacing every bulb, one by one, with a spare one to see if it magically lit up again. When it doesn't, you take the spare back out and replace it with the original bulb. I remember my parents going through this ritual every Christmas, the tediousness of this activity is more memorable than the fleeting joy of shinies.
Continue reading "Christmas decorations teach me a lesson about troubleshooting"
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:
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.