Sevilla MUG March Madness

Last night the Sevilla MUG had our March Madness event. This was our largest event yet, with 36 people signed up. Although the aim of March Madness is to have a MongoDB Engineer at all the user groups this month, that's not such a big deal for us as I live here, so this was also the first event where I wasn't the main attraction - [Javier] (https://twitter.com/JvrBaena) gave a really great talk about the lessons learnt at SocialBro after using MongoDB in production for the last couple of years.

The slides for my introduction to Replica Sets and Sharding:

And the slides for the main attraction:

The event went really well, everyone seemed engaged, and our first talk in Spanish seemed to encourage more questions than normal. We were also in a new venue, and although I love the central location of our previous venue and the friendliness of the owners, the menu of the new location seemed to be a massive win.

First presentation at the Virtual JUG!

Yesterday I had the privilege of presenting the very first session for vJUG, a new virtual Java User Group that allows us to span geographies when sharing talks and stories. I'm really interested in the vJUG idea, especially now I'm not in London - if we can find good ways to share knowledge without having to travel, that will help us reach people who don't normally go to conferences or don't have a local user group to go to. Not to mention cutting travel costs and saving the environment.

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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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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:

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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...