JAX London – I learn stuff and meet people

A couple of weeks ago, I was at JAX London along with a number of the London Java Community regulars (Martijn/Ben/John/Sandro/Simon/Zoe I'm looking at you....)

My purpose for attending was largely to present the Hardcore Concurrency for Beginners talk that Mike and I debuted at an LJC event a few weeks back. Almost as important was catching up with the aforementioned LJCers and meeting with as many people as would talk to me. After the disappointment of the sessions at Java One, sitting in a room being talked at was quite low down on my list of priorities. Sometimes it's nice to be wrong.

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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

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.

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...

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.