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.
JavaOne Shanghai
So, I was in China last week. It's not really what I expected, but then my knowledge of China comes almost entirely from visiting various Chinatowns and watching martial arts movies, so I guess I wasn't all that well prepared for a modern Asian city like Shanghai.
Webinar: Processing High Volume Data Feeds with MongoDB
Hot on the heels of my very first MongoDB webinar, I was... encouraged... to do another. Here at 10gen we've been running a series of webinars around using MongoDB in the financial services domain. Yesterday was the last in the series, and was presented in association with C24 - John Davies, their CTO, did most of the talking, and demonstrated their product for automatically turning financial messages from one format into another.
Update 14 Dec 2020: Sadly it looks like the video is no longer available, but the slides are
Webinar: Processing High Volume Data Feeds with MongoDB - FIX, FpML and Swift in association with C24 from MongoDB
It was a fun webinar to do, actually - I didn't know anything about C24's iO tool, so I learnt quite a lot as I watched John navigate the demo. My background in trying to debug raw FIX messages probably skewed my questions, I was definitely more interested in how to use it as a developer and what it could give me if I were doing production support. It's a dead interesting tool - I know for a fact that many organisations, banks in particular, spend a lot of time translating stuff from one format to another, before making some decision on on what to do with the contents. This tool does all the heavy lifting so you can get on with the interesting stuff, the stuff your business actually needs you to do.
In addition, as someone with more of an FS background than a NoSQL background, I was very interested to hear how lots of the financial institutions are using MongoDB already - the combination of not having an enforced schema but supporting structured data, supported by fast execution, makes it a good fit for a lot of the problems they're trying to solve. Yes, it's my job to say nice things about MongoDB, but when businesses are already using it because it makes their lives easier and meets their needs, it gives you a warm fuzzy feeling that the product must be doing something right.
I enjoyed giving this webinar, I think if I do any more I will suggest pairing on it (we all know two heads are better than one, right?) - it gives you some of the feedback and energy that's hard to get in a darkened room talking to a microphone.
Introduction to the Disruptor Slides
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.
Strangeloop Disruptor Workshop Materials
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:
GOTO Copenhagen
So, before everything gets pushed out of my head, GOTO Copenhagen.
It was my first conference "alone", in that I didn't have friends and colleagues from LMAX or the London Java Community there with me. And certainly at the start of the conference, I wasn't the only one who was standing around, hoping someone would talk to me (in all honesty some of the photos above are a little unfair - the schedule was a very nice, simple phone app so most people spent a lot of time playing with their phones).
Why Open Source Your Secrets
Here's a video of my Open Conference session on the business benefits of open sourcing your software. Given that the conference was at a weekend and had a very intimate feel, I think I was a teeny bit more honest than I usually am. Enjoy.
New Disruptor Presentation Unveiled to the LJC!
A few weeks ago, I presented my new "User's Guide to the Disruptor" talk to the London Java Community. Since it was very kindly hosted at Skillsmatter, there is a video of the presentation available, and the slides are below.
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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?).
Continue reading "Mike and I debut our new Disruptor presentation"