Popping to the Skillsmatter freebie evening sessions is one of the best ways of getting an introduction in to any open source project that I know of (particularly if you are in London)

The one I visited last night was for MongoDB which LDC are looking at in our general search to see which of the newer generation of NoSQL dbs we like best (yes yes i know they all have different usages cases but it nice to have a favourite that you spend a bit more time with), this “do” consists of a quick 45 min to 1 hour session (the content was from a 1.5 hour to 2 hour session) ,question time afterwards, and then pub time after that (with sponsored drinkies), a nice thing to pack your head with at the end of the day.

We were given a introduction of what happens on traditional relational db applications when they reach the serious levels and their limitations. and then how to design a NoSQL db from scratch to scale to a complete monster, the room was full of people who REALLY wanted to know stuff, but Alvin Richards (Senior Director of Enterprise Engineering at 10gen) REALLY knew his stuff and answered all comers with nary a pause. (and gave out freebies)

items handled were :

• Sharding
• Replication
• Fail over and recovery (i love the arbiters)
• Scaling (indexing still seems to cause the same bloody problems)
• Safe writes (i was pleased to see that this is in mongodb as well as Cassandra)Thankfully Skillsmatter post the videos from all their talks online and you can see this one here (its well worth your time)

Last Tuesday was a great night at the 1st Tuesday club hosted by Information Security Solutions, as normal the conversations ranged from the intensely technical all the way through company purchasing patterns in the security market and ended up chatting about beautiful hikes around England, I was treated to an explanation on a super simple corporate CMS that minimises the chance for user errors resulting in unsecured documents (as we often see with share point) and got to catch up on all things security based. the sponsor for the night was HP who with their acquisition of Arcsight seemed to have really rounded off their portfolio of recently acquired security companies and had brought someone from each group along, all of them doing that tricky balancing act of being there to represent their company while not at any time doing any form of hard sell (Rob from Arksight was a particularly interesting person to talk to) it was a good thing that HP had not brought more people as it was packed with the waiters really earning their money keeping everyone’s glasses full and maintain a constant flow of food.

All in all a great night with good company that showed that HP is serious about the security arena.

Woop Woop, I have my first full Lotusphere session! I will be presenting a Show ‘n’ Tell entitled “Write Better Java Code: Debugging, Logging, and Unit Tests” with the great Julian Robichaux, the master of openlog (a tool I use on every Domino app I write)

Anyway, quickly onto the point of this blog entry: After every conference’s sessions are announced there is the usual “it’s only the same set of people that get them each year” grumbles. However, 4 years ago I was not part of the Lotus community at all and this year I get to present properly at IBM’s leading collaboration event and scare the living shit out of myself in front of hopefully not too many people, so how?

• I did my local LUG circuit (UKLUG & ILUG) which incuded rejections and one total cock up 🙁 .
• I did LotusIdol last year (a year in which I purchased my own ticket).
• I followed Gab Turtle’s guidelines on writing abstracts, then passed my attempts round to a couple of peers.This year I submitted 3 abstracts (2 joint) and got 1 session. Of the other 2, 1 had to be retracted due to time conflicts with my co-submitter, the other was a tad fringe and a bit of a gamble, but I may try it again on a LUG this year.

  Soooo, Lotusphere is not a closed shop, new people present each year, and I’m one of that lucky number.

Old Comments

Mark Myers(05/12/2011 23:43:48 GMT)

@joe and to a drink together after

Joe Litton(05/12/2011 23:38:36 GMT)

Your session last year (LotusIdol) was great. Looking forward to your session at LS12!!

Mark Myers(05/12/2011 23:36:29 GMT)

@David @Bruce thank you VERY much

Bruce(05/12/2011 23:34:42 GMT)

Mark – congratulations!!!!!!!! ROCK STAR

David Leedy(05/12/2011 23:22:15 GMT)

Congrats Mark! Looking forward to your session!

Mike McGarel(06/12/2011 00:43:22 GMT)

Congratulations!

Paul Withers(06/12/2011 00:11:20 GMT)

Congratulations, well deserved and a great topic. Looking forward to it

Mary Beth Raven(06/12/2011 03:44:29 GMT)

Congratulations!I volunteer to check all of your “bad grammer” 🙂 and I am sure you’ll do a great job because you’ll be speaking about a topic you know and that you feel passionate about. See you there. I volunteer to sit in first row and heckle you:)

Carl Tyler(06/12/2011 06:20:20 GMT)

Hard to believe its your first time. You’ll be great.

Mark Barton(06/12/2011 09:30:29 GMT)

Well done Mark – I know Java is a subject close to your heart.

Ben Poole(06/12/2011 08:12:29 GMT)

Congratulations old bean; LS won’t know what hit it! I wish I could be there to heckle.

Mark Myers(06/12/2011 07:50:36 GMT)

thank you every one, im sure Julian will be gentle with me

Mark Myers(06/12/2011 10:19:05 GMT)

@ben i wish you were there as well

@Mark same goes for you, it would be awesome

ChrisC(06/12/2011 13:17:27 GMT)

Congrats Mark – look forward to attending!

Mark Myers(06/12/2011 15:43:19 GMT)

thanks Chris, i better make it a good one

Its funny how history repeats its self, I was listening to the Grails Podcast 122 and listening to the netflix boys describing their working enviroment and the features they used, these include

• Rapid Application Deployment (Groovy and Grail’s)
• Everybody building apps all over the place
• Timed jobs (Quartz)
• Shared infrastructure (AWS)
• None Relational Data storage (simpleDB and Cassandra)It sounds as if they are really getting stuff done and making things work for them and growing all the time with the best they can get hold of, I have heard this before, last time was in the heyday of lotus notes.Draw you own conclusions.but mine are:
• If you think your way is the best and only way, then you have not looked around in the last 5 mins.
• Always look to grow and change, treat it as fun rather than a challenge.

Old Comments

Jerry Carter(06/04/2011 17:02:05 GDT)

+1 esp. facing change. learned just this week that crutches can be used to turn off lights, activate the power lock toggle on the car door, as a temporary door stop and to entertain children. Oh, and keep weight off a blown out hip.

More in line with this post though, some of the concepts that have come along in the past ten years really make what we already know how to use more useful if we’re willing to take the time to understand and embrace them, even if only for the duration of a single project.

Mark Myers(06/04/2011 21:45:23 GDT)

sage words Jerry sage words!!

Opps!, forgot to post this

Here it is “The horror of losing agent manager and other chilling tales”

Hope it is of some use, feel free to point out stuff i have missed or got wrong, it would be nice if it could grow