My 2012 - including a new Garbage Collection Tool

Hi all,

So I haven't written here for over a year! Why?

TLDR

Well because several amazing things have happened in the last year or so. I am truly, truly blessed to be part of an amazing, vibrant community of hackers, dreamers and doers. If you've been following me on Twitter [1] then hopefully you'll have had an idea of what's been going on. If not, or if you were after more details then read on!

I'm the CTO of a new Start-up called jClarity

I co-founded a new start-up called jClarity [2] with industry legends Ben Evans [3] and Kirk Pepperdine [4] along with a host of other exceptional engineers [5]. We're focusing on intelligent products to optimise Java/JVM applications and ensure the stability of the Cloud during its infancy. Basically we decided to try science, basing our analytics off empirical science as opposed to guesswork.

Today, existing performance tools give you lots of data, lots of graphs and no real answers. They also impact heavily on your running system and become a major bottleneck themselves. Having suffered on the wrong end of this for years, we decided to do something about it! We're focusing on simple, light-weight and easy to use tools that give answers as opposed to making you scratch around in deep computer science and Java/JVM theory.

Of course community and supporting FOSS is a strong part of this, we're passionate fans of fun tech communities. If you're interested in performance tuning, cloud, virtualisation, the internals of the JVM, how Java really works etc then sign-up to our Friends of jClarity [6] programme and join in the fun!

The London Java Community continues to kick butt!

We won two awards this year for our work in the Java Standards space. Our two programmes Adopt a JSR [7] and Adopt OpenJDK [8] continue to thrive and make a real difference to the ~9 million Java developers out there today.

For example, you can thank Stephen Colebourne and also Richard Warburton/James Gough for ensuring that Java 8 gets some great new date and time APIs via JSR 310!

I spoke at 10+ conferences

I was privileged to be invited to speak at a large variety of conferences this year, from intimate rooms at regional events in their first year to keynotes at some of the largest Java conferences in the world. It was (as always) a learning curve, dealing with different audience sizes, cultures and areas of interest.

My technical talks focused on Java and the Machine - looking at where the language and the JVM hit the Operating system and the hardware and why that matters again. For those of you who missed the 2012 trend on this, basically multi-core CPUs and virtualisation/cloud means that Java developers have to really think about the hardware they are coding on top of again, no more free lunch!

The Well-Grounded Java Developer was released!

After ~2 years of elapsed time Ben Evans and myself are very proud that our first book The Well-Grounded Java Developer [9] has been released. So far it's all 5 star reviews in Amazon, some even by people we don't know ;-)!

I was honoured to be counted as a Java Champion

The Java Champions [10] are a group of Java luminaries that I've looked up to my entire career. To be named in their number is still bewildering to me, but there you have it.

We built a solution to figure out your Garbage Collection problems

We've released Censum, a new tool for analysing Garbage Collection logs, telling you exactly what you need to change in order to stop those mysterious pauses and the OutOfMemoryErrors (amongst other things).

Garbage Collection often causes production problems, and is a difficult, specialised area that can be very frustrating for busy developers, devops and operations teams. Censum analyses complex logs and tells you about your GC performance problems in plain English, along with the fix!

Censum is available to download at www.jclarity.com [2].

So that's been my year in a nutshell - I hope yours was as much fun and that you got to write more code than I did, something I need to rectify in 2013 :-)