Jakub Korab

Category: thoughts

  • Batching JMS messages for performance; not so fast

    Recently an idea had crossed my radar around speeding up performance of messaging producers; batching messages into a single transaction. The idea being that there is overhead in the standard behaviour of a message bus that can be optimised out if you group messages into a single transaction. My initial thoughts about this were that […]

  • Give your DB the love it deserves

    Pity the poor database. As critical to most apps as a foundation to a building. And as interesting as an accounting seminar at a nudist colony. Not sexy enough for the attentions of the senior dev, or considered to be “well understood”, DB work frequently end up getting handed off to the junior guys on […]

  • Goldilocks actors: not too many, not too few

    After my last post on parallelism with Scala actors, I had a thought: when doing a calculation like this, am I actually making the most of my resources? If as in the Pi example, more cycles will generally lead to a better result, surely if I have a limited amount of time to get the […]

  • Better living through parallelism

    Judging by the interest to my last actors post, I thought I’d throw up a piece of code that uses actors anonymously to parallelise a long running operation. Not every operation can be parallelised, most things we work on tend to be fairly sequential. However, sometimes if you can split up the work to perform […]

  • Why I dig Scala: Concurrency and the Dining Philosophers

    I am occasionally asked what the big deal is about Scala. For me, to decide whether a programming language is worthwhile is dependent on two practical questions: does it aid comprehension, and does it reduce code. The two are not necessarily interchangeable. Terseness, after all, does nothing to aid comprehension. Scala scores points on both […]

  • Tips on the London Eye

    Pretty much everyone who comes to London goes on to the London Eye. If you want to save yourself some time and money, book tickets online at their website to get a 10% discount, and you get to skip the ticket queue when you turn up to collect your tickets. Great way to save yourself […]

  • The Moustache is Back!

    During Movember (the month formerly known as November) I’m growing a Mo. That’s right I’m bringing the moustache back, because I want to help tackle men’s health issues and fight prostate cancer.The Movember rules are simple. I start out on the 1st clean shaven, and for the rest of the month grow the most awesome […]

  • Conference organizing no more

    After taking a step back to have a think about my situation, I have regretfully pulled out of organizing the IJTC conference in Dublin this year. Putting together a conference is a hugely involved activity and I just do not have the time to spare on it this year. I wish the remaining organizers the […]

  • Irish Java Technologies Conference 2008

    It’s that time of the year again. We are just starting to ramp up getting this year’s conference in Dublin together for November. A good few months this time, as opposed to our insane 3 month schedule last year. There are a bunch of themes that we are looking to cover in this year’s line-up, […]

  • Who reads your blog?

    So, why no blog posts lately? Most of the interesting stuff that folks blog about are those issues and ideas which have currency, those at the forefront at their minds. Tech blogs too deal with the everyday. Issues that we have come across, interesting ideas, problems and techniques. However, in this day of corporate non-disclosure […]