If you can't be a good speaker, be a groovy speaker

I will be speaking on groovy and grails at the up coming 2GX conference in New Orleans in October. If you are in the groovy space or you are just looking, you don't want to miss this... all the big names will be there. Most of the leading authors and committers in the groovy, grails and griffon space will be there!

How I got to be among them is beyond me... but it sure is groovy!

My topics include security, where the focus will include defense against hacking techniques such as injection flaws and XSS, followed by a walk through of the security plugin and how to secure urls and services. The second session is on Java memory management, the memory demands of a dynamic language, along with tools on debugging Grails applications in production.

Personal Career Guiding Principals

I have received a number of requests from team members and session attendees for career path guidance. Here is what I threw together... I would enjoy others comments on what makes a difference for them!

My Guiding Principles

1. Become an expert at what is coming...
I've been lucky to live in an area of the country which is conservative when it comes to technology, which can at times be very dissatisfying. I travel to the coast (usually west) at least once per year for a technical conference. Through observation and networking, I learn the passions of the technical industry (not the vendor hype... beware the vendor hype). I make time to become well versed in these spaces. Within 1 year clients are interested and are looking for advice, within 2 they are looking for consultants. This is absolutely necessary to be a good architect anyway.
Suggestion: No one should work in our business without reading the mythical man month. Also read the pragmatic programmer or the quick guide if not the book: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/files/Pragmatic%20Quick%20Reference.htm

2. Have the final say on matters that affect you...
Each of us is responsible for ourselves. If a company says no to training, or a conference or... that doesn't mean no to me... it means that this activity will not be subsidized. The next question to me is it worth the full obligation. There are plenty of training courses I've not only paid for, but took vacation time to be at. I currently have a nice large LCD screen, a wireless headset for my office phone and I don't use the corporate PC, I bought a MacBook Pro... all of which I paid for. I am generally unwilling to compromise working with the best tools. It shocks me in fact that Chefs bring their own cutlery, mechanics bring their own tools and software developers have better machines at home then they use at work, with an expectation that all their tools are provided for them by some company. In addition to the MacBook, I have invested significant dollars in software. Although I like open source, in many cases it is not the best. So I have TextMate, Intellij, MS Office, Keynote, etc. This wasn't as easy starting out, now frankly some vendors send me licenses now so that I'm showing their tool when I'm demoing. It is important to note that I do not accept licenses even for free if I can't stand behind the tool.
Suggestion: Invest in you! Be a master craftsman. Read: http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/04/01/master-craftsman-teams

3. Seek out Mentors and Network...
Find people who are great at what they do in an area of interest and seek them out, read their books, articles and blogs. Email them. Network with them. Obviously don't annoy them. Perhaps buy them lunch. Challenge them (for instance, "you said xyz, why would you say that?" or "why wouldn't you say yyy?"). Better yet, see what they are thinking about, what they are working on and what they might need help with. Help them! Pass them some work (if they have time), and ask their opinion.
Suggestion: Go to conferences and network.

4. Build your brand...
Create a brand for yourself. Be the Java Memory guy, the F# guy. Dive deep and market yourself. This means; a) find jobs or opportunities to work in this space, b) blog in this space, c) provide presentations in this space d) write articles or a book in this space. Your digital footprint is very important and it takes time to build out. As an example, if you search my name, the first several pages are me. This is significant. The goal here is to in a position to be hired for a gig without a resume. Those asking for you by name don't need a resume, they know what you represent. Reputation is everything! The great thing about a personal brand is it is more reasonable to change than a business brand... so 2 years as the czar of java, followed by...
Suggestion: Read Groundswell.

5. Know who you are and what makes you special...
This takes time for most people. You have to know what your talents are and what you are not good at. When you know what you lack, find teams / team members to compensate. For instance, I am a knowledge sponge and learn very quickly, but I get bored quickly. I am not as good working with a plain piece of paper, but I can perfect and analyze the dickens out of any architecture, system or code put in front of me. Take some personality tests and understand your personality. It's worth it! In the process of learning you.
Suggestion: Read Brain Rules.

6. Learn and consistently work on soft skills
Don't be the average developer... It is ok to be a geek, but be an alpha geek! Most developers will have one of two paths; PM or architect. Either way, the skills are completely different from what made them great as a developer. In the end, developing software is about enabling the business to a) make money or b) save money. Learn their language.
Suggestion: Read How to win friends and influence people and seven habits of highly effective people.

7. Be a Leader!
Leadership is earned... it isn't a title. For a technical person, It consists of having deep technical skills in at least 1 area combined with good morals. People follow people who know what the heck they are talking about and they trust. Knowledge without morals and people don't trust you. Morals without knowledge and you are a really nice guy. It has to be both.

8. Don't be Afraid:
- to say no (especially to things that don't align with you, know what you want)
- to have an opinion or stance on a subject (as soon as you do someone will shoot arrows at you)
- to change your opinion when the evidence dictates... but not based on pressure or opinion
- to make a decision (even in the absence of information)
- to be criticized
Suggestion: Read Who moved my Cheese.

9. Eat like a Bird and poop like an elephant
This is a wonderful phrase by Guy Kawasaki. Birds eat half their weight in food per day... Elephats poop... well they poop a lot. The idea is to read, listen, consume knowledge... then poop... I mean share that knowledge with anyone and everyone. I have a large library (which I read), and an account with Audible and Audio-Tech Book Summaries.
Suggestion: Read made to stick, and rules for revolutionaries.

10. Passion!
Have some... find it! There is nothing more convincing and more contagious than someone with passion. Change you, then change the world!

11. Have fun...
Life is too short

BTrace and JStat

I just finished a JavaOne presentation on Debugging your Production JVM. The killer part and climax of the presentation was on BTrace. BTrace just rocks! As good as it is, the documentation and javadoc information is somewhat dated. This post will explain one of my favorite tool sets working together; that being jstat and Btrace.

JStat
Jstat is a tool that has been provided in the jdk bin directory since Java 5. It has a number features, which can be examined by using the flag -options:

jstat -options

The most significant in my opinion being jstat -gcutils which provides an output of jvm memory by compartment; survivor spaces, eden, old and perm space. Here are the steps if this is new to you:
1. start an demo application: java -jar Java2D.jar
2. get the pid: jps
3. lauch jstat: jstat -gcutil 1483
output:

S0     S1     E      O      P     YGC     YGCT    FGC    FGCT     GCT
0.00   0.00  10.61  59.98  76.81      8    0.057     9    0.460    0.516

BTrace
Btrace is a tool that allows you to inject probes into a running java process to observe and debug an application. I won't go into "how" to use BTrace, as I've blogged on it in the past and the BTrace document does a good job of explaining it.

The area that is lacking is around the @Export annotation for BTrace scripts. There are no details in the documentation and the sample code comments says "// create a jvmstat counter using @Export"... yeah... right... Even the internal code comments and JavaDocs are just as vague. So if you are lost at this point, jstat use to be called jvmstat and was provided as part of the distribution of jvmstat. Even then there is no information on how to leverage the two... until now!!

Creating the Script
Take a look at the ThreadCounter.java file in the sample directory of BTrace. Any value you want to be exposed to jstat will need to be annotated with @Export. Then you will need to assign a value to this exported value with a static method from BtraceUtils. In the ThreadCounter example this is accomplished with perfLong("btrace.com.sun.btrace.samples.ThreadCounter.count"); The next step is to inject this code into a targeted JVM; such as:

btrace 1483 ../samples/ThreadCounter.java 

Accessing BTrace exports with jstat
The undocumented trick for jstat is that you have to specify -J-Djstat.showUnsupported=true and -name with the name of the exported variable defined by the perf statement. Here is the full command-line:

jstat -J-Djstat.showUnsupported=true -name btrace.com.sun.btrace.samples.ThreadCounter.count 1483

Thanks to Sundar at Sun for the enlightenment!