Vanilla Java

Background Between my partner and I, we have six daughters, and as they have grown I have thought more interested in their long term future, the role of women in society, the way technology will change our lives and in particular the role of women in technology. On the last topic, all the articles I have read have been written my women.  In this post, I hope to outline my experiences in this regard. Women face many challenges, most typical of male dominated professions as well as some specific to the technology field.  I believe that there will be a time when IT, like teaching and accounting, will have more women than men. I can understand it is frustrating as a woman in technology to be treated as a novelty.  Perhaps my experience can illustrate why that might be. One thing I have learnt over the years is that while I am happy to talk technology all day, there is one time to stop, in social situations when women are present.  This doesn't come from men, but women overwhe

Overview Java 8 has added features such as lambdas and type inference. This makes the language less verbose and cleaner, however it comes with more side effects as you don't have to be as explicit in what you are doing. The return type of a lambda matters Java 8 infers the type of a closure.  One way it does this is to look at the return type (or whether anything is returned)  This can have a surprising side effect.  Consider this code. ExecutorService es = Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor(); es.submit(() -> {     try(Scanner scanner = new Scanner(new FileReader("file.txt"))) {         String line = scanner.nextLine();         process(line);     }     return null; }); This code compiles fine. However, the line return null;  appears redundant and you might be tempted to remove it.  However if you remove the line, you get an error. Error:(12, 39) java: unreported exception java.io.FileNotFoundException; must be caught or declared to

Overview Vendors typically publish numbers they are happy with, and avoid telling you about a product's weaknesses.  However, behind the numbers is a dirty secret if you know where to look. Why don't we use GPUs for everything? Finding problems which naturally scale to thousands of data points/tasks is easy for some problems, and very hard for others. GPUs are designed for computing large vector operations.  However, what is "large" and why does it matter? Say you have a GPU with 1024 cores. This means it can process a vector of length 1024 all at once and 2048 double the time.  But what happen if we only have a vector of 100, or 10 or 1. The inconvenient answer is it take the same amount of time because you can’t make use of all of your cores at once.  You get only 10%, 1% or just 0.1% of the peak performance.  If you want to get best efficiency, you want a problem which has many thousands of values which can be processed concurrently.  If you don