Running The Marathon
Veronica Augustsson - 13 Jun 2008Not a story about any marathon. A story about The Marathon.
How can a marathon be compared to something that we do at Cinnober? It depends how you see it. I think running a marathon is like launching a product without acceptance test, without testing in production environment and barely without have run a full capacity test.
So, who can be that stupid that you expose your self for something like that? I was. And the other 8399 first Stockholm Marathon runners earlier this month. I mean, the other 10000 know what they were getting in to on for hand.
It all started in September when I wanted to have a new goal with my training. Pär Bertilsson and I walked down the stairs at our former premises at Industrigatan, checking out for the weekend when Pär was asking what I was training for. I answered “I think I’m going to run Stockholm Marathon”. To be honest, I think I was more surprised by the answer than Pär was. Said and done I headed home, started my computer and spent 2 hours surfing among Marathon Training Programs. The longest I run so far was half a marathon. But a marathon felt doable so I signed up. I also sent an email to my family and friends telling that May 31 2008 I was going to run my first Stockholm Marathon. Perfect. Just making sure there is no way of regretting.
36 weeks to go. Late September. I started to train immediately. It was so fun! After running two half marathons this was just what I needed.
22 weeks to go. December. No snow. The perfect marathon winter! The official marathon training program starts.
15 weeks to go. February, just 2 degrees, rain. The first proof of concept, 25+ km. Besides that I could not speak the last 10 km since my mouth was so frozen, it went well! Feeling confident!
4 weeks to go. There has been around 7 or 8 pass around 27-30 km. Here comes the one and only longest lap before the race. 33 km. It is the warmest weather of the year. 26 degrease. I’m running out of water. Thirsty with 7 more km to go. 4 more km, stopping at a gas station to refill my water bottles. Can’t barely run the last km. Anyway, I wasn’t that worried for the race. I had after all run totally 81 km this week.
1 week to go. The big day is coming up. Almost only rest on the schedule this week. Feeling unreal. All training since September just focusing on May 31.
On the starting line. I can’t remember that I had any feelings at all
10 km. I’m flying
26 km. Just heading in to Strandvägen from Djurgården. Soo beautiful!
30 km. I promise you that every new generation, old generation and young generation of my muscle cells was just full of garbage. Is there a way of triggering a human garbage collection, please let me know
30-40 km. Has 10 km ever been this far?
40 km. Seeing Stockholm Stadion. (Probably dreaming since you can’t see it from here) Getting new energy and increasing the speed.
41950 m. Entering Stockholm Stadion. Almost double the speed (it feels like anyway). I’ll never forget this moment. The grandstand is crowded with people watching me crossing the finishing line. Or did they? I don’t care. Crossing that line was such a relief. But at the same time sad. Now it’s over. Time to find new goals to over come.
Having said that, I can guarantee you that I will do everything I can be as prepared as possible to any production launch! Not knowing if the capacity is enough or not knowing if the hardware is ideal is not something that you want to be part of when the whole company’s reputation is at stake. Or even worse, our customer’s reputation.
The best thing is that I’m not the only one at Cinnober that has run The Marathon. We are many strugglers. And I’m sure there are more to come. Isn’t there J-O?
Hot in Sweden
Fredrik Backlund - 6 Jun 2008What is it that has made Stockholm, far up in the cold North, to such a hub for global financial technology? A couple of business media have asked this question lately.
Some says the explanation is within the “technology tradition” of Sweden combined with the fact that a small domestic market drives internationalization. Some says that a great deal stems from the early initiative of the legendary Olof Stenhammar”.
The answer might lie here and also in the phenomena clustering…?
However, even the Swedes seem a bit surprised over the number of financial tech companies that successfully have expanded during recent years. This week, the leading Scandinavian business magazine Affärsvärlden published an extensive focus on this sector.
Cinnober, chosen by BOAT, Turquoise and Alpha Trading Systems, is of course covered. Also business peers in the actual physical neighborhood such as ORC, Neonet, Tbricks and… well, okay… even also a few words regarding that “US owned exchange” located in the rougher harbor area of Stockholm…
One morning the magazine actually succeeded to assemble some of the joined forces for a photo session. Some CEOs and founders were able to participate on short notice. Usual spokespersons on our hand such as Jan and Nils-Robert were of course on various flights. Not exactly a PR officer’s dream…
Cinnober was represented in the photo session by two of the founders; Gunnar Mjöberg and Peter Lenti – still active within the day-to-day business and development.
I wonder if Gunnar and Peter were too impressed over the idea of the appearance within a glossy business magazine – they might have preferred a techie magazine within the Java community or so? But they didn’t have such a choice while being hunted down by colleagues with a special interest within “Corporate Communications”. ‘Cause it’s great with great publicity! ; – )
Some reflections from JavaOne in San Francisco
Kalle Hassel - 3 Jun 2008I really love San Francisco with the cable cars, Lombard Street, Golden gate, Victorian houses. If you think that I experienced all these things… Wrong! I joined the JavaOne conference…
Some weeks before, I booked my sessions etc. The choice was simple, focus on technology for the financial market.
My schedule got full of sessions with Real-time Java, Garbage Collection, Concurrency, Throughput & Latency, and the new GC type G1. Yes, I am into Java…
When I reached SF I felt like being in a movie, everything were new but yet so familiar…
Well, 15,000 Java developers joined the conference at Moscone Center. When I reached the conference area I first reached the north building where the large session was held.
But all people were stopped at the entrance by a conference guard, we were not allowed to just go the stairs down to the session hall, but we saw people being downstairs, weird! Why?“You have to go to the other side of the street, to the south building, there is a way to the session hall under the street”. It was no idea arguing, because I heard several now irritated Java developers arguing the same way I intended…
I walked across the Folsom street to the south building, but I was confused, a lot of people stood in front of some other guards saying things like what I had just heard. – “You have to go to the other side, go to the north building”…
After a while I decided to give it another try, I walked across the street again, together with hundreds of people. I heard the same arguing again from Java developers but now new people, perhaps newly arrived, I saw them turn around and walk across the street, I smiled for myself and thought good luck…Anyway, I came to the large session hall just in time.
Some highlights from JavaOne, theme JAVA + YOU:
- JavaFX, has been more developed. A demo gave an overall cool impression; dragging a running application from a browser onto the desktop, closing the browser and the app continues running just like that.
- Rock’n‘Roll; Neil Young showed up on the first keynote giving credit to Java and Blue Ray.
- G1, Sun develops a future replacement of GC type CMS. The new G1 will focus on low latency but still good throughput.
- Real-time Java. There exist RTJVM from Sun, IBM and JRockit today. The JSR work is still ongoing. Soon new updated VMs will be released.
- Java1.7. Some news are: Multi-catch, enhancements of Annotations, closures, fork/join framework and a transfer queue.
- JMARS; NASA has produced a very impressive tool for mapping Mars and handling various geological data. The amazing application showing Mars’ elevation, potential landing sites, and a large amount of surface detail shots.
The sessions were held on a rather high level. I had to talk to the speakers, join the BOFs to get answers to the specific questions our company had. I visited some company booth and some companies presented performance analysis tools for production, that should not slow latency at all, maybe some milliseconds, they told me. When I said that decrease of latency for only 1 ms in our system is bad, they looked like they had got something stuck in their throat…and it was time for me to walk on.
The computer revolution is here, we already did the 0->1 CPU transition. Concurrent programming is now “the norm”, many companies are doing the 1->2 CPU transition. Scalable concurrent programming is even harder. It is time to think about the 2->N CPU transition. There is one interesting query we could try to answer: What is the limit of parallelism of our trading system?
In the future I believe Cinnober have to adopt to the new memory models, immortal memory and scoped memory using Real-time Java using NHRT and Javolution to decrease the latency.
One conclusion of all my inputs I got from JavaOne is very satisfying:
Cinnober already have relationship with a number of the speakers and we cover the new technology. We either have ongoing research or we already know the new technology well. I feel that we are well-equipped for future competition.And, there is no doubt about it, I will for sure go back to experience the amazing Bay area again.
“I believe in an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.”
Arthur Hays Sulzberger
But at least I have one photo of SF with me back home, I took a shot on a postcard…
Photo of a postcard
June 2008
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