Douglas Hawkins
Twin Cities Software Symposium
Minneapolis · October 3 - 4, 2014
Lead Developer Java Performance Monitoring at Datadog
Douglas Hawkins has been passionately developing software for the past 20 years.
Throughout Doug's career, he has focused on creating performance intensive applications
in Java ranging from bioinformatics to financial exchanges.
After 10 years as a Java developer, Doug transitioned to working on Azul's Java Virtual Machine.
Today, Doug continues his interest in building performance tools for developers working on Datadog's Java Application Performance Monitoring.
While Doug's passion for developing software remains, his true passion is in sharing his
interest in low-level details and JVM performance with others.
Presentations
JVM Mechanics
HotSpot promises to do wonders for us by Just-in-Time (JIT) compiling the “right” code for us, but how does it makes those decisions? And, perhaps more importantly, what happens when it's wrong?
Java Optimizations That Matter (and Some That Don't)
Early releases of Java performed poorly, but those issues largely disappeared long ago with the introduction of HotSpot. However, much of the performance advice for Java persists through hearsay from those early days.
What's in a Type? A Mathematical View of the Java Type System
Over the years, Java developers have learned through trial-and-error the best ways to use Java's type system. But certain parts of the type system like wildcard generics and covariant return types are
under used; in-part, because they are not well understood.