Java is often described as a simple programming language. While this is arguably true, it has still retained the ability to surprise me after using it full time for years.

From 2005 to 2008 I was an undergraduate studying Computer Science at Cambridge. My method of preparing for the exams was to summarise each lecture course into just a few sides of A4, which I’d then commit to memory in their entirety.

Something I recently became interested in is map data structures for external memory — i.e. ways of storing indexed data that are optimized for storage on disk.

I recently had cause to investigate fast methods of storing and transferring financial timeseries. Naively, timeseries can be represented in memory or on disk as simple dense arrays of floating point numbers. This is an attractive representation with many nice properties:

I recently released my first open source library for Java, MDBI. I learnt a lot about the Java open-source ecosystem as part of this process, and this blog summarises that in the hope that it will be useful to others. Specifically, the post will explain how to set up a project using the modern Gradle build system to build code and deploy it to the standard Maven Central repository from the command line really easily.