The Java Performance Tuning Road Show

Jack and I have been talking about organizing public offerings for our Java performance training courses for some time now. Last week we stopped talking and started doing something. I think that I am beginning to understand why it has taken us so long to start this effort. It is a daunting organizational task.

We do all of the work to produce our manuals. Having never been involved in the mass production of books before, I didn't realized how much attention to detail the process takes. How difficult can it be? You put paper in the printer and you print stuff. No problems here.... Next you punch some holes in the paper and do the binding. This also sounds fairly simple... right? In some sense it is.... until you start to realize that most printers just won’t stand up to the task of printing 10,000+ pages. My first choice of printer painfully proved this point. The printing process can take days! You also need to factor in the logistics of getting and maintaining printing supplies. When you print the much in such a short period of time, you quickly realize that the supplies are actually MORE expense than the hardware! It’s amazing but it becomes LESS expensive to buy new equipment WITH the drums and all the ink cartridges then it is to replace the drums and ink cartridges. Go figure! Even armed with this knowledge, it's difficult to make the economical choice to replace the printer that you bought last week with a new one.

The first time I went to get supplies for our first production run, I was faced with an unlimited choice of paper. To make a reasonable choice meant that I actually learn about paper. Everyone in the family thought that I was crazy but I felt that it was important to leave our customers with a high quality document. After all we had spend a lot of effort carefully gathering, pondering, writting, editing, and laying out the information. It didn’t make sense to “cheapen” the effort by using low quality printing. I wasn’t even sure that anyone would really notice but they did. We received many compliments on the quality of the books. Jack and I really appreciated these comments. It really made the effort worth it.

Next problem, can anyone guess at how much 10,000 pieces of paper loaded with ink actually weight? FYI, the bulk of the pages were 110 and the section separators were 160 weight.

Compared to printing, organizing public offerings seems like an incredibly more complicated task. I just wonder at what lessons we are going to learn as we enter the next phase or our journey.

If anyone is interested in helping us host a public offering, plese let us know. J