Saturday, February 3, 2018

Dreamix's Java Daily: Aggregation of Fresh Java Online Content

Roughly 18 months ago, I listed three blogs that regularly (daily or weekly) posted links to (and sometimes summaries of) new Java-related blog posts and articles. These blogs were listed under the "Other Resources" section at the bottom of my post "Recent Java News - Early June 2016". Two of those three featured blogs would stop posting those daily/weekly posts with links and summaries by the end of that same year (2016). In this post, I introduce a blog that has come to my attention since then and that I frequently reference when I wish to quickly determine what are the most interesting things going on in the Java online community.

One of the blogs that I featured in my post "Recent Java News - Early June 2016" was Robert Diana's "Geek Reading" series. That series ended approximately one month after my post, but had posted 1150 messages with the "Geek Reading" tag by that time. The reasons for the discontinuation of that series are articulated in the post "Geek Reading July 17, 2016 #1150".

Thorben Janssen's Java Weekly was on my original list, but Janssen concluded (at least temporarily) that series in late 2016 for reasons explained in the post "The end of Java Weekly ... for now." However, Janssen continues to help identify relevant and interesting online resources related to Java via tweets (his Twitter handle is @thjanssen123). It is also important to note that Janssen continues to post original content on his blog.

Of the three blogs that I specifically cited in June 2016 for their links and summaries of fresh Java online content, only the Baeldung Java Web Weekly posts have continued and I still find many good sources of Java-related news from these posts.

The Dreamix blog posts a series called "Java Daily" that provides links to a small number of interesting Java-related blog posts and articles each "working day." These links tend to be to online resources published since the last "Java Daily" blog post. These posts are simple and are typically composed of fewer than ten references with titles and links to the online content. There is typically little or no description beyond what the referenced work's title conveys. I find that the simplicity of these posts and small number of referenced resources allow me to very quickly identify new Java-related posts of interest.

Stoyan Mitov recently posted "Lessons Learned from Publishing the Java Daily during the Entire 2017," in which he writes about "lessons learned from publishing the Java Daily (almost) every working day throughout 2017." He calls this effort "an eye opening experience in the Java world" and outlines eleven "lessons learned from publishing more than 250 Java Dailies in 2017."

Mitov's Java Daily lessons learned post includes a lengthy list of "people one should follow on twitter to stay up to date" with links to the Twitter handle for each of these people. Mitov also references some of my favorite social media sites including DZone, Java Code Geeks, and Baeldung's Best Java Blogs. The post offers approaches to finding new Java sources and this reminds one of the effort that is involved in creating a daily post such as "Java Daily."

In "Lessons Learned from Publishing the Java Daily during the Entire 2017," Mitov makes an observation that I think developers may not fully appreciate until they write a blog of their own: "It's hard to keep up and support a good Java blog." I have seen many of promising blogs that I enjoy come to an end, some of them after a relatively small number of posts. An example of this is the aforementioned Geek Reading. Mitov also observes, "There aren’t so many news on Java on a daily basis. There are many blogs in the form of tutorials – mainly on the basics."

One of the advantages of working with a popular programming language such as Java is access to the thinking of the large community using that language. There is a wealth of online information on Java, but the downside is that it can be difficult to identify the freshest and most interesting new Java-related online resources. Software development social media sites such as DZone and Java Code Geeks help tremendously in this regard, but I have found that these simple recurring blog posts such as those provided by Baeldung's Java Web Weekly, and now by Dreamix's Java Daily, sometimes provide a different perspective on what's interesting that complements those social media sites well.

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