Welcome to the Interesting Links section of AutumnCode.com!

I spent years at TheServerSide and other environments just scanning the feed, so to speak, gathering tiny bits of interesting references and news. Some of it was interesting because it was relevant (“Java goes open source at last!”), some of it was informative (“Use ArrayList instead of LinkedList in Java, and here’s why”), and some of it was just stuff that was being put out there that I thought people should be aware of (“Use LinkedList instead of ArrayList in Java!”).

However, for a lot of these links for the past few years, they’ve basically slipped into nothingness. They’re in various logs, I guess; a lot of them went into the Freenode ##java channel logs (now on Libera.chat as #java, the logs are available at https://javabot.evanchooly.com/logs/#java/today, and we even had a podcast where we went over a lot of them for a while…)

The problem with the channel logs is that they’re very ephemeral and difficult to search, and the podcast was a lot of effort; I thought originally I’d be just yapping for five minutes into a mic, and publish, but I found that really difficult to do. I don’t speak well or easily, and I found it necessary to bring in a good friend to make it tolerable to listen to - but that introduces a lot of scheduling and production work. Instead of a five minute exposition with a ten minute production cycle, it turned into four hours’ worth of work at least… for few readers and no feedback.

Feedback wasn’t a reward, necessarily, but with no feedback we had no idea if what we were doing was working. A few months after we stopped, we found that users had liked the podcast… but the time had passed for it. We mentioned restarting it, because Andrew and I are good friends and always will be, but the scheduling problems remained, and there was still no likelihood of a feedback loop that helped us improve.

I despise the loss of information, though, and my trawling of the Internet is rewarding personally, and … I don’t know, like I said, I despise losing information. I think it borders on sin.

So I’m starting this, as a simple way to record information and taxonomies, so we don’t lose the information.