In Lewis Carrol’s "Through the Looking Glass" there is a part where Alice and the Red Queen are running on a giant chessboard but don’t seem to be making any forward progress. While Alice is frustrated by this struggle, the Red Queen says, “If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that."
Technology innovations nowadays are so fast that I sometimes feel like Alice while trying to keep up with them. One way I've found to cope with the enormous amount of new stuff is to listen to podcasts. The main advantage of podcasts is of course the fact that you can listen to them while you are doing something else. I listen to them while I commute to and from work which can be between 40 minutes to more than an hour every day (since I'm driving my car I can't read any printed material).
I listen to a lot of podcasts (I am subscribed to more than 10 podcast feeds) and this time I would like to recommend two of them:
- The first one is The Java Posse - this podcast is a discussion about Java related technologies between four veteran Java software architects. These podcasts have a nice mix of news, discussions and interviews presented with good attitude and a lot of humor. Every week there is a new episode, usually a news roundup with commentary from the posse members. From time to time they have special podcasts that include excellent interviews and special events like the JavaOne BOF session and the Java Posse Roundup.
- My second recommendation is ITConversations which is actually a portal for a lot of high quality podcasts that include interviews, special collections and presentations from events such as O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Summit and the Emerging Technology conference. Some of my favorites are : the funny and sometimes provocative Paul Graham, Tim Bray on the the Atom Syndication Format and publishing protocol and Kent Beck on developer testing.
More podcast recommendations in one of my upcoming blog entries.
Enjoy your listening...
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