Links of the Week

Some time ago, Ole Morten tried a concept called MyWeeklyLinks, but he stopped after the eighth one. I speculate this was because he defined an audience that had no need for this kind of information, namely us: his readership. We rely on Twitter, blogs and other community-driven sites (Digg, Google Reader, DZone) for the fitting stream of links we consume.

That's not to say that that weekly links is a useless practice. Remember that you, dear readers,  are "information power users": We like to stay on top of what's going on out there, we stay updated. We devote a certain amount of time for this activity. Perhaps we have no need to consume "weekly links", but we can produce it for our colleagues.

I wrote my first mail like this to the team mailing list little over a year ago, simply three links:

Hi folks, I just wanted so share some interesting resources I found the last few days:  

This is a short overview of some Java programming styles that can give nicer code (although much debate followed after the post):

> http://codemonkeyism.com/generation-java-programming-style/

JetBrains are beta'ing a new IDE for pure web developers (not Java). Perhaps something for you guys who are tired Eclipse so-and-so CSS/JavaScript features?

> http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/WI/Web+IDE+EAP

Eclipse Galileo is out since June, if you haven't heard already. Some interesting features include improvements to the Compare editor, better Mac-support, a bunch of GUI/usability improvements, and Java code navigation and auto-completion. I've been running it since yesterday, and so far it seems stable enough:

> http://www.eclipse.org/galileo/

I don't know if people think such links are useful, but if you want to, I can make a tradition of sending out a handful links every week or so (?). Give me a ping if you think it's a good idea.

And tradition it became. Since then I've sent out 42 of these mails.

The way I go about this is that every time I'm reading an article or blog post (in my free time) that could be relevant for my team, I paste it into a draft mail in GMail. By lunch-time Friday, I shine it up a little and send it out.

I receive the odd feedback or comment on these, so I know that at least some colleagues are skimming through them and finding something of value. That's enough motivation to keep me going.