Parleys.com: My New Favourite Site
Posted by pramatr on October 18th, 2008
For the past few months, I’ve been spending most of my lunch breaks viewing the plethora of content available on Parleys. I first heard about Parleys courtesy of Marten Deinum, during a conversation on Spring Forum. Back then it seemed to be a well kept secret, but according to it’s website, 45,000+ people have now visited the site.
For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of visiting Parleys and don’t know what it is, the home page describes it as:
Parleys.com is a new BeJUG initiative where the different recorded talks from JavaPolis, BeJUG, SpringOne, JaZoon, JavaZone and EclipseCon (and hopefully others in the future) get published on a regular basis.
The Parleys.com site wants to become the premier Java e-learning site where you can listen and subscribe to many Java related podcasts or view the flash talks, hopefully all resulting in improving your Java skills.
There’s a wide array of presentations available (over 100 at last count), so there should be something there to interest you. Each presentation gives you a handy overview of the content, the running time and also the votes that have been cast. All of these together, make it very easy to choose something to fill your lunch break.
The presentations provide audio, video and also slides to accompany it. It’s great to be able to leave the presentation going in the background whilst I’m do something else. If I really have nothing to do, it’s great to be able to view the additional content the slides provide. One feature I’ve found invaluable however, is the ability to skip through the agenda. When you have to get back to work, it’s so nice to be able to carry on watching from where you left off when you get home.
If you haven’t already used Parleys, I would thoroughly recommend a visit. I’ve found Parleys to been an invaluable tool for learning about new technologies and techniques. Over the past few months, I’ve seen a large number of presentations on topics that I previously knew virtually nothing about. There are typically new presentations added at least every couple of weeks, so I’m looking forward to seeing what content is added next. And lastly don’t forget to vote for the presentations, it’s great to know what other people did or didn’t enjoy!