Pramatr Blog

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!

Nearly a year ago, I posted a question on Spring Forum entitled, “am I working for the wrong companies or is it just not that common to attend conferences?”. I’ve worked as a developer for over six years and as yet I’ve never had the opportunity to attend a single conference. I thought I might be alone in this, but I’ve spoken to a large number of developers who are in exactly the same position, some of whom have worked in the industry far longer than I have.

Having worked for small companies in the past, I can fully understand the problems associated with sending developers to conferences. Sending one developer doesn’t cost a vast amount of money, but if all your developers want to go the money really does start to mount up. After the issue of cost, you then have to factor in the lost development time, not only for the conference but travelling to and from the event as well. The various costs to the business can soon become very prohibitive.

Back in January of this year, I decided that I would make sure I attended a conference this year, and decided I would just pay for it myself. I wanted to see if conferences really are worth the money. After months of discussing it on Spring Forums, I had the pleasure of attending SpringOne in June. The conference, hotel, travel and other costs came in at around £800 (€1200 or US$1600) in total. I also decided to take a weeks holiday from work to make the most of my trip.
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