So few newscasts

[Frank Mathy]

I really enjoy listening to your podcasts. Recently there have been only very few Java Posse newscasts. Mostly only recordings of the Java Posse Roundup and on the news side a lot of discussion on non-Java-topics. I'm a little concerned and it appears to me like the podcast team has lost its motivation or is too busy.

I hope that this impression isn't accurate since I got addicted to the Java Posse podcast and am really missing the time when there was a new newscast every 1-2 weeks.

[Chet]

(Re-sending this reply because it seemed really confusing as a reply to the digest form of this group. So, in a much more beautiful and well-thought out presentation, here is said reply)

As the newest and most uninformed member of the group, I'll attempt to address this from my historically-ignorant perspective:

I see two questions here:

- What's with all of the Roundup recordings recently?

- What about Java news?

On the first one, we found that there were a lot of recordings still left from the 2012 Roundup and wanted to post those at least within the year when they were recorded. So there was a higher proportion of those shows vs. posse recordings recently. That will end soon now that the hopper is empty (though the new Roundup episodes will soon start to mix in with the episodes).

As to the second point, the show has changed over the years and evolved into one where we simply don't cover the amount of data/news/headlines that the show originally did. For one thing, we don't do as much "Product FooBar, release 3.2.4.1_17 update 19 was released this week."

Since I joined the posse after this particular change, I can only speculate on why (I could ask the other guys, but it's more fun to just take a wild guess). I think that it takes a lot of time and effort to mine for those stories compared to the worth of actually hearing it on the broadcast. These are simple release headlines that you can get anywhere; I don't think the posse discussion of them adds much. Also, we are not focused as much on _Java_ news specifically because, well, we (meaning the posse and everyone that tunes in) does so much more in our jobs besides writing code in any single language. It seems more helpful, and frankly more interesting, to  cover anything relevant in the larger land of software development, without zeroing in on that one specific area. 

We also tend to have more wide-ranging discussions that are not necessarily code related (password apps and backup systems come to mind, since these happened during my teeny tiny tenure). These topics are definitely not about the code, but seem relevant to the types of issues that developers have to deal with, so they seemed ripe for conversation.

Oh, and yeah, we do tend to get pretty swamped with work at times, so the recordings don't happen on a rigorous schedule, but rather on a when-we-can-do-and-enjoy-them schedule. Hopefully it's often enough, and we're motivated enough when we do gather, to offer something worth the download and listening time.

Chet.

[Mark Derricutt]

Hey Chet,

This sounds much the same as our podcast, we used to have a good mix of
news and discussion, but eventually we split the news out to its own
show as we found didn't only liked one or the other, soon we found there
wasn't much happening in Java at the time so that show kinda stopped -
talk about 2.3.4 of this, 1.3.6-stable-rc-4 of that each week kinda gets
boring.

I much like the new Posse with much more coding meat for a change, its
good - like a BBQ.

Mark