My top four blogs of 2024

Looking back at a year of many blogs

Photo by nousnou iwasaki on Unsplash

This is the 48th blog I have written and published this year. I’m pretty sure that’s the most blogs I’ve written in a single year. This year will be remembered for a long time, for a variety of different reasons. I probably won’t remember this year as the year I wrote a lot of blogs. I will remember it as the year I wrote my first technical book. Blogging became a kind of regular writing detox for me this year. It helped me find and keep my focus, amidst the ever distracting circus of social media and news.

Below are links to my top four blogs this year. Based on the number of reads, not views, my top four blogs this year were all about Java. Three of the blogs were also about Smalltalk. This was kind of an interesting surprise. Smalltalk brought me some new insights and fun experiments this year, which I am thankful for. Java brought me a wonderful community to share these insights with, and a great language and IDE to use for my code examples. Not everything we learn has to be less than thirty years old. We still have so much we can learn from the past seventy five years of programming language history.

Anyway, I am happy to have been able to share these blogs with the developer community in 2024. I hope the insights and lessons continue to help others on their journey of discovery and learning.

Thank you for reading! Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

#1 — 6.2K reads

What if null was an Object in Java?

#2 — 4.2K reads

Map-Oriented Programming in Java

#3 — 2.6K reads

10 Billion Integers Walk Into an Array

#4 — 1.6K reads

What if Java had no if?

I am the creator of and committer for the Eclipse Collections OSS project, which is managed at the Eclipse Foundation. Eclipse Collections is open for contributions.