The greatest reference of them all

I’m talking of course about discussion groups/threads.

See, I’m in the process of rewriting major portions of my internal RFP tracking application, and so, I’ve had to hit the books big time. I re-read the Designer 6 Developer Handbook, but there are still many places where I wish it spent more time and some areas I just didn’t care for (typical). I also know that someone whom I read his blog (Hi Rocky!) has a book (maybe more) out on Amazon, which looks interesting, but I’m not sure I want yet another book (I have Redbooks coming out of my ears).

I decided to hit the Lotus Discussion forums on IBM DeveloperWorks, which is where I found answers to pretty much all the questions I had as I was going through some pain points in my application design. So I figured, why not just have them all on my HDD. Faster, easier, always available.

I created my connection documents, went to fetch the 4/5 and 6/7 Forums. Wow! Respectively 13Gb and 5Gb! But who cares nowadays. My primary HDD has 58Gb free. I do have some wiggle room on others drives, maybe 30Gb or so (gotta clean those up). So, I’m in the process or replicating some 1,000,000 discussion posts. The collective intelligence of countless developers way more advanced than I.

And best of all, tks to Lotus Notes, I’ll keep getting the new content through automatic replication. Woohoo! Now, back to looking at my download progress bar…