Can I get some brutally honest feedback on a podcast I ran for 2 years (100+ episodes at once per week) at https://runninginproduction.com/? It's a podcast focused on chatting with developers around how they build and deploy their web apps. It mostly focuses on the "why", tech stack choices, libraries, workflows, lessons learned, production war stories, etc..
In my mind I thought it was a good idea but it got so little listeners that I had to abort recording new episodes due to burn out since there was no path forward to ever sustain it by outsourcing the burn out inducing parts. I still think it's a good idea but I wonder where I went wrong.
I tried everything I could think of. Guest variety from solo devs to bigger companies like Mux and Dropbox, audio editing to ensure the highest quality I could get for a remote guest<->host podcast with new guests having assorted mic qualities, removing a lot of "ums" and other fluff but not over editing things to make it unnatural, tags to quickly find tech stacks you care about and a ton of clickable timestamps with a summary of each show that's skimmable in seconds along with tons of reference links.
On paper it feels like I did everything I could to make things "good", but in practice after 100 episodes I had like 200-300 listens per episode which made it no longer viable to continue doing since each episode was about 6 hours of end to end time to put together (finding a guest, editing it, show notes, etc.).
I learned a ton from chatting with every guest and regret nothing but I overall see the podcast as a total failure since if it didn't gain any traction on it, it must be trash. I'd love to revive the show because chatting with someone new about what they enjoy working on was really fun.
Decembers episode was the story of porting Doom to the 3DO. Other favs of the year were the story of building the Android operating system, building Serenity OS, building CPAN and building Eliza the chat bot.
The hosts give advice to real problems sent in by listeners involving non-technical issues in the software engineering workplace, such as dealing with problematic co-workers, how best to develop your skills into seniority, how and when to negotiate a pay raise and how to prepare yourself for moving to another job.
I don't think every episode is extremely useful since a lot of the solutions for workplace related problems can be drilled down to "look for a new job and quit your old one", but the hosts are very charismatic and funny. And when they do give good advice it's always something I've kept in mind which has occassionally helped me in my own job.
The most recent episode is about Bret Victor's 2006 essay Magic Ink, but other recent episodes have covered Alan Kay and Doug Engelbart, and older episodes feature interviews with people working at the edges of what it means to program a computer, including Devine Lu Linvega (Orca), Toby Schachman (Apparatus, Cuttle), Ella Hoeppner (Vlojure), and even Miller Puckette (Max/MSP, Pure Data).
I'm the current host of the podcast, so if you have suggestions for future episodes or other feedback about the show, I'm all ears.
To me the hosts seem pleasant and the topics relevant, it might not be the most detailed podcast out there, but it sure is a comfy one to listen to.
Also, occasionally The Changelog Podcast is nice to listen to: https://changelog.com/podcast
And the CoRecursive Podcast as well: https://corecursive.com/
The latter two have a greater variety of people to talk to, about all sorts of projects in the industry. One of them had a pretty good interview about SQLite, which was an interesting listen - hearing a bit more about how the project came to be and how it was developed.
We interview developers and leaders who work on "platform" teams (e.g. devex, devprod, infrastructure) that focus on making developers happier and more productive. If you're interested in this kind of work, or the subject of developer productivity, I think you'd enjoy checking it out.
A couple recent episodes include an interview with a former Dropbox engineer about how they approached measuring productivity, and a conversation with a couple of engineers from LinkedIn who've built a system for gathering real-time feedback about their internal developer tools.
Direct links if helpful:
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3NxjyIsuxeDMQtisDqBy7D
- Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-engineering-enable...
From the About page:
Software Engineering Radio is a podcast targeted at the professional software developer. The goal is to be a lasting educational resource, not a newscast. Now a weekly show, we talk to experts from throughout the software engineering world about the full range of topics that matter to professional developers.
Matt as in Matt Godbolt the guy who made Compiler Explorer at https://godbolt.org
[1] https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/to-be-continuous
In the security/cryptography space, Security Cryptography Whatever is pretty great (with tptacek): https://securitycryptographywhatever.buzzsprout.com/.
Disclaimer: I'm affiliated with the former and work for the latter
Even if you're not directly working on security, listening to this podcast will help you have security in mind in your every day developer work.
The episodes focus on the experience of my guests with software engineering practices such as testing, or code review, their journey to advance their career and often also on how developers build their successful business.
Would love if you give it a listen and see if you like my show.
Test and Code is a good (the only?) testing podcast (often with a Python angle).
"Oxide and Friends" is a great interdisciplinary podcast with a lot of focus on hardware and low-level stuff, but always looking at a big picture.
"Array Cast" is a pretty unique podcast about array languages (think APL, J, K and friends).
"Type Theory Forall" - podcast about formal methods and type theory, some absolutely great guests there!
I also have to mention "IPv6 Buzz" and in general "Packet pushers" family of podcasts on networking - listening to it helped me a lot when I had to implement some IPv6 functionality at my job and didn't really know where to start.
Oh, and "Machine learning street talk" is just awesome if you're a bit more philosophically inclined.
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/algorithms-data-struct...
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/software-unscripted/id...
I also recommend Hidden Brain, SyntaxFM if you are into JS especially, and Soft Skills Daily.
Chat With Traders Podcast has Quant traders and software engineers from time to time. Hearing technical people talk about work and answer questions to a non-technical audience is useful, because podcasts often don't have PR talk. There are exception to that, here's a 3 year old episode with Sam Bankman-Fried https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSDk5PAJss4 https://chatwithtraders.com/?s=software
DataSkeptic is an AI, data science, stats, advertising podcast I have found relatively recently. The have had multiple seasons, Seasons labeled, Ad-Tech (current), Physically Distributed, k-means, Time Series, Consensus, Interpretability, Fake News, Natural Language Processing, and Artificial Intelligence. I really liked the episodes I have heard so far. https://dataskeptic.com/
I also enjoy old developer conference presentations like ones from Game Developers Conference and Defcon. There are projects to put saved articles through text to speech in batches on the computer, but I have set up classic TTS on my phone instead. Not all articles will work well for conversion though.
Any suggestions?
Guests on podcasts are typically there because of whatever is trending and are frequently overrun with self promoters. Has anyone managed to get Fabrice Bellard on a podcast? No, but Uncle Bob will be ever ready to show up.
It's a weekly podcast discussing the edge of technology and what we can build with it. Each week, my cohost Wil (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=iamwil) and I introduce a big idea in the future of computing and extrapolate the effect it will have on the world.
Wil and I started this show because we found that most tech podcasts were focused on career development or Big Tech drama. We wanted a show where we could be optimistic and excited about the future of software, especially things which were not mainstream.
Some of my favorite episodes:
- Smalltalk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZNqOFAhM8o
- Zig - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wie5YuzoUQI
- Generative AI models - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOy-v2ah0Ms
We're in all the usual places:
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@techniumpod
- WEBSITE: https://technium.transistor.fm/
- SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/1ljTFMgTeRQJ69KRWAkBy7
- APPLE PODCASTS: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-technium/id1608747...
If you’re a python fan, Talk Python To Me is a great podcast. Covers so many topics within python from libraries, frameworks and special tools.
The thing I like about these two podcasts is that they don’t assume that their listeners are primarily web developers. Since I don’t work in the web domain, it’s been tough to find a good podcasts that cover CS more broadly.
It's great to look at games through a developer's lens, why things were done a certain way, and how we've improved since. Also they frequently have developers of the games on for interviews after they play through, with lots of "how the sausage is made" stories.
I haven't found many that hit 100%, so subscribing to a bunch and allowing your podcast app to store say the "latest 3" is how I pick and choose the episodes I'm interested in.
All feedback is welcome! Note: it's less applicable for devs at larger companies.
- Data Engineering Podcast (https://www.dataengineeringpodcast.com/): Podcast about Data engineering and Databases.
I wish there was a podcast like this episode. A single host and new guests on every week to share their stories of bad interviews.
Linear digressions was very good for when I was dabbling in data science, although they are no longer producing episodes.
I really enjoy Coffee with Butterscotch although it’s focused on comedy and game dev on lighter on software engineering.
https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/stacktrace/id135943544...
For ML, I'd highly recommend Gradient Descent from Weights & Biases - Lucas is a fantastic host.
https://geshan.com.np/blog/2021/04/sofware-engineer-podcasts...
Although they haven't released new episodes in a while, the archives are still there and most of it is just as relevant today.
I would give a link, but it doesn't seem to have a home-page.
(I’d also recommend Security Cryptography Whatever and Signals & Threads, but they’ve already been mentioned)
current epsiode
Amazon used the stage of AWS re:Invent to toss shade on .Net and reveal its broader ambitions.
Plus, why Pydantic is giving Mike a headache.
Elon Musk on Twitter — Good conversation. Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store. Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.
.NET open source is 'heavily under-funded' says AWS — "We found that .NET open source is heavily under-funded," said Saikat Banerjee, an AWS software development manager, at a re:Invent session this week.
Pydantic V2 Plan - pydantic — The release of version 2 is an opportunity to rebuild pydantic and correct many things that don't make sense - to make pydantic amazing .
PyO3 user guide — Rust bindings for Python, including tools for creating native Python extension modules. Running and interacting with Python code from a Rust binary is also supported.
FastAPI — FastAPI framework, high performance, easy to learn, fast to code, ready for production
Coinbase Wallet on Twitter — You might have noticed you can't send NFTs on Coinbase Wallet iOS anymore. This is because Apple blocked our last app release until we disabled the feature.
Good Morning America on Twitter — @GStephanopoulos sits down with former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried
‘We kind of lost track’: how Sam Bankman-Fried blurred lines between FTX and Alameda — Exchange’s former CEO says he was close to key decisions at nominally separate trading firm
Why Hasn’t Sam Bankman-Fried Been Arrested Yet?
Mike on Mastodon
asdf — Manage multiple runtime versions with a single CLI tool