Sunday, February 21, 2016

What are your favorite podcasts?

Being a husband to my wonderful wife, father of 2 amazing kids, employee of an awesome company, creator of things (like ShopToTrot), someone who is trying to blog more, create more, do more, yada... yada... yada, time can be scarce. One of the tools that I use to keep in touch with what's what in technology land is podcasts.


I usually sneak in a listen on my way into work after I've dropped off my little munchkins at school, which typically amounts to 15 to 20 minutes of geekery. While I typically don't make it through an entire podcast in one sitting, as most run about an hour, I get enough of a fix on my morning drive to keep tuning in the next day. It's just enough to give me something to think about either actively or on one of my many background threads that like to solve things subconsciously for me.

Is there always a direct benefit to my daily grind... no. But it does keep me abreast of techno land in a way that nothing else can. I don't always have time to sit down and read deeply about a subject, and this helps to gain a deeper than surface level understanding on some topics.

Here's what I've been listening to lately:

SE-Radio - This is one that I hit for what I call bigger fish I guess. It's where I'm more likely to run across someone like Linda Rising, someone chatting about CAP theorem, or a good hearted discussion about the GOF 20 years after the initial publication of their book.

The Changelog - This is where I go to get my open source fix and things that might be more on "the edge".

Simple Programmer - This is where I hit for good advice on moving my career forward and personal development (and in all honesty I relate to the guy).

I did a search for "github podcast" and this awesome list turned up from Guilherme Dutra (thanks dude, it's a part of the awesome list of lists). It contains quite a bit and perhaps you can discover something new there.

I've recently started using Overcast to manage and listen to my podcasts, I recommend it. One of the reasons I made the hop was I wanted something that helped in controlling what podcasts actually got pulled down to my phone vs. allow me to stream. Overcast will let you set how long to hold onto a podcast before deleting it... you can always go back and grab it again if you need it. If you decide to use it, be kind and drop the folks that make it a few bucks... nothing in life is free.

This isn't necessarily my complete list or my historical list, but it is the list that's comprised my last 6 months or so. I'm interested to know, if you listen to podcasts, regardless of if they are technology related or not, what are they? Everything I listen to isn't necessarily technology related (although lately they have been), and I would love to know what your tuning in to and why you are tuning in.

3 comments:

  1. I'll continue to update this post as I explore new podcasts. Another that I've come across is Six Pixels of Separation

    http://www.twistimage.com/blog/.

    Maybe I just stumbled onto a good one, I hope they are all this good, but I recommend this particular episode.

    http://www.twistimage.com/podcast/archives/spos-504---the-modern-economy-with-douglas-rushkoff/

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  2. Ted Radio Hour

    http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510298/ted-radio-hour

    From the episodes I've listened to, it's been a nice mixture of interviews with folks that have given a Ted Talk along with some of the talk that they gave for Ted, around a particular subject area.

    I listened to How Things Spread recently, and quite enjoyed it.

    http://www.npr.org/player/embed/469081786/469089244

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  3. Legacy Code Rocks is truly great. I recommend pretty much everything that is coming out of this channel. It was started by, and sponsored by the crew at Corgibytes ( http://corgibytes.com/ ).

    Check it out at:
    http://legacycode.rocks/

    In addition to the podcast, make sure to hop into the Slack channel for some good discussions on everything legacy.

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