Ask HN: What are some of the best podcasts for developers?
I want to know if other developers listen to podcasts and which ones? I love to listen to podcasts at the gym, but need some new ones related to software engineering.
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.
I would find a way to make it easier and funner and reduce the 6 hours.
Otherwise it's a marketing success/failure.
Perhaps he should engage listeners and find out why, what, etc.? They're consuming the product. Also, try to get feedback from one-and-done listeners.
Moi? I don't have time or interest in casual chat and then get to the end with nothing taken away. I can't invest time unless I'm confident I'll at least breakeven.
Also for sustaining, perhaps you need to lower your expectations and focus on doing it for fun.
Video is tricky with a new remote guest every week because their recording set up might be a little rough around the edges or it might make them uncomfortable to be on video. I do think video adds a huge element though. It also forces me to be less perfect because it's really easy to edit audio and you as the listener would never know. Most episodes have literally hundreds of cuts but you can't tell for most of them, but video is much harder to cut since you visually see the jump cuts.
Thanks for the suggestion!
"Devs chatting about development" is also a pretty tight niche. You could probably do better than 200-300 listeners per episode, but not by much. You're creating a product very few people want. Very few people would come solely for the information being conveyed. Nothing wrong with that, but just as a podcast about European pickles would never get millions of views, no matter how good it is, neither would yours.
The audio quality was also not great, but this isn't a major issue if the podcast is entertaining.
There must be millions of devs who might be interested in a podcast that teaches them about better development practices
Sure, but just hearing/reading "Devs chatting about development" doesn't convince me that the outcome is I'll know about better development practices.
> A podcast where folks talk about running small & large web apps in production. Topics include tech stacks, lessons learned and DevOps / deployment tips.
This is at the top of the page.
I said yes to every single person who requested to be on the show. The hard part for this style of podcast is finding a constant stream of guests. Often times you have no idea how a person is going to react on a call until you're already in the call and recording the show. In every episode we jumped on a call, spent a few minutes saying hello and went straight into it.
I went with my gut in that anyone volunteering to be on the show will be comfortable having a free form conversation. None of it is scripted but I do usually have a couple of bullet points in front of me to cover a range of general topics.
But, I get where you're coming from and I'm like that too. I'm for sure going to gravitate towards a more engaging host / guest if I had an option choosing between A and B. It's really hard to pull this off because if you only have guests on the show who have a public presence on the podcast / interview / YouTube / etc. scene it'll be much more difficult to find guests as a side project. You may also lose out on some really cool stories. In one episode a couple of guys built and shipped a custom hardware device to remote African villages to help make email more accessible.
But when I clicked to one episode randomly: ah, looks to be a very interesting conversation with a lot of technical details and challenges...
Maybe I'm looking into this too much but when I take a couple of other replies and yours together in the same context my takeaway was when you want to hear about the gory details about something development related you'd listen to the show. To me that says from a technical standpoint the show is good but you're not listening to it to be entertained specifically. You may also not be listening to it while doing something else because if technical information is what you're after, you might be focusing fully on the show?
Even if my assessment of your specific case is wrong, it got me to think about a couple of new things such as "what type of mood are people in when they tune in?", "are folks listening to this for pure knowledge, entertainment or something else?", and "what might someone be doing while they're listening to the show?".
My gut is that you have plenty of content, and you need to organize it better and exploit SEO. Unfortunately, because this is for developers, the space is very saturated. Have you tried running ads for any particular sections that may be popular like #aws?
The show costs at least 6 hours of personal time per episode which translates to a Saturday or Sunday. There's also hosting costs, etc.. Paid ads would be another expense. My thought process as a developer (and I'm probably wrong) is if something is worthy then it would be spread fairly organically. If it's not spreading organically then it's not good enough because it means people aren't sharing it enough to hit that point of critical mass.
I don't take it personally but it might bias my decision not to use paid ads because in my mind it would feel like burning money to get more eyeballs on content that's not good enough. It's also a tough sell to get someone to land on a podcast page and invest 30-90 minutes into listening to it if they don't know anything about the show already.
> you need to organize it better
Any suggestions? There's a list of podcasts broken down with tags. Each tag is clickable and each tag has its own dedicated page with a title / meta description. There's also a massive list of tags at https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/.
The writing needs work. There is too much. You need to cut down and try to distill the good stuff essence for each episode to make users want to click.
For example,
"QAWolf Helps You Create Automated Browser Tests as You Use Your Site"
-> Automated Testing for your website
The verbiage adds up.
You bring up a good point. I did try to make the titles kind of short (none of them are > 70 characters) while always trying to include the service name and the core idea of what the service does.
But a lot of those titles were maybe optimizing for the wrong thing. For example "Podia Has Everything You Need to Sell Online Courses"[0]. It's almost like I went out of my way to make it sound like a sales pitch but my goal was to include their product's name and the core idea of what it does. It does feel like it's trying to optimize for SEO such as "sell online courses" but the content of the show has nothing to do with selling online courses, it's about chatting with one of the lead devs on how they built the platform.
An alternate title based on a topic from that episode could have been "Podia survived Black Friday without breaking a sweat". If that were in a Twitter card the meta description includes it's a Rails site and it's always nice to hear success stories on how Rails does scale. It ends up have clickable interest for the skeptics out there and also Rails developers?
[0]: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/77-podia-has-everyth...
The other tag line with breaking a sweat would be much better.
Maybe you should think about it from the listener's POV? For me a podcast has to be interesting or useful. If a title can meet that I will click.
One difference I notice between Running in Production and some other podcasts that are popping up in this thread (e.g., CoRecursive, Darknet Diaries, Lex Fridman) is that those podcasts focus on people and stories, whereas Running in Production focused more on technology.
After writing my blog for several years, I noticed a pattern in that the majority of my popular posts were stories from my life rather than technical posts about a particular technology. The stories were highly related to technology, but they usually made sense to people who knew nothing about the technology.
Even for fans of the podcast, I think the narrowness in topics means that not all fans of Running in Production are a match for most episodes. Comparing it to the Indie Hackers podcast, I'd listen to any episode of IH if the guest sounds interesting because there are a lot of potential things they can say that might be useful to me. Because Running in Production is more narrowly about tech stacks, the percentage of episodes that are relevant to me is much smaller. I'd be interested in hearing about someone talk about their Flask stack because that's what I use in my business, but if the guest is talking about Elixir or Ruby, I'm unlikely to learn anything useful since I don't use or plan to use those technologies.
I tried to make the story about going from development to production but it is for sure super focused on the technology choices that take you from A to B. There's the lessons learned which kind of apply to any tech stack but that's also near the end of every episode so you have to listen to the whole thing to get there.
There's a number of little funny stories hidden away in some episodes. Like one guy was on vacation driving with his wife and ended up switching his web server from Apache to nginx while literally driving as a passenger.
Deployment is a tricky topic to "promote" because in my opinion deploying a Flask app is almost no different than Rails. If they both have a web + worker + db + cache component, it's basically the same pieces (especially if you're using Docker). The hosting provider choice, monitoring, logging, CI / CD workflows, etc. is all the same. When I went into making this show I came at it from the perspective that even if you didn't use Ruby you could still take away a few nuggets of info from a Rails episode since there's a lot of overlap but I'm beginning to realize that's not how this works in real life.
What I'm thinking now is maybe exactly what you said around being interested in Flask. You care about deploying a Flask app, not deploying in general.
You are right though, I have no problem sitting down and listening to a 5 hour conversation with John Carmack and Lex because I'm interested in hearing John's stories. I'm not there to learn the gory details about z-fail stencil shadows. I care about why he ended up inventing that and how it helped him build a cool looking game. When looking at things from that angle, that changes everything. Running in Production is like "90% technical details / 10% story" but "80% stories / 20% technical details" is a more enjoyable listen for a podcast. If this were a technical video course that would be much different, but it's not. It's a podcast.
Now to be fair, I did try the best I could to avoid going too deep into the technical details about a specific topic because I know most folks will doze off or lose interest because it's not relatable but still, bouncing around a bunch of technical topics at a surface level is still very tech heavy.
You suck at marketing.
You need to promote the shit out of media that you want people to consume. What did you do to promote it? You need to create engagement and use platforms where you're more likely to bring in money (this is why Twitch is the current favorite for new concepts like yours). The title of each episode is factual but boring and makes it seem like the interview will be a sales pitch for each product or service. Also, minor point, there are no dates on the episodes. The audio, see below.
You suck at audio engineering.
The audio from several samples I listened to ranging from mid-run to the most recent episode were a plosive and fricative nightmare. It was literally difficult to listen to. If this were some course for a degree program, I could probably suck it up and listen to it an hour at a time. But this is edutainment.
Promotion wise I tried to organically promote it. Basically if I read a comment on HN or a few sub-reddits I'd leave a non-spammy reply and often end the comment with something that links back to an episode with a timestamped link to the information related to the comment. I also suggested guests share the episode when it goes live. I tweeted out new episodes but I don't have a huge following.
Some of those posts on Reddit did pretty well. For example this single post in /r/django fueled almost a year's worth of guests https://www.reddit.com/r/django/comments/gddnh0/are_you_runn..., and the follow up post https://www.reddit.com/r/django/comments/ifrcd6/a_few_months....
> You suck at audio engineering. The audio from several samples I listened to ranging from mid-run to the most recent episode were a plosive and fricative nightmare.
Is this feedback mostly on the guest's audio or my set up?
It's not my full time job but remember each guest is a different person recording their side of the track in their house or office. They're using whatever bare bones mic set up they have. I pre-assembled a list of recording suggestions before the show to avoid common issues. If money were no object I'd send every guest $150-200 worth of equipment or pay to have studio time in their local area so they can record their side but that's not realistic for a podcast this size.
The most recent episode has plosives but if something clips there's not much I can do since the source audio is messed up. Everyone was recording locally, usually with Audacity to eliminate any network artifacts. Audio editing wise on my side, I usually just run their track through a noise gate while trying not to kill the natural sound of their voice. Sometimes I play a little with an EQ when it's super clear they have a very trebly voice. Often times I can't use a compressor to make their volume more consistent because they have a huge amount of room noise that can't be filtered out without making them sound non-human.
I'm curious what you think about this episode's quality https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/31-mux-is-an-api-bas.... This was one where the guest ended up buying a new mic before the podcast (I suggested they pick up an AT-2005 which is a pretty low cost dynamic USB mic, it's what I use as well). They wanted a better set up for future videos on their own (not just for my show). What you hear there is mostly straight from the source.
The immediate things that I noticed were the audio quality, your talking speed (often slightly too fast, especially when excited), and saying "like" too much.
On the plus side, very in depth conversations, great guest, and you have a good interviewing voice and style IMO.
If you wanted to revive this (which I think might be worth doing), I would work on your speech and audio first. After that you'll obviously need to figure out the product aspects of this. Marketing and presentation for one. Maybe focus on bigger technologies (languages, fields, etc) for your titles and mainline questions which can bring in the views and you can get into the details and tech stacks in the summaries and long form discussions. You need for every episode to be relevant for most listeners in some meaningful way, otherwise it's pretty difficult to retain viewers. I'd say most devs aren't familiar with probably the majority of episodes. Also putting video recordings on YouTube is a must. Some people want video and it's also a great marketing channel so you're limiting yourself without that.
I do think there is something there, but I don't think you'll stumble on to it on accident given how niche it is already - it'll require some research and trial and error.
Another thing, in most episodes, it seems like you have a list of questions that you want to ask, and you quickly go through them, as if you just needed to check them off the list. And I get it, any application running in production consists of multiple pieces and involves many decisions, but just listing all of the components one by one, turns into reading the specifications on the back of a cereal box. Maybe you could pick one or two particular aspects of the infrastructure and discuss those in greater depth. Ideally something that either you or your interviewee feel very strongly about. I'd also be interesting if you challenged some of the decisions that went into the infrastructure. All too often you agree too easily with your interviewee.
Overall however, none of these should be dealbreakers. I still listened to many episodes.
You are right. I do come into each episode with a number of high level bullets. I always try to stay on track so each episode flows roughly the same. Basically (:D) learning a bit about the service, team size, how it's built, how it's deployed and lessons learned. If some of these get skipped, it feels like an unfinished story that goes against the premise of the show? It's interesting to hear you think otherwise and would rather go deeper on a smaller subset of topics. I thought maybe that would make it even more niched down.
I'm happy you brought up the part about tech choices. I do try to pry out the "why" on a number of decisions. There's a fine line here. I kind of wonder which episodes you watched because I thought I challenged them kind of a lot but I definitely keep myself in check to avoid coming off too combative even if they are asked in a friendly way. But I did try to always call out questions that I really feel most listeners would be thinking.
It's just hard to take action on it because it's 1 data point. For example, I also record video courses. Tens of thousands of people have gone through them and I've gotten a handful of comments from people saying I sound robotic. But then I've also gotten hundreds of comments saying they like the way I explain things and had fun.
This podcast is different because I kind of feel like if I'm doing my job correctly the guest will be speaking 98% of the time. I'm there to ask thought provoking questions and hope it sparks a good response from them, then maybe I'll add a little bit of color and opinions around their answers and move on. I don't want to take away their thunder or be the focal point of the show. I hate listening to guest based podcasts where the host doesn't let their guest speak and always interrupts them with "actually..." type of remarks or tries to 1-up them.
I ran a podcast with friends for 13 years. We took it on the chin, and paid (via patreon subs) for an audio engineer to fix the things people complained about in our show. It made a world of difference, but we'll never be able to break the "first impression" of people who didn't appreciate it, and unsubbed as a result.
Sure but the ratio matters in the end.
For example if 30,000 folks have gone through something and 5 people say you sound like a robot with zero charisma but 287 people say the content was engaging and funny then I have to assess that a majority are ok with how things were presented. There's always room for improvement but you're never going to please everyone.
I think one important aspect is that you, personally, need to have a following. It's the same as in other areas like blogging and vlogging. You have to create yourself a persona that people will follow for some reason and then they will consume your content.
My persona might suck. My persona is there is no persona. I'm a dude building and deploying web apps. I use a lot of different tools and try to share everything I've learned along the way.
I don't play anything up for videos or interviews. I'm almost exactly the same in real life other than I'm a little more unfiltered in real life.
I did a meta episode on the show where I interviewed myself at https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/100-running-in-produ.... Since the show is guest oriented I try to let them speak as much as possible (they are the star of the show) but in that episode since I was interviewing myself I got to talk a bit more.
One piece of feedback though, I always felt the episode titles could have been better.
More like https://www.indiehackers.com/
Where the title was some like “X person company generates Y revenue with Z tech”.
The main difference being, it gave me a reason to listen (sparked my interests because 1-person is generating $100,000s with a simple PHP form app”. As opposed to “Meteor Cloud Is a Full Service Hosting Solution for Meteor Apps” which just sounds like an ad for their app.
Another subtle suggestion, the date of the episode wasn’t visible from the main feed - making it difficult to see if any new episodes have dropped.
Sorry to hear you considered it a failure. I really enjoyed it.
That one does read a lot like an ad. For most titles I tried to lead with the service name plus what they do in 70 characters or less. I tried to focus more on what the service does because I figured most folks wouldn't know what these services are, but if you know what it does it might help you relate to something in your own mind based on a rough idea of "this will be about an invoicing service or an email campaign service, etc.".
But, if I do step back and reflect on my own browsing habits for not just podcasts but also YouTube. It comes down to the title. Always.
It's an interesting problem in this context. The suggestions here are to mainly make the titles optimized for humans (which I agree with too), but I'm not sure if that will help with gaining traction because the site is already nearly invisible on Google and podcast sites. With that said though, after 2 years and a 100 titles in their current state, my original plan is clearly not working so I have nothing to lose to switch up that strategy. Although I'm not sure if I should go back and change all of the existing titles (they are also tied into the URL on a static site, etc.).
That's kind of clickbait topic?
> As opposed to “Meteor Cloud Is a Full Service Hosting Solution for Meteor Apps” which just sounds like an ad for their app.
That interview is long high quality podcast with a lot of very interesting information to me. I'm in target audience, developing software with Meteor. And it really is not required for every company to describe exact financials.
You know, your thought process is identical to mine on this subject haha. That's why I started the show. It felt like it was filling a void around a bunch of deployment topics.
Work on your titles, first of all.
I would love to see it back with some suggestions other people are pointing out.
More generally, and not specific to runningproduction, I _strongly_ favour shorter podcasts and, although I appreciate this costs money, podcasts with a transcript.
Thanks for making runninginproduction, I appreciate you may see it as "a total failure" but fwiw that is a very long way from my perception of it.
Yep transcripts were on my list to include but there is a decent cost to get accurate human vetted transcripts for ~6 hours of (2) speaker audio content per week. There are semi-automated free tools but the accuracy is poor enough where I'd spend a !huge! amount of time rewriting and fixing them up (I tried a bunch, even some low cost paid solutions that were AI driven).
Can’t help you in terms of marketing advice. Count me as someone who truly enjoyed your podcast, and it was my intro to the concept of SaaS as a lifestyle business. A breath of fresh air amidst a world where everyone’s looking for the next round of funding.
Your take on it being just people with an idea is my preference too and I know exactly what you mean. I don't mind having all forms of guests and business types on the show but those smaller to medium sized businesses definitely popped up the most. I think it's because I mostly got guest requests from posting on HN and Reddit. I didn't reach out to big companies directly.
I'm 100% someone interested in shows like yours, I just didn't know it existed. One major thing you could probably do right away is invite other people with followings in this area as guests. Popular podcasters are generally annoyed by requests to be on their show, but can be a lot more friendly if you invite them on yours. That's because you're doing the work and exposing them to your audience. They'll likely promote it or might even cross post it if you want to. They might have you on as a guest afterwards, someone with that many interviews is bound to have some interesting things to talk about.
The episode you posted as an example of audio quality lately seemed more than good enough for me. As far as burn out, I would maybe recommend actually doing less for each episode, at least until you feel like you can outsource the worst parts. What if you did only the most important parts of post, and cut down post production to an hour instead of 5 or 6? Maybe a tool that auto removes silence, umms and ahs, etc could help a bit here too. Descript for example can do a decent amount of this in about 5 minutes. Good enough in my opinion. Cut out as much post work as you can. I bet you your real audience won't care.
Part of it could also be just shorter recording times. I prefer longer episodes but it seems like I'm the only one. Editing 30 mins of recording is a lot easier than an hour and a half, and people seem more likely to put on shorter episodes (I guess).
Also, just skimming a bit of an episode, I think you overdo the formality of the intro. It sounds too scripted and not like your natural self. Skipping from the intro to a later clip of you speaking, you sound much more natural later on. A lot of people will bail out during the intro if they're just checking you out for the first time and it doesn't hook them much.
The titles should reflect more of what's interesting to the audience, make it the coolest part of whatever they're doing instead of an elevator length description. Are they hitting high requests per second, doing something bleeding edge, serving a lot of users as a solo dev, etc? Combine that with the most interesting part of their stack for the title. Looking at your show notes I can see this stuff is in there, just make it the title.
If you're burning out, try being more selective with guests too. Don't force it. And don't look at it as needing X audience numbers or whatever for success. You're building authority as someone in the industry, getting respect from guests and listeners, being exposed to way more than a normal dev, and so much more. If you're trying to make a living off of the podcast, you'll need to go wayyy more generic and attention grabbing. But I say don't do that. Instead do this thing well and you'll build a name for yourself with the kinds of people who listen to things like this - people in motion, building things, who are excelling in the field. People who are or will be somebody to respect in the industry.Thats a big deal.
Finally, please keep making the show, this is a niche that I've found surprisingly hard to find good content for. I want the technical details, I want the code talk and the deep dive that most podcasts cut out because "people don't want to listen to this". Well, I do and so do plenty of people actually building real things.
I've done a few cross-posted episodes. That wasn't the goal of those episodes but some of the episodes are with folks who either have their own podcast or are part of a group podcast. For example, the changelog episode https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/63-changelog-is-a-ne.... There's a number of others.
I don't spend too long while editing. About 60-90 minutes of editing per episode when the episode in itself is about that long. I basically edit at 2x speed and quickly chop out the filler words. Any audio processing like cleaning up noise or basic EQ work is a few minutes. The 5-6 hours is the full end to end time from having an empty folder and no guest to a finished mp3 that's ready to be published.
The intro and outro were recorded years ago with different audio settings (it's way too muffled and bass'y compared to any of the last dozens of episodes). I just pad them onto the beginning and end of each episode. They were scripted because I personally don't like long intros so I was trying to get the core essence of the show out in the least amount of time possible. I will re-record them if I pick the show back up, thanks.
Definitely going to work on the titles, at least as a homework assignment make new titles for a bunch of the previous episodes even if I don't publish them. I tried to limit each one to 70 chars or less and out of respect for the guest also wanted to include their product's name in the title.
A living would be pushing it but if you work 40-50 hours a week (which I do), dedicating nearly a full day to it is a big investment. To outsource everything properly (an editor who knows enough about the tech to pick what stays in and human vetted transcripts) would be like $300-400 per episode. That's not counting someone to go through the episodes and make clips to help promote them, that would easily be another $150-250. At 1 episode per week, even without clips that'll be ~$1,500 a month.
Getting sponsors is also tricky because it's not profitable for someone to spend $300 or even $150 per episode for an ad slot when only a few hundred people listen to it. The sponsors will only be happy if they make a return on their investment and that will require having a lot more views.
You are right though, there's a lot of ancillary benefits of having the show. That's partly why I kept going for as long as I did but I noticed that my course sales didn't really change too much during or after the podcast so I'm not sure it helped get the word out on them. When I look at all of that, I think to myself that it's a failure because it didn't move the needle. The conversations were great and I value them a lot which is priceless. Although, a lot of people won't admit that money does matter. It's not my primary concern or motivation for the show but money is necessary to continue doing what you like so you can afford to continue doing it.
A couple of criteria would be what programming languages or web frameworks do you want to hear about? Also do you want to hear about solo devs or large companies?
If you want to hear about large companies, the Mux episode is at https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/31-mux-is-an-api-bas.... They handle billions of monthly requests to serve video. They use a lot of Go and Elixir.
If you want to hear about custom hardware products run by a solo developer, the TinyPilot episode is at https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/105-tinypilotkvm-let.... It's mostly Flask driven.
A mostly solo dev also created RealPython which is a large community site for Python developers, that episode is at https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/4-real-python-is-one.... It's a big Django app hosted on Heroku.
Another solo dev episode is on how GoRails generates millions of dollars with a custom Rails driven video platform on a single DigitalOcean server. That one is at https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/12-learn-ruby-on-rai....
If you want to learn more about Unikernels there's https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/79-nanovms-let-you-r....
I feel bad not listing more because there were so many episodes that were good but I wanted to cap it at 5. I wouldn't necessarily say these are the top 5 episodes and the others are worse. I recorded some of these 2-3 years ago and while I remember the gist of most episodes, the intricate details of every episode is mostly lost.
- not one of the titles made me want to click. They all sound like sponsored content / ads. I don’t click on ads.
- nothing catches my eye. You need thumbnails, visuals. Maybe some logos, maybe an illustration regarding something specifically fun or interesting that was said in the podcast
- I tried listening to a podcast to give you feedback on the audio but honestly couldn’t decide which one to click on. See first point
You really need to work on your titles, they’re that bad and probably the main problem. Even if I subscribed, I wouldn’t listen to new episodes because the titles don’t attract me at all.
In cooking shows they often make a segment where the judges don’t even eat the plate if it doesn’t pass a visual judgment. You don’t pass the visual judgment.
Meaningful episode art is seldom used in podcasts, and is seldom surfaced in podcast player list views. I don’t know the cause and effect, but suffice to say that they aren’t a meaningful driver of engagement.
Titles for Running in Production are complicated. They are bland but I can’t see how they could be any better. It’s a solo host podcast, with no recurring guests, by design, so there’s no development of the sort of in-show culture that invites funny titles.
Point is, titles and thumbnails matter. After reading the other replies, it even seems it's the main criticism regarding this podcast.
> They are bland but I can’t see how they could be any better
I clicked randomly on "uscreen Is a Platform That Helps Content Creators Build a Business"[1]. This title is awful, I stand by it. It doesn't carry anything interesting about the content and sounds like an ad, like all the other titles.
However, the "Topics Include" section contains something that caught my eye: "BREAKING NEWS: Rails can scale and it’s working out nicely for them as a monolith". "uscreen scaled a Rails monolith to xxx users per day", "Scaling a Rails monolith" or "Rails monoliths can scale" are titles I would have clicked on. And I don't even use Rails.
No idea who Simon Cowell is BTW.
[1]: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/104-uscreen-is-a-pla...
I have no deep insights, but if I had to guess I assume discovery was a major problem. I heard of your podcast by accident I think, and haven't seen it since. I assume this Hackernews thread is more publicity than the last few years combined?
From a content point of view there seemed to be quite a bit of repititon in the kind of technology stacks that were represented. A lot of smaller, single founder applications with somewhat smaller sizes and typical sort of SaaS stacks and integrations with a few typical external service providers. More variety here would definitely be a bonus.
But I realize just finding the guests must be really hard already and you did an amazing job going as far as you did.
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 episodes look pretty cool, gonna them a listen!
Are you also open to any guest speakers?
My criteria are around someone having a really crazy you-wouldn't beleive-it story about a software project to share.
Thanks so much for doing the show Adam. Some random ideas for guests:
- Joshua Stein (@jcs): Too many projects to list. Rad all-around hacker.
- Mike Bayer (@zzzeek): Creator of SQLAlchemy/Alembic
- Theo de Raadt: OpenBSD creator. Somewhat a controversial guy, but very interesting.
* Every time your guest specializes on something low-level - like Rebecca Heineman from most recent episode, David Shayer from last year, and others - you keep saying "yeah, this is a very complicated subject and I don't understand anything about it". Everyone has they own area of expertise, no one knows everything - and that's OK. But when you as a host constantly put yourself down, it leaves a very strange impression on the listener: "well then, invite someone who does".
* When you do a voice over for the interview and queue interviewee responses - the whole sequence feels doctored. It just doesn't sound as a normal conversation, more like out of context clips forced into pre-made narrative. Again, I'm not saying it _is_ out of context, it just feels that way.
Please don't take these two the wrong way, you're doing great job.
Also, I would love to support the show and you seem to have a Patreon account, but prices there are a bit too steep for a casual listener: $6/14.50/36 per month (that's in Canadian dollars). For example, semi-weekly Darknet Diaries has $3/7.50/14.50 tiers.
In the last episode you've announced bonus content with Rebecca, but there's not even an announcement on the Patreon page and it's not clear what tier would allow access to it.
Sorry for the rant, but I hope it provides outside perspective and you might find it useful.
Thanks for listening. The podcast being narrative, I've gotten complaints about the before, but my feelig is there are so many straight interview podcasts out there. If you don't like the narration then there are lots of other alternatives.
Now, it could be that I'm bad at narration. That could totally be true and probably I could improve, but it's a narrative podcast.
All content is available to all patreons. Rebecca bonus episode is not out yet. I should post more details and explanation about how that works but bonus episodes episodes come out on the 15th.
Me not knowing low level stuff is true, so im not sure about that feedback. To me I think admission of my lack of knowledge in an area is good and I'd like to talk about the things I don't know or my vulnerabilities more often.
Again, maybe I do it badly, but I think its good to be ok not knowing something and asking questions about it.
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.
For me, this is what makes the show. I normally don't like "conversational" podcasts, but this is my one exception. There are thousands of resources for this kind of thing that are better if you want information density, but Dave and Jamison's conversations are endlessly entertaining, and they are both extremely witty and charismatic.
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.
https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/
I recommend that episode in particular.
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...
Speaking of Platform teams, I'm one of the co-founders of WunderGraph(https://wundergraph.com/) and we're working on a platform right now for API Integration. Are you open to any guests from a early startup?
Right now we're focused on interviewing people in internal-facing roles, but we're exploring doing a series that explores interesting vendors and solutions.
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.
https://www.se-radio.net/2008/05/episode-97-interview-anders...
The North Korea 3-parter is equally good IMO.
- the epbf episode where one of you started talking like back in the old days you treated servers as pets and not as cattle
- the episode about auditing startups where most of the talk you were carried away and even said somethin “let’s continue or we won’t finish” or something
- oh and that Silicon Valley tv show stuff that just keeps popping every other time
It’s like that uncle of mine that I meet every Christmas who is always “back in my days” (I remeber when we…) or “in my old hometown they used to” (here at changelog we…)
but that’s just my personal opinion. Time is scare these days so I’d like to get as much info as possible.
But hey, I’m sure there are millions that adore you, cause in general the guests and topics are great
Sorry, Johnny! It's probably just me.
Really loved the recent episodes with Adam Wiggins.
Nonetheless, Changelog has great shows and great hosts and great guests. I listen to _a lot_ of dev related podcasts, and I can assure you, they all have some of the human affects you pointed out.
Changelog definitely rises to the top!
Hi Jerod!
i've been a two time guest on the Changelog (https://changelog.com/person/swyx) and always wondered if i could be doing something better as a guest/speaker. I listen to myself at least 2x every time i'm on and spot a bunch of verbal and factual mistakes but thats only the ones i know about - if you listened to mine (no obligation!) did anything tick you off in particular?
Matt as in Matt Godbolt the guy who made Compiler Explorer at https://godbolt.org
- Talking with Richard Hipp about SQLite: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/corecursive-coding-sto...
- What it was like working at Apple in the early 2000s: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/corecursive-coding-sto...
- The birth of UNIX with Brian Kernighan: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/corecursive-coding-sto...
[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/.
They started hosting conversations on Twitter spaces instead, which were then published as a podcast called Oxide & Friends: https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends
Disclaimer: I'm affiliated with the former and work for the latter
I think it's a bit unfair. Overall, I'd say he's a decent interviewer and has interesting guests.
That being said, I find him pretentious, and get a bit tired of some recurring cliches and themes. I'd prefer if he would keep things a bit more "neutral". Also he invites occasionally some crackpots, which would be fine if he'd challenge them more, or invite another guest who can.
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.
https://twitter.com/software_daily/status/155561241447724237...
Test and Code is a good (the only?) testing podcast (often with a Python angle).
There is also Code with Jason, the author of which wrote a book on testing with Ruby, and the episodes often get into tests.
"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.
I appreciate the narration a lot because I would have no idea what is going on otherwise. :)
Any suggestions?
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.
- 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.
That said I like it and recommend it.
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...
All feedback is welcome! Note: it's less applicable for devs at larger companies.
For ML, I'd highly recommend Gradient Descent from Weights & Biases - Lucas is a fantastic host.
Although they haven't released new episodes in a while, the archives are still there and most of it is just as relevant today.
https://geshan.com.np/blog/2021/04/sofware-engineer-podcasts...
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
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.