Ask HN: What is your favorite Tech Podcasts these days? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your favorite Tech Podcasts these days?

75 pointsHixon1076 comments

During COVID-era we got a lot of new podcasts. So I am wonder, what is the current list of Tech Podcasts, which you consume these days?

My current list:

1. https://www.codingblocks.net/category/podcast/ - deep dives into different tech topics

2. https://anchor.fm/happypathprogramming - scala/kotlin/java + interviews with different tech people

3. https://postgres.fm/episodes - deep dives into different parts of PostgreSQL database

4. https://www.softwareatscale.dev/archive - interviews with different tech people

5. https://bootifulpodcast.fm/#/all-podcasts - java/spring + interviews with different tech people

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Without doubt Darknet Diaries, it should be a mandatory listen for anyone touching computers. It is a crash course on building secure systems by learning from the failures of others.

I highly recommend starting from episode #1 because they are almost all great and episodes often reference past topics.

https://darknetdiaries.com

I like Darknet Diaries, but I feel it is geared towards techies and not engineers.

The concepts are high level, the details are vague and the stories take a lot of shortcuts to make the podcast accessible to more people.

True, but it's an entertaining listen which is something that can't be said for a lot of the more technical and complex podcasts. The engagement he gets has enough technical that you can jot something down and research it but the overwhelming takeaway on WHY such and such failure or vuln was a problem is more important IMO.

Hah, they have a link for "start at the beginning": https://darknetdiaries.com/reverse/

I listened to quite a bit of Darknet Diaries back in 2018 but he had a few episodes that were such complete misses for me that I hopped off the train. The episode about trying to get to the top of Apple's podcast charts wore my patience, but a few episodes later the content was padded out with getting up to date on some Youtuber drama or something? I figured it was just hard to keep finding content for this niche. Should I give it another chance? There's 100+ more episodes now than the lats time I looked.

It’s true, not every episode is amazing. It’s a bit of a tangent, but I feel like podcasts don’t make it easy to get started. Unlike a TV show, where you obviously should start with S1E01, lots of podcasts either get outdated over time or have hugely improved over time and starting with a recent episode is better. But then you dive in and you don’t get any of the references, get blasted by ads, and so on!

Could you recommend some episodes?

I started with “Jeremy From Marketing” and really liked that one

One that stuck with me was Ep 86: The LinkedIn Incident. It is about how one seemingly inconsequential device at home being compromised can lead to a massive data breach.

Software Unscripted https://twitter.com/sw_unscripted is good. I don't know whether it's well known or not. Possibly a hidden gem.

Already mentioned, but Signals & Threads https://signalsandthreads.com is a very notable one. Probably the best episode hit-rate of any development-related podcast I've listened to.

Core Intuition https://coreint.org Apple-platform focused. Hosts have endearing personalities.

The Changelog https://changelog.com/podcast Good interviewers and wide-ranging episode topics (some get deleted - I won't subject myself to Kubernetes-related blather!)

I could not figure out how to subscribe to software unscripted with a regular podcast application. I don't see an RSS feed anywhere.

I haven't really used the Apple podcasts website before but apparently I can find it there.

Here it is: https://feeds.resonaterecordings.com/software-unscripted (that URL was surfaced by my subscription in Overcast).

I usually end up using podbay.fm for finding rss feeds for shows which don't list them on their web pages (or anywhere else). https://podbay.fm/p/software-unscripted

I highly recommend CoRecursive - The Stories Behind The Code: https://corecursive.com/

Basically, the host (Adam Gordon Bell, himself a programmer) is interviewing other software developers about their career or the journey to a particular piece of software.

I found these two episodes particularly interesting: * Software Word Tour: https://corecursive.com/software-world-tour-with-son-luong-n... * The Untold Story of SQLite: https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/

Here to recommend CoRecursive as well! I would also recommend the SerenityOS episode for first-time listeners. The quality of the podcast, in general, is spectacular.

Python Bytes. Python Bytes is a weekly podcast hosted by Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken. Python Bytes podcast delivers headlines directly to your earbuds. If you want to stay up on the Python developer news but don't have time to scour reddit, twitter, and other news sources, just subscribe and you'll get the best picks delivered weekly. https://pythonbytes.fm/

This is the only live one I manage to tune into on a regular basis.

I like a lot https://signalsandthreads.com/.

Also, Lex Fridman https://www.youtube.com/c/lexfridman when he interviews people like John Carmack.

I like Future of Coding. The show combines interviews with paper reads. One of my favorite interviews was with Miller Puckette who created Pure Data and the original version of the Max/MSP software.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/future-of-coding/id126...

I also enjoy the Tech Won't Save Us Podcast. This podcast takes a much needed critical take of tech and SV culture. I feel like this is what tech journalism should be as opposed to the usual cheer leading we usually see.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-wont-save-us/id15...

Oxide and Friends covers a pretty good range of topics from hardware, software, business, company values.

https://feeds.transistor.fm/oxide-and-friends

I was also going to post your 3). https://postgres.fm is great, and I feel like every episode I learn something new or find something to look into more in detail.

Thanks!! (postgres.fm co-host)

Have enjoyed the All-In pod for macro tech/biz/culture/etc https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/all-in-with-chamath-ja...

Quit listening a while back cuz it got too political at a point. Is it better now?

I’ve been getting into Corecursive

https://corecursive.com/

About 9 months back I relocated to India and started listening to Scaler Pod (https://www.youtube.com/@SCALER). It's focused on startups in India, and interviews their CTO or SVPs.

Two personal favorites: Dukaan CTO Subhash Choudhary[1] and Rippling Co-Founder Prasanna Sankar[2]

[1] https://youtu.be/a5kKRtMmhzQ [2] https://youtu.be/8-6f7zh46EQ

I enjoy all of Jupiter Broadcasting’s output (mostly shows about Linux) but especially “Self-Hosted”

http://jupiterbroadcasting.com

Linux Unplugged was recommended on HN a while ago so I gave it a try but found the signal to noise ratio very low. I felt it was 30% content on topic and 70% noise about meetups, crypto...

100% Signals an Threads. Super technical extremely well presented.

Some more fluffy ones: Hard fork. Pivot. All in.

Accidental tech podcast - atm.fm

* https://atp.fm

For the SRE in the room, check out Slight Reliability Podcast https://www.buzzsprout.com/1698445

His perspective on SRE really resonates and he shares some really great strategies and book recommendations for adoption of SRE practices, cultures and technologies without pretending he has all the answers.

Very good!

I've been really enjoying the Hacked podcast for about a year now. It's quite similar to Darknet Diaries but episodes are typically shorter and they seem to be branching out a bit more past just security. They don't seem to have a website so here are some of the useful links:

* https://twitter.com/hackedpodcast

* https://open.spotify.com/show/21zZfOy7VCSIIWlJ64DElv?si=f1ad...

* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hacked/id1049420219

Nobody has mentioned Acquired yet?

I think they do a great job discussing the history and business decision in tech that have led to where we are today.

It's not all tech focused, but even the handful of episodes that aren't such as the Berkshire Hathaway one are tangentially related and great.

Mine is Risky Business https://risky.biz/RB691/ . It's about IT security.

But I'm more interested in dev news and I am still searching for a podcast that would have discussions about dev news.

I forgot to mention one more podcast, which discusses latest news. It is online streams on Fridays - https://www.youtube.com/@DevOpsParadox/streams

https://embedded.fm/

If you are interested in embedded software, and by extension all the stuff that software goes into.

+1 for Darknet Diaries

Also, a few others that I did not see here:

- Programming Throwdown: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/

- This Developer's Life: https://thisdeveloperslife.com/

- Adventures of Alice & Bob: https://www.beyondtrust.com/podcast

Late Night Linux, Linux After Dark, Linux Downtime, 2.5 Admins

Commandline Heroes

https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes

The SAAS Podcast

Ukraine: the Latest

Startups for the Rest of Us

You're Wrong About

Built to Sell Radio

Disrupting Japan

Advent of Computing

Darknet Diaries

The Art of Product Podcast

Signals and Threads

Practical Founders Podcast

I Dream of Cameras

I wonder if there is a gap in the audio market for low-level podcasts aimed at building technical "muscle memory".

Example: repeated syntax step-throughs in a rote/kata style, like foreign language courses.

I've never seen anything like that and have often wondered if it could work without the visual accompaniment.

I don't see how this would be that useful. If you are learning a foreign language, you already know what you want to say, but not how to say it in the new language.

Syntax doesn't really matter after programming for more than a year, as the important part is how to solve a problem, and not how to write down that solution.

True, but stumbling over even basic idioms and syntax can be quite frustrating if you have not used them enough to absorb them, especially for those like me with dodgy memory retention.

That would be best solved by writing more code and practicing. A lot of syntax is just hard to convey over audio.

I've actually found it quite an active/engaging experience to take in some normal code-presenting videos/screencasts as audio-only (i.e. earphones in, phone in pocket), because you build up in your minds eye the code they're talking about.

Ah yes, that's a good idea. I think I've actually done that in the past, come to think of it, when walking; listening to a video course and occasionally screenshotting the phone at a bit I wanted to come back to.

Do you mean like https://newrustacean.com by Chris Krycho? Although you have to really concentrate when he starts reeling off those generic method signatures, I love that he went that way with it. And I think it works.

Please do some more, Chris!

I was actually thinking more of an audio version of something like learnxinyminutes [1] but yes, that also seems a good use of the medium at a higher level, thanks! I didn't get to the method signatures/other syntax recital part yet, so it may be what I'm thinking of as well.

[1] https://learnxinyminutes.com/

Coder Radio. A weekly talk show taking a pragmatic look at the art and business of Software Development and the world of technology. Chris Fisher, Michael Dominick, Wes Payne. https://coder.show/

here's my list: https://www.swyx.io/fave-podcasts#tech

and i've done annual updates you can find at the top of the post

But what exactly podcasts from the list do you consume?

probably the more recent (2022, 2021, 2020) are more consume-heavy. the original list is pretty old by now but reflective of where i started out when leveling up in tech

That's a lot of podcasts. You must have one hell of a commute.

But seriously, how do you find time to listen to all of these?

i work remote, no commute haha. i just play these in the background while i work (example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvd9JFFRI5Y). also i skip pretty aggressively if i dont like a guest or topic. you should skim podcasts like you skim HN titles and tweets.

although it is specific to scala, chris kipp's tooling podcast is fascinating. there is much to learn about tooling in general and if you're a scala developer, the technical insight is invaluable.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tooling-talks/id158000... https://www.tooling-talks.com/

+1 for Darknet Diaries

2.5 Admins

Self Hosted

Late Night Linux / Linux After Dark

Ham Radio Workbench

Rustacean Station (esp the "new release" episodes)

RealPython has some fair content for beginner / intermediate level

Hackaday covers some pretty interesting projects I wouldn't have found otherwise

What are some tech podcasts which dive really deep into the tech?

Shout out to Unruly Software! Love these guys.

Australian dev duo. Casual conversations around web dev, mostly the experiences of the hosts over the last month or so. Informative but relaxed.

10/10 parasocial relationship

For UX and Web Design, I highly recommend The Boagworld UX Show, although it is over now but it has a huge repository of over 15 years, with transcripts. It's a timeless relic.