Show HN: Talking Code – Technical podcast for nontechnical people | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Talking Code – Technical podcast for nontechnical people

talkingcode.com

45 pointsjoshdotsmith9 comments

My co-host Venkat and I have been thinking about starting this for awhile. We often work as technical advisors to non-technical founders and have to answer many of the same questions over and over. Instead, we imagined a world where we could give these people the absolute best expert opinions on the things they really need to know to run a software business.

If you have any topics to suggest or advice on how to refine our questions, we're all ears! We've found it pretty challenging to bridge the technical/non-technical divide sometimes.

I like that you have the "What to listen for:" timed, perhaps you could have it so when you click it, it seeks to that part of the audio :)

Thanks! Having the click seek to it was my ideal. Unfortunately the player is an iframe, so I'm not sure how to hijack that. I could just do HTML5 audio or something, but then we don't get the benefit of Simplecast's analytics.

We're about to push a fix for this. It will also work with URLs, so you can go to /episode-title/#1:23 and it'll go there. Makes sense to share a particular question and answer with someone.

Sounds awesome! Will give a listen when I get home.

Who is the target audience? An MBA or a my sixty year old mother who is curious about what I do?

More like an MBA. We really wanted to help out the non-technical folks on a technical team who are trying really hard to grok what we're saying. It really hit home when my co-host Venkat went to a meetup in and found people who wanted to go to dev bootcamps – not to become developers – but just to be able to share the language.

We're hoping to be sort of like the Lonely Planet for non-technical founders, designers, product managers, and so on.

Although that said, my sixty year old mother is currently learning to code herself. So I'm not sure what to expect. The wider the audience the better, but to ask better, more targeted questions we need to assume a certain level of knowledge.

>but just to be able to share the language.

This is a major pet peeve. We are very bad at teaching computer programming without using jargon--we don't even notice it.

This is true in the Army, too. I'm at a fairly technical school for Army Signal Officers right now and it's compounded even further. To top it off, I'm a sponsor for a Saudi Arabian student. All too often he'll get a ton of undefined acronyms thrown at him that he's never heard before. I have to imagine he feels a lot like a biz dev guy or gal working at their first startup (if not worse).

I feel like this could be useful for cross-discipline summaries within engineering -- e.g. explaining what quants do to iOS developers, and vice-versa.

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