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You Should Subscribe to Tech Podcasts

For the first post of 2014, I thought I’d make it a quick one, largely due to the fact that I haven’t had a lot of time to catch my breath over the last few weeks and am thus short on posts in my drafts. A while back, I wrote a post about multi-tasking where I described that I listen to podcasts on the drive to and from work each day. I thought I’d list some podcasts that you might want to check out. I find them valuable, anyway.

I have an app on my phone called Doggcatcher (I think it might be Android only). It’s great for organizing podcasts to which you want to subscribe and playing them as if you were listening to a radio show. With the bluetooth setup in my car, this turns out to be perfect: one ends, and the next one automatically starts without me intervening. New episodes download automatically and listened-to ones vanish automatically from your phone’s drive. Here is my list:

  1. .NET Rocks, a frequently released, professionally done show about all things .NET.
  2. Hanselminutes, a weekly technology talk show with Scott Hanselman
  3. This Developer’s Life, a sporadic personal evaluation of software developers’ lives (Rob Conery and Scott Hanselman)
  4. Polymorphic Podcast is a developer podcast from Craig Shoemaker (I don’t think it’s made anymore, but it was really good when it was, and I’m hoping it comes back)
  5. Herding Code, a group of prominent technologists conduct interviews with people doing cool things in the industry.
  6. The Java Posse, a show about all things Java, that helps me from getting too .NET-centric these days.
  7. The Stack Exchange Podcast will be familiar if you participate in the stack exchange Q&A sites.
  8. Deep Fried Bytes is another tech podcast, “with a southern flavor” (though I don’t personally consider that to be a draw, per se — it’s an interesting show on its own).
  9. Yet Another Podcast, the one I deliberately saved for last due to its name.  This is a last, but not least situation — definitely interesting.

I also listen to the Freakonomics podcast, due to a mild obsession with incentives and outcomes that I’ve had for the last couple of years, but I omitted that from the general theme of developer podcasts.

If you’re a developer and interested in improving your craft, I’d highly recommend subscribing to some podcasts.  This is an excellent array of them with lots of good information, in my opinion.  Perhaps there are others that you’d prefer, however.  Just find some and listen.

Podcasts are a great way to passively assimilate information.  You don’t need to concentrate heavily or even pay attention all the way through, though it’s certainly preferable.  These podcasts touch lightly on a wide variety of topics and the end-result is that they’ll make you vaguely aware of a lot of things that could be useful.  You’re not going to come away from your morning commute suddenly fluent in a new programming language, but when your peers are talking about writing a distributed, publish/subscribe utility that can dictate message routes, you can think to yourself, “I’m pretty sure something like that exists…. and that they talked about it on one my my podcasts… let me go google it.”  In fact, over the years that I’ve kept up with podcasts, I can’t tell you how many wheels I’ve avoided re-inventing.

So, go get yourself a podcast app if that’s your thing.  Or if not, just visit the sites periodically for new episodes.  Whatever approach you take, turn yourself on to this pasive way of keeping current with the industry that you can keep up with during life’s natural downtime.  I’m pretty sure you won’t regret it.

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Dick Kusleika
10 years ago

Thanks for posting these. At the end of every football season, I feel like I have nothing to listen to, so I’ll be giving these a try. On the tech front, I’ve been listening to ATP. It’s very Apple-centric (and I’m not) but it’s still a good listen. If any of you readers are just getting started with The Stack Exchange Podcast, I encourage them to go back and find the one about how they recovered from Superstorm Sandy. That was a fascinating story.

Erik Dietrich
10 years ago
Reply to  Dick Kusleika

Interesting… I’ll have to check it out. I don’t really have much skin in the apple game, but I like to diversify what I take in as much as possible. And I hear you about football season — that always leaves me wondering what it was I used to do on Sundays all those months ago before football started. 🙂

Jacob Appleton
Jacob Appleton
10 years ago

I’m a huge .NET Rocks fan. Even when I’m not necessarily interested in the topic of discussion, the chemistry between the hosts make for great listening.

I’m also a big fan of “The Changelog”: a language agnostic open-source developer podcast.

http://thechangelog.com/

Erik Dietrich
10 years ago
Reply to  Jacob Appleton

Looks good, thanks for the link! I like language agnostic particularly because I’ve become fairly .NET heavy over the last few years. Will definitely give a listen.

Daniel Longest
Daniel Longest
10 years ago

Great list, thanks for sharing. Udi Dahan has some podcasts available on his site (http://www.udidahan.com). I haven’t listened to them yet, but based on an old Hanselminutes when he talked with Udi about NServiceBus, definitely going to give them a try.

Erik Dietrich
10 years ago
Reply to  Daniel Longest

I imagine that there’s some good stuff in there. Udi seems like a very sharp guy from when I’ve heard him talk and, obviously, from creating a piece of software that can do such a good job simplifying/wrapping convoluted communication technologies (no offense to anyone who might like WCF).

mikeswierczek
mikeswierczek
10 years ago

My two favorites are Software Engineering Radio and FLOSS Weekly, though I skip many episodes of both when they cover topics that don’t interest me. If you like Clojure (the Lisp dialect that runs on the JVM), there’s the ThinkRelevance podcasts.

Erik Dietrich
10 years ago
Reply to  mikeswierczek

Will have to give a look. I think I’ve heard of Software Engineering Radio before, but I’m not sure. Thanks for the suggestions!