Programming Podcasts

I’m always on the lookout for podcasts to listen to, but I think good software development ones are quite hard to find. There’s loads of languages out there, so you need to find ones based on languages you know or would like to know. Also, podcasts are audio only, so you are limited to what you can discuss, since many aspects would benefit from diagrams, or to see actual code.

I was listening to a particular podcast and thought I could review it on my blog. After typing up a draft, I held off publishing it because they have quite a big following and I was quite critical. After consideration, I’ve anonymised it somewhat, and tried to frame it more about Podcasts in general.

When I was learning about Web Development, I did want to learn more debugging tips. This particular podcast had an episode on debugging websites, so I eagerly listened to it. However, they didn’t talk about actually stepping through code using a debugger! They did partially talk about the newbie way of writing “console.log” statements in the code. I wasn’t impressed with this episode.

Another episode was discussing experiences of being a woman in the tech industry. This is fine; talk about what you know, what you have experienced. However, sometimes they went off on tangents talking about women specifically, and not in the context of software development. I think it was this episode where I wrote down this somewhat ironic quote:

“I get told I’m too emotional, do you know how angry that makes me?”

Woman developer on her critique from a Man

That did make me laugh out loud. She was totally sincere.

A few episodes have discussed doing presentations at Tech Conferences. I did watch a couple that I found recorded on Youtube and they did seem really impressive presenters. One of them presented at “Frontend Love” which is just a hilarious name. I think that’s why sometimes they brand it as “Frontend Developer Love” to make it sound less rude and more professional. I found it very strange that one of the hosts stated that sometimes they have signed up to conferences to talk about a specific topic, but they actually know absolutely nothing about the topic. The upcoming deadline then forces them to learn quickly. The thing is, surely your talk can’t be that interesting if you aren’t an expert in the topic you are presenting. I definitely wouldn’t want to put myself in that situation. What if someone asks you a question and you have no idea? You will look like an idiot. That brings me onto the next point…

I think it’s the same approach with many of their episodes. Host A starts talking about a topic, Host B asks a question to get more detail out of the statement, then Host A says “I don’t know, that isn’t in my notes”. Then at that point I realised they were just reeling off information from Wikipedia. What value does that give the listener? Anyone can read Wikipedia. We need “added value”; you need to talk about “lessons learned”, your opinion etc – just give us something more than an audiobook version of Wikipedia.  

Compared to other programming podcasts, it hasn’t been as nerdy with its themes since it has mainly covered subjects relating to the industry (recruitment and conferences), rather than the subject of coding directly. Personally, I don’t think this is what I’d look for in a Programming Podcast.

One Podcast that I have enjoyed is Merge Conflict. Those guys talk about Android/Apple development, and “.NET”, and both James Montemagno and Frank Krueger seem incredibly knowledgeable in their topics. Never have I thought they were just reading from Wikipedia, they seem to have a deep understanding and plenty of experience in what they are talking about. Sometimes it might be more news-like, so they talk about upcoming changes to “.NET” or a new iPhone etc, but their experience of previous iterations means they can actually provide an opinion on the new features.Another one I enjoy is Fredrik Christenson who also posts them to Youtube. He keeps them concise, usually under 10 minutes and answers a question from his subscribers. He speaks purely from experience of the industry and has some good stories, or makes good points in general.