Since I started both running semi-regularly and also biking 30+minutes on the Burke a couple times per week, I’ve started listening to a lot of podcasts — mainly focusing on technology (especially free software, web development, and Ruby) and product management. I’ve listening to enough good, and enough bad, that I want to share some of the podcasts I’ve found most interesting and helpful.
Weekly podcasts
These are the most consistently good, consistently released ones I listen to. Not every episode is great, but they are worthwhile enough of the time that I usually at least sample a bit of each new episode.
- Ruby Rogues – a great panel, featuring the awesome Coraline Ada Ehmke, among others. It’s excellent both for Rubyists specifically and as a general software discussion venue.
- Talk Python To Me – a superb interview-based podcast. The focus is Python, but it’s very accessible even without a deep knowledge of the specific language, and I often get ideas from it that are relevant for my work. Episodes usually start with a lot of personal narrative about how the interviewee got to where they are, which is often really interesting.
- CodePen Radio – this one is focused on the startup codepen.io, and is usually a fun listen. The range of topics — all drawn from running a web app-based startup — maps pretty nicely onto the things that are relevant for me, running the technology side of a small nonprofit. (I’ve still never used CodePen, and don’t feel like I need to in order to get value from the podcast.)
- The Changelog – the best of the handful of free / open source software podcasts, this one is interview based, usually goes deeply into the background of each guest, and has consistently interesting guests.
- Javascript Jabber – the javascript companion to Ruby Rogues, this one is a little more scattered and less consistently insightful, but still has a pretty high ratio of solid episodes.
- Ruby5 – this short podcast comes out twice per week, and basically runs down interesting news and new releases in the Ruby and Rails worlds. It’s a little cheesy, but it’s worth your time if you work with Ruby or Rails.
Individual episodes
These are some of the podcast episodes that I recommend. Some come from the podcasts above, and others are individual episodes from podcasts that I otherwise don’t listen to regularly or wouldn’t recommend highly.
- The Changelog: The Future of WordPress and Calypso with Matt Mullenweg – I wish I could just hang out all the time with Matt Mullenweg.
- Data Skeptic: Wikipedia Revision Scoring as a Service – This interview with Aaron Halfaker is the best overview of Wikipedia’s editor trends that I’ve seen/heard.
- Javascript Jabber: The Evolution of Flux Libraries – This late-2015 overview of React, Flux and Redux is the best of many React-related podcasts I’ve listened it. It helped clarify my thinking a lot.
- Ruby Rogues: Neo4j – a nice Ruby-centered introduction to the concept of graph databases
- Javascript Jabber: npm 3 – an interesting overview of the npm roadmap, which helped me understand a lot more about what npm does and what it’s trying to do
- Ruby Rogues: Feature Toggles – a discussion of feature toggles as an key enabler of a trunk-based development git strategy
- Ruby Rogues: The Crystal Programming Language – with the creator of Crystal, made me eager to start using Crystal
- Ruby Rogues: The Leprechauns of Software Engineering – with the author of the book of the same title, super interesting
Thank you for the kind words and shout out Sage! Much appreciated. It’s blog posts like this that help us to know we’re on the right track.
Dude, did you took the NYC aerial photograph by chopper.