Here are some podcasts I’ve been into lately and why I like them.
Note - I’m not affiliated with any of these podcasts, I’m just a listener.
Tech
- Backend Banter - Lane from boot.dev interviews a variety of other devs (mostly) and talks about their experiences and projects. I particularly like that it’s not only Golang focused. It’s mostly entertainment, but I’ve learned a few things from it. I really enjoyed the episodes with John Crickett about ‘mechanical sympathy’ (and also his coding challenges) and the one with Thomas Ballinger about convex.dev (I’ve used convex and it’s cool). Those two stood out but they’re all great listens.
- Mostly Technical - Just started listening to this one after hearing Aaron Francis’ interview on Backend Banter. He also posted a thread on twitter once that helped me work out a schema / data model issue I had with optimizing a processing chain for a lot of data. So naturally been following his updates. This is a lot about Laravel and php, at least what I’ve heard so far, and I’m not using those tools - but it’s still entertaining. Kind of makes me want to give Laravel a try…
- Mapscaping - All the stuff I work on a FarSounder touches GIS - we’re grabbing measurements from sonar and other sensors and aggregating them into a big map of the ocean floor. I’ve been listening to this one to learn more about GPS, LIDAR, and the GIS world in general. There’s a really interesting episode about high precision GNSS and one about RTK that were both relevant and informative for me. I heard about it after seeing Brian Timoney’s talk at POSTGIS Day 22. Off topic, but If you haven’t seen this and you’re into Postgres / PostGIS stuff you should check it out. He walks through live pulling in JSON hockey stats data, analyzing it, and producing a nice looking hexbin image ENTIRELY using SQL / PostGIS 🤯 (just to show you can). He was a guest on the show at some point afterward talking about how you should and shouldn’t present your GIS skills, and I found out about this podcast from his promotion of that episode.
- Darknet Diaries - Jack Rhysider tells stories and interviews cybersecurity experts, pen testers, hackers, etc. I’ve learned a lot about security from this one at high level (it’s mostly entertainment). There are a few episodes that are more technical, like one where a pen tester describes his week of work undercover as a new employee in marketing at a company, where his task was to figure what he could get access to and how. I particularly enjoy these types of episodes where pen testers describe a job. This has made me slightly paranoid, maybe in a good way. For example, a guy came by our office to ‘measure windows’ once - claiming to be the buildings owner. I was so skeptical I followed him around the whole time until I got confirmation that he was legit 😂. Definitely wouldn’t have thought anything of that if I hadn’t heard the episode about a group of physical pen testers getting access to an office by posing as tech “testing doors”…
- Pragmatic Engineer - This is a new one that just launched, the first episode was about all the AI tools that are now available and what that might mean for devs. I’m looking forward to more episodes - I’ve been following Gergely Orosz’s newsletter for a while now and I’ve enjoyed it (thanks for the recommendation Rich!).
Product / Business
- Lenny’s Podcast - Lenny interviews a variety of high profile people, usually in product and as a rule, never (almost never) the CEO. Bunch of interesting stories and insights on product dev, marketing, business in general etc.
- My First Million - Just started this one after hearing it mentioned on Mostly Technical or Backend Banter. So far very entertaining, and another one where they are interviewing a variety of successful people and talking about building. My current favorite episode has been the one with Anne Mahlum about founding Back on My Feet and then Solidcore.
Language / Entertainment / Misc.
- Science Vs - They look at trends and fads in the world and try to figure out if they’re based in fact (Microplastics, Are you getting enough protein?, Is social media rotting our brains, etc.).
- The Sharp End - This is about climbing / mountaineering / hiking accidents so it’s a little niche I guess. Usually survivors of the accidents are interviewed explaining what went wrong, if there any mistakes made, etc. These are super interesting and as a climber myself I think it’s good to hear about how things can go wrong to keep on top of your own safety. This episode about surviving a crazy lightning storm was scary.
These next ones are all in Spanish - I learned Spanish a few years ago, and though I don’t speak enough to keep it sharp, listening consistently at least means I can still understand it.
- No Hay Tos (Mexican Spanish) - this one is deliberately for language learners but it’s mostly just two friends talking about random stuff, with a bit of a lean towards culture and language learning.
- Entiende tu mente (Spain Spanish) - this one is about psychology and mental health - they start each podcast with a question from a listener and then discuss the suggested topic or help with them with their issue.
- Caso 63 (Chilean Spanish) - this one is a very sci-fi podcast show series, I don’t want to give anything away but it’s really good and I wasn’t able to put it down. I listened to it while I was running and I remember a couple times I ran longer or kept walking afterward just because I had to hear the next episode.
Any recommendations?
Those are the podcasts that have been filling my queue lately. I’m always looking for new ones to add to the list - so if you have any recommendations send them my way!