I just received my first iPod from Amazon the other day and have been playing with it a little here and there. Having music to go is great but I’m really enjoying listening to podcasts! Just as blogs have become a more important source for technology news in my life than mainstream media, I can see podcasts having a similar effect on how I keep abreast of technology but at a higher level.
Blogs typically have posts with a very focused subject matter so you usually get insight into a piece of technology such as ActiveRecord or Hibernate. Podcast interviews on the other hand often give you the big picture of how the various technology pieces and practices intersect. For example I love hearing about how company X rewrote their site using technology Y, the challenges they faced with scalability, how they handled deployment, what they used for continuous integration, how long the release cycles were, how involved the customer was, etc… Geoffrey Grosenbach is especially skilled at touching on almost all of these aspects when interviewing folks in his Ruby on Rails Podcast.
There are 2 podcasts that really stand out in my mind that I’ve enjoyed going through the archives of so far. They are the Java Posse and the aforementioned Ruby on Rails Podcast.
What other really good technology focused podcasts are “must listen”?
http://www.itconversations.com/series/programming.html
An ipod? Criminy! You already ignore your girlfriend too much as it is! Blogging incessantly- it’s reprehensible! I’ve got a podcast for you:
http://getOffTheCouch.AndWashTheDishes.com
Wow, even my conscience reads my blog, hi Susan!
Thanks for the suggestion Mike, I’ll check it out. Another technical podcast I found that looks interesting is: http://www.swampcast.com/
ZDot http://timshadel.com/blog/ (A lead developer, mostly Java related)
Drunk and Retired http://drunkandretired.com/podcast/ (Two developers, Agile, UML, Ruby, Java, Enterprise Software)
The Polymorphic Podcast http://polymorphicpodcast.com/ (.NET, but focused practices and very enthusiastic host)
I like SwampCast as well, though it can be a bit spotty.
My favorite — since I particiapte — can be found here at THE PODCAST ROUNDTABLE:
http://www.podcastroundtable.com
– Dennis D. McDonald