Ask HN: What are some of the best podcasts for developers?

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best podcasts for developers? by Name_Chawps on Sunday December 11, 2022 @01:07PM (#33945634)

There are literally millions of podcasts out there. You have to do something special in order to get people to listen. The episode I listened to part of sounded just like it was a couple of normal devs chatting about development. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not special. If you listen to major podcasts, the people on the podcasts are highly charismatic and it's easy to listen to them talking about anything. Your podcast, on the other hand, has people who aren't particularly charismatic, just normal people talking, which I can get anywhere. Podcasts can be informative, but they are a form of entertainment, which means you have to be entertaining.

"Devs chatting about development" is also a pretty tight niche. You could probably do better than 200-300 listeners per episode, but not by much. You're creating a product very few people want. Very few people would come solely for the information being conveyed. Nothing wrong with that, but just as a podcast about European pickles would never get millions of views, no matter how good it is, neither would yours.

The audio quality was also not great, but this isn't a major issue if the podcast is entertaining.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best podcasts for developers? by yunwal on Sunday December 11, 2022 @01:18PM (#33945768)

> "Devs chatting about development" is also a pretty tight niche

There must be millions of devs who might be interested in a podcast that teaches them about better development practices

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best podcasts for developers? by capableweb on Sunday December 11, 2022 @01:55PM (#33946180)

> There must be millions of devs who might be interested in a podcast that teaches them about better development practices

Sure, but just hearing/reading "Devs chatting about development" doesn't convince me that the outcome is I'll know about better development practices.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best podcasts for developers? by yunwal on Sunday December 11, 2022 @04:04PM (#33947488)

Sure, but that’s a problem with the marketing, not the niche being too tight.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best podcasts for developers? by nickjj on Monday December 12, 2022 @06:19AM (#33953460)

The official tagline of the podcast is:

> A podcast where folks talk about running small & large web apps in production. Topics include tech stacks, lessons learned and DevOps / deployment tips.

This is at the top of the page.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: What are some of the best podcasts for developers? by nickjj on Sunday December 11, 2022 @03:45PM (#33947304)

Thanks.

I said yes to every single person who requested to be on the show. The hard part for this style of podcast is finding a constant stream of guests. Often times you have no idea how a person is going to react on a call until you're already in the call and recording the show. In every episode we jumped on a call, spent a few minutes saying hello and went straight into it.

I went with my gut in that anyone volunteering to be on the show will be comfortable having a free form conversation. None of it is scripted but I do usually have a couple of bullet points in front of me to cover a range of general topics.

But, I get where you're coming from and I'm like that too. I'm for sure going to gravitate towards a more engaging host / guest if I had an option choosing between A and B. It's really hard to pull this off because if you only have guests on the show who have a public presence on the podcast / interview / YouTube / etc. scene it'll be much more difficult to find guests as a side project. You may also lose out on some really cool stories. In one episode a couple of guys built and shipped a custom hardware device to remote African villages to help make email more accessible.

[ Parent | on HN ]