Ask HN: What software engineering related podcasts are you listening to? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What software engineering related podcasts are you listening to?

87 pointstsaprailis26 comments

I'm interested in hearing both technical and on the human management side (i.e. along the lines of the mythical man month book)

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The Bike Shed [0] is great, I think it started as a ThoughtBot podcast, but one of the two regular hosts - Sean Griffin [1] - has since left for Shopify.

I think it's great because although dominated by Ruby (Griffin is a committer on Rails, and I gather it's ThoughtBot's main language) the discussion is typically applicable to other languages, or focuses on a human element. I don't think I've ever written a line of Ruby, and I enjoy it.

There's also some Haskell discussion and more recently a lot of Rust - Griffin having created the Diesel ORM [2].

The format's great though, and as a consequence never sounds like a contrived dialogue - it typically starts as a "what have you been working on this week", and that recent real experience turns into a more general discussion around whatever it was.

I can't really recommend it enough, I only found it fairly recently, and went back through to listen to the entire catalogue of episodes.

- 0: https://thebikeshed.fm

- 1: https://githib.com/sgrif

- 2: https://github.com/diesel-rs/diesel

correct link for 0) http://bikeshed.fm/

Oops - sorry about that, that's what I get for typing out a URL like it's 1999..

Not all of these are "software engineering," but many of them often tie to the soft skills side of things or general development rigor.

Regular listens - shows to which I subscribe, in rough order of how excited I am to see them show up in my podcast app:

Not So Standard Deviations [0]

Immutable [1]

ShopTalk [2]

Talk Python to Me [3]

The Versioning Show [4]

Data Skeptic [5]

Occasional listens - not subscribed but regularly check for interesting guests:

Data Stories [6]

Partially Derivative [7]

I tried Software Engineering Daily last year and wasn't a big fan - based on the following here I'll have to give it another shot.

0 - https://soundcloud.com/nssd-podcast

1 - https://spec.fm/podcasts/immutable

2 - http://shoptalkshow.com/

3 - https://talkpython.fm/

4 - https://www.sitepoint.com/tag/versioning-show-episodes/

5 - http://dataskeptic.com/

6 - https://datastori.es/

7 - http://partiallyderivative.com/

I tried listening to Data Skeptic and gave up after a couple episodes because the dude was coming across as a jerk.

NSSD is great tho.

I'll start by plugging my own podcast, "The Holistic Developer" (http://theholisticdeveloper.podbean.com/). It hasn't been coming out very regularly since my son was born but I do my best to put out ~5 minute episodes every couple weeks.

Developer Tea is along the same lines, straddling between technical topics & career development.

Soft Skills Engineering is entirely focused on, well, soft skills.

Leader.team is just getting started but they seem to be a good resource for technical leads & managers.

JavaScript Jabber has great interviews.

and it's not a technical podcast, but Creating Disney Magic (Lessons in Leadership, Management, and Customer Service) with Lee Cockerell is a must-listen for me every week.

From my "awesome podcasts" list related to your criteria:

- Vimcasts

I have tried several tech-related podcasts, but gave up on most within a couple episodes.

One common format is a host who brings on a new guest for an hour-long interview each episode. My main gripe with these is they're too long for the amount of substance they contain.

I ended up basically scrolling the archives of these shows to pick out only the guests I was already interested in, because the random ones just weren't worth the listening time.

The podcasts I keep coming back to are concise, edited episodes of 30 minutes or less. Most of these aren't directly related to the types you're looking for, though. I'd love to know of more.

GoTime[0] is a Go oriented podcast that is high quality and has a new guest each week. They also touch on a lot of general topics about SWE that are relevant to a broader audience.

[0] https://changelog.com/gotime/

Check out the back-episodes of "this developers life" - while not too technical it dived into some human aspects of being a developer: http://thisdeveloperslife.com

I miss This Developer's Life :( It's a great show. Definitely worth digging into the archives if you've never heard it.

  StackExchange
  Hanselminutes
  SE-radio
  SEI podcast
  Cognicast
  Software Engineering Daily

Software Engineering Daily seems to dominate my playlist. I guess that shouldn't be a surprise.

Last year, I listened through a lot of the Changelog's back catalog. But I sort of maxxed out on it because my interest is more toward the infrastructure than the front end development tools.

Software Engineering Daily does a good job of exploring both technical and human issues. The Changelog is a great podcast for the open source community.

Software Engineering Radio[0] is a useful resource for in-depth discussions on software and development practices.

Developer on Fire[1] tends to feature more personal interviews with software developers.

Software Engineering Daily[2] produces episodes at a similar rate to the previous podcast but discussion tends to be product-oriented.

Coder Radio[3] can be good fun sometimes. The hosts can sometimes be a bit over the top.

[0] http://www.se-radio.net/ [1] http://developeronfire.com/ [2] http://softwareengineeringdaily.com/ [3] http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/show/coderradio/

"New Rustacean" is great for anybody learning Rust. The episodes are very short (10-20 mins) and are surprisingly comprehensive, considering you're not looking at any code: http://www.newrustacean.com/

It's much more niche-specific than most of the other suggestions, but I've been enjoying This Week in Machine Learning & AI (https://twimlai.com/). It feels like the field of ML is moving so quickly these days, and I think Sam Charrington does a good job of making new research accessible without dumbing things down too much (which I find most media outlets tend to do).

Edge Cases "A weekly podcast about (mostly Apple-related) software development by Andrew Pontious and Wolf Rentzsch."

http://edgecasesshow.com

My favorite podcast because the hosts (a) are highly talented developers (b) did careful research for each episode (c) chose common Apple programming challenges as the topic for each episode.

Sadly, it died last year, and I've found nothing out there to fill its void.

I'm a huge fan of Security Now podcast: https://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm. It's not a software engineering podcast per se but it gives detailed explanations of security breaches found in software. So I recommend y'all check it out.

I listen to DNR's latest shows as soon as I can.

https://www.DotNetRocks.com

This is a bit off topic but are there any funny software engineering podcasts?

Edit: funny replaced with off topic

embedded.fm

Coder Radio, it's a bit more focused on the logistics of being a developer rather than developing itself.

I wrote a post you might find interesting about Podcasts I Listen To: http://codingfearlessly.com/podcasts-i-listen-to

A few of my favorite: 1. SE Radio 2. Software Engineering Daily 3. Full Stack Radio

The Changelog

I listened to SQLite developer interview in this podcast and was highly impressed with it.

Get this... none. I'm not being snarky, I'm saying I choose not to spend time filtering audio opine on untargeted areas of the profession and consider than a desirable optimization.

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