I listen to the Changelog, programming throwdown podcasts when I'm driving and try to read one cs related research paper a month. Would like to know what blogs/podcasts/websites/magazines do you follow?
I'm really getting a lot out of Tim Ferriss' podcast http://fourhourworkweek.com/podcast/ lately. Especially the episodes with Kelly Starrett, Josh Waitzkin, Sam Harris, Peter Attia, Pavel Tsatsouline and Whitney Cummings.
I think at a certain point you start to recognize that more tech isn't helping as much as it was (diminishing returns perhaps) and that a more holistic approach to improving is necessary.
This crowd might particularly enjoy his interview with Samy Kamkar (of MySpace worm fame). It gave me a few laughs and provided some inspiration to just try things and get stuff done, rather than over-analyzing everything and just sitting there spinning my wheels... a reminder I seem to need every couple of years or so :)
+1 for this! Here were some of the concepts from Tim's interviews that I still think about:
1. Meditation comes up in a lot of the podcasts as a performance practice (as opposed to spiritual practice). It's good to hear that reinforced by a lot of successful people.
2. I use a technique from the Josh Waitzkin episode about priming your brain with hard problems to work on while you sleep. You finish your work day with your most intractable problem. That primes your subconscious to think about it overnight (assuming your evening isn't very taxing). Then I journal in the morning to see if I've had any insights. I often find the intractable part was emotional and whatever happens in my brain while I sleep helps me figure that part out.
3. I like the Pavel episode (the Russian strength coach) for reminding me that a lot of strength training is neurological and that not every workout needs to be done to exhaustion. His Russian athletes had a thing they called Grease the Groove, which was essentially to do lots of short sets spread throughout the day. That basically saved my strength work because weights are the part I'm most likely to skip at the gym for time.
4. There's a segment in the Tony Robbins episode where he denies being a motivational speaker. Essentially he thinks he's a strategist that also happens to care about sequencing and packaging his strategy advice in a way that people can hear it. I think that concept comes up all the time at work: it's not enough to be right, people also need to hear you.
Josh is a revelation: Making smaller circles (there's an article on this on his blog and in the book that is a great read). Also, everything he learned, he's able to apply to something from a completely different field to speed up his progress.
Do you think it's not helping as much due to narrower and narrower specialization, that is it isn't helping as broad a community that it once did but helping many small communities scattered about?
It's more that things are changing faster and faster. At the same time, my life is progressing (wife, kids, commute) and I have less time to focus and devote to learning.
At some point, I feel like I have to focus on the whole package and being a rounded human instead of knowing all the new hotness. Thats what I really feel Tims podcast fosusses on; doing less with more and optimising life with whatever advantage is at hand.
Too bad; I grew up reading Dr. Dobbs, in late 80's, and have so many fond memories. I had to travel 1h by bus to a nearby city every month to (try to) buy it. Only two newsstands in the entire state used to carry it. This was south of Brazil, so an international subscription was completely out of reach for my teenager penny-pinching standards
Episodes are usually small bites (~20-30 mins) of discussion/interviews on one of the upcoming technologies/trends by a couple of Andreessen Horowitz partners and an invited guest. Content is usually pretty insightful and they are really good at doing a thorough analysis of the current status of the tech industry.
I listen to dotnetrocks.com podcasts during my commute to work and while taking a walk. Love it so far. Learned so much new stuff.
edit - I also follow asp.net\community, techcrunch, robert scoble's updates, the hacker news, fb engineering, scott hanselman, guy kawasaki and few more tech resources via my fb news feed. I also watch few videos from time to time at youtube.com. MSDN blogs, Channel 9, mvc conf, dotnet conf are also in my reference list.
My problem here -
I come across so much great content everyday but it is very hard to digest everything or keep everything somewhere conveniently to refer later. Currently, I email content links to myself. I tried pocket and other similar services but they do not have good features to retrieve or refer content later on. And, this is the reason I started work on this site - www.LinkSto.re few years ago. It provides you summary of articles that you saved, clutter\ad free reading. User profile to show you what they have saved.
Features coming soon - great search capabilities by tags, date or content. Calendar to locate stored articles or schedule reading for yourself or with your friends. Article recommendations.
* Talking Machines (http://www.thetalkingmachines.com/), which is a relatively 'heavy' podcast about machine learning, great for when I've managed to make coffee before getting on the Bart.
* Partially Derivative (http://www.partiallyderivative.com/), the podcast about data science and beer. Perfect for the days when I haven't managed to make coffee before getting on the Bart.
I've been doing a lot of driving this year, and dotnetrocks has been one of my staples.
What surprised me the most once I started listening was that I was expecting a very Microsoft focused show because of the name, but that ended up being only partly true. There are just as many shows that are are focused on developer tools, javascript, and the industry in general as there are shows that deal with .NET technologies. Not to mention the geek-out shows which just dive into random areas of tech and science. I really like the breadth of topic. It's in a sweet spot for me.
I'd love to find another show that has a similar scope but focuses on another language or area of technology, since it would both keep my interest while giving me familiarity with a whole other area of programming. I haven't found one yet, but maybe skimming through the lists posted here will reveal one.
http://atp.fm, but I rarely finish one episode these days... I wish I could listen to fun smart folks talking about computers other than Apple. Also, I'd love to hear people that weren't so overtly progressive.
Most stuff I find is too serious and I rather hear podcasts to entertain myself instead of trying to learn more stuff while driving.
> Also, I'd love to hear people that weren't so overtly progressive.
Uhhhh, what? The only remotely political topic they touch on is women in technology. Casey Liss went to bloody Virginia Tech, hardly Reed College level progressivism.
Maybe gp is including blog posts as well? Marco Arment ventures into other political topics to some degree. I don't think I've ever heard John Siracusa or Casey Liss hit on anything significantly political other than women in tech.
In all honesty, Siracusa is, well, the only guy worth listening to in this particular podcast. Occasional smart comments by two other co-hosts are drowned in an overall sea of mediocre insight or factual errors.
I think we're all just spoiled by John's consistent insight and wit. Other tech podcasts are filled with people like Casey, who talk a lot but don't have anything to say. Marco is usually fine.
Nonsense. Marco may be frivolous and scatter-brained but the man has some serious brain power. He's a very effective duck tape programmer and does some hard algorithm work along with serious UI polishing. There aren't many millionaire independent programmers who succeed based on the quality of their programming without much business and marketing acumen, but Marco shows it can be done.
I never questioned intelligence levels of any of the hosts. It's just that John is infinitely more entertaining, informative and insightful; Marco and Casey are often out of their depths on many subjects.
I like to listen to Marco's point of view of the tech world, being a successful independent developer his (conservative) opinions on languages and platforms are always insightful.
I feel that all podcasts about Apple tech have gone downhill since Apple Watch was announced; endless discussions about its price tiers and fitness bits. Yet nothing insightful ever comes of it.
I guess that's how everyone felt when the original iPhone 'invaded' former Mac-only blogs...
Software Engineering Radio is in my podcast software but I don't find myself listening to it much.
I have a variety of others more oriented to productivity and freelancing, but they're less technical. I do highly recommend the Home Work podcast by Aaron Mahnke and Dave Caolo - one of the few I have set to auto download.
In your opinion if I were to start listening to nodeup should I start from the beginning. Node changes all the time and I feel like if I start on episode 1 I could be potentially learning outdated tech. If so what episode do you recommend starting on?
I also thought this was a great listen. Season 2 - not so much. I feel like they really dove too far into the back-and-forth between the founders and I personally find it much less interesting.
Before PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman did Reply All, they did TL;DR. It was pretty much the same thing but over on WNYC. There's plenty of great episodes worth going back to:
http://www.onthemedia.org/tags/tldr_podcast/
I'll recommend Software Engineering Radio (http://www.se-radio.net/). The interviewers are a bit uneven, but the topics and interviewees mostly interesting. A vast backlog, too!
Other than that, my main source of information is youtube videos coverted to mp3 using `youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format=mp3`. Possibly your podcast player can treat regular mp3s as podcast episodes (the wonderful PocketCasts on Android supports this: http://www.shiftyjelly.com/support/pocketcasts#115)
SE Radio is definitely a great podcast. I'm not even a professional developer (Linux sysadmin) and I find at least 1 episode in 3 fascinating. They do a good job of keeping the topics diverse.
I agree that sometimes the interviewers (or the recording quality itself) can be a little weak and difficult to understand, especially on older episodes. That seems to be pretty common among podcasts, actually. I dislike and/or disagree with the host, and the production quality sucks, but they get such outstanding guests that it doesn't matter. I used to listen to a lot of podcasts on homebrewing beer, and that was definitely the case in that world.
Just found http://fullstackradio.com/ yesterday and I've been listening to most of them. They're pretty great. They talk about their subjects in a mostly language/framework agnostic way so it's really useful. I don't know why but it's hard to find podcasts that don't assume you're a web developer by default.
* Sparkgap, focused on a specific technical topic each episode, sometimes with guests. http://thesparkgap.net
* Embedded.fm, focusued on technical and non-technical topics surrounding embedded systems software development but also often links with art and education, often with guests. http://embedded.fm
* AmpHour: Dave Jones and Chris Gammel ranting about whatever they feel like fairly often with guests. http://theamphour.com
Cortex [1] is a case study of the workflow of CGP Grey, who makes really great YouTube videos that the HN community would probably enjoy. It's slated for 10 episodes, and currently episode 5 has just been released.
I also really like Hello Internet [2], which is done by a couple of guys who make YouTube videos for a living. Usually not super tech-oriented, but they almost always have interesting discussions. It's a fun podcast.
3. Website: Subreddit Programming for my general interest in programming
4. Magazine: Harvard Business Review for understanding business needs. Reading business case studies help to align my tech skills with business needs. I find this combination particularly essential.
5. Magazine: MIT Technology Review for tech related research
6. Podcast: Nodeup for my nodejs interest
7. Website: Producthunt for uncovering products that I dont know.
Lastly something which you didn't ask. But I want to share is books and video tutorials. Books and videos recommendation is a whole new topic.
CppCast [0] is a pretty good C++-focused podcast. Starts with a summary of recent C++ news (and related topics), followed by an interview with excellent guests (usually luminaries from the C++ community).
I follow all of them via RSS. In English: Hacker News, InfoQ, Planet Clojure, O'Reilly Radar (and ocasionally listen their podcast in SoundCloud), Ars Technica, The Server Side. I save some episodes of some podcasts which I find interesting (eg. The Cognicast) but takes me a long time to catch up.
I also follow some tech blogs in Spanish: Microsiervos, Fayerwayer, Manzana Mecanica, Hipertextual, Genciencia.
None of them are directly tech related, but most of them have insights that are applicable to projects from a human perspective (eg discovering things about how people react to stuff).
They start off their podcasts with a review of some sort of alcoholic beverage, then progress through discussions about data science. I find the combination works, I suspect the alcohol helps them express themselves and often it gets pretty hilarious - but I don't think I've listened to an episode that hasn't informed me or gave me some sort of insight into data science yet.
If you want daily video reviews + feedback for new Show HN and Product Hunt projects, I'm launching Rate My App (http://ratemyapp.com, @ratemyapp) later this month.
The Jeff and Casey Show is a weekly podcast by software developers Jeff Roberts
and Casey Muratori that is, for lack of a better description, almost completely
random. Often both meticulous and erroneous, somehow both offensive and
compassionate, and always unorthodox, the one thing you can say for certain about
The Jeff and Casey show is that there’s nothing else quite like it.
I've been enjoying Developer Tea[1] quite a bit lately. If you are into Rust (or are curious about Rust), the first episode of Rusty Radio[2] was released recently.
I'm currently working on http://engineeringblogs.co - its a list of engineering blogs from tech and startup companies such as Facebook, Twitter, AirBnB etc. It currently needs more work and that will be happening soon!
EDIT: If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them.
-you must listen to Android Devs Backstage : http://androidbackstage.blogspot.fr/ It is animated by key members of the Android team at Google, so they offer really good insights on the platform and its internals. Even if you are a senior android engineer, you are going to learn new things. Sadly, that's the only android podcast I can really recommend (if you know any good alternatives, feel free to let me know).
- many engineering blogs : etsy, instagram, square, facebook, ..
-it is a good idea to follow googlers and experienced devs on G+.
I have learned a ton about managing relationships and being a better person from The Art of Charm (http://theartofcharm.com/podcast-episodes/). The Art of Charm is the only podcast I listen to religiously these days.
I visit /r/netsec a lot. It's a subreddit devoted entirely to information security; the discourse there is pretty high caliber for an open internet forum. Fairly strong signal to noise ratio.
That's not a podcast or blog, but it is a website and it is extremely good for keeping up to date on software security news.
A variety of FLOSS projects, usually entertaining and quite often I learn about projects I've never heard of before.
Randal Schwartz et al. are pretty good at extracting interesting information.
If you're looking for something a bit different from the usual tech fare, I'd recommend Aeon, it's a magazine-style site, I like it quite a bit: http://aeon.co/magazine/
How has no one mentioned the Joe Rogan Experience yet?
Edit: ... because it isn't a tech podcast. It's too early to read carefully. But seriously sometimes he has scientists and stuff on. The Aubrey de Grey one is pretty good.
A lot of good stuff here, for podcasts, I have to add Dan Carlin's 'Common Sense' and especially his fantastic history podcast 'Hardcore History'. http://www.dancarlin.com/
Would you guys be interested in an open magazine that curates content from several blogs to give you a general overview of hardware/software technology industry? Anyone interested in collaborating on that?
* Beats, Rye & Types (http://beatsryetypes.com/) -- An entertaining podcast about music, food, and programming. I love listening to Michael Bernstein and Aaron Quint, especially when they're talking about Computology and Hip-Hop. A rather interesting mix. Also noteworthy: the only show in the list without a sponsor.
* Home Work (http://5by5.tv/homework) -- A weekly podcast for people who work from home. I'm currently able to telecommute once a week (which is great, by the way). But even if you're not in the position to work from home, this podcast offers many useful tips on productivity, work spaces, tools, and more.
* The Writer Files (http://rainmaker.fm/series/writer/) -- An in-depth look at the "habits, habitats, and brains of a wide spectrum of renowned writers to learn their secrets of productivity and creativity". I care a lot about writing. It's no surprise that I'm interested in the work habits of people who write for a living.
* The Binpress Podcast (http://www.binpress.com/blog/category/podcast/) -- A series of interviews with creators and founders on how they built a business around their digital products. I've always been fascinated by the idea of monetizing (open source) software and creating a sustainable alternative to working for someone else.
* The Changelog (https://changelog.com/podcast/) -- A podcast dedicated to "the intersection of software development and open source" covering a wide variety of topics. I tend to skip most of the episodes on web development, but I listen carefully to anything about Go, Rust, CoreOS, etc. Bonus: The Changelog Weekly newsletter is excellent too.
* Invisible Office Hours (http://invisibleofficehours.com/) -- Hosted by the smart and funny Jason Zook and Paul Jarvis, this podcast includes topics like side projects, launching products, and writing books. I've read all books by Jason and Paul. I also enjoy their weekly newsletters. As I'm writing this, I'm already excited about the third season of their show.
It touches everything and keeps me up to date on important security vulnerabilities. (Otherwise I would probably disappear in my coding cavern for months and not know what is happening on the surface...)
I get occasional reminder spam of my email address used for k5 having been harvested at some point, but looking at those diaries doesn't fill me with a desire to return there.
Kuro5hin's alexa rank is about 300,000 also many stories have significant pagerank. One can see from google trends that k5 is a popular site to read, but the five dollar one-time troll suppression fee discourages new members.
I think at a certain point you start to recognize that more tech isn't helping as much as it was (diminishing returns perhaps) and that a more holistic approach to improving is necessary.