Building Better Developers

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Well, hello and welcome back. We are between seasons, just wrapped up looking at positives. It seems like a time that it is worth doing a little retrospective. At this point, we've actually gone north of 400 episodes of the Develop-a-Noor podcast. That seems like a good time to take a step back again and look at lessons learned. We have looked at these before. We brought them up here and there, I think in podcast episodes and blog articles and some of the other things we've had discussions on and shared. But it made sense to just sort of put a little pin in this one. Now that we've grown this many episodes, take a look back at what do we do? How do we do it? This is not necessarily best practices or anything, but some ideas that may be your best practices. I don't know if there are best practices as much as it's just how these things get put together. So without any further ado, let's talk about putting together a podcast. Then the first thing is content. Actually the primary thing is content. There are different ways to approach it, obviously, I think. You can do a heavily scripted version. You can do something that's a little more off the cuff. You can do something that's casual or formal. We may do interviews. Obviously we've had almost none, so we don't go the interview route. But that definitely from a content point of view is, I would say, the easiest way to go. That's probably why you see most podcasts and even television shows and things like that that are put together on a regular basis. Not like a few episodes a year or something like that. That have writers. If you don't have writers, then a lot of times it's easier to just do interviews if you can do those well. Because whoever sits down in the interview seat, they're going to bring content. The way we do it is essentially look at it as season at a time. I think it's probably becoming obvious. Take basically a topic or a series of topics and say, hey, here's something that we want to talk about that is going to be more than an episode or two. We can spend a few hours essentially in time going over it and digging into it. Of course there's also these episodes that are not. This is when some idea comes up that is really not worthy of or not something we want to desire at a full season level. That can be a quick episode. It's worth 20 or 30 minutes to talk about it. Or maybe a couple between seasons where you can say, oh, that's probably an hour's worth of material. This is, if you probably have noticed, this is not heavily scripted. Essentially not scripted at all. I highly recommend that you step into something like this with an outline. That's roughly what happens when I sit down to do an episode. I have a mental outline, a couple ideas, maybe a few bullet points that I want to touch on. Then I just start into that. I make sure that I cover those in what I hope is a conversational tone. That's part of what the podcast is. That may or may not work for you. That tone and your approach is something you need to settle on, something that works for you. The less scripted, the less formal I guess it will say that it is, the easier it's going to be to get it done. If you have something heavily scripted, heavily produced, then that takes time. If you don't have people, if you don't have a team to do that, then it falls on you. I do everything from start to finish on every episode. I do what I can to reduce my time while trying to put together something that has a reasonable enough quality. When I jump into a topic, it's something that I'm either very comfortable with, which often happens. It's something that I've probably presented on before and probably had a lot of conversations about. That's often what sparks these episodes. Some of them do require some research. That's why I look at stuff essentially a season at a time. If there's something where I need to go deeper into that topic, then I can do that before I – usually at least – will do that before I get into the season. For example, next season that we've got coming up is going to be on Agile and the Agile Manifesto. I will do a little bit of research. I've done a little bit of research around that, but also have lived it so it makes it a perfect topic. Or I can sit down, take a look at the specific items I'm going to discuss in each episode, and then start to talk about them. Of course, it helps to be able to weave in experience and stories and other things that not just directly keeping it an academic kind of discussion. The further you get into your career, your experience, your life, whatever it is that informs that podcast topic, the easier it's going to be to talk about it. Quite honestly, that's where a lot of what these episodes have come from. They've been conversations that I've already had either in a mentor class or over lunch or with coworkers or something like that so that there is my initial take plus usually a lot of feedback from other people and things that I've gained by having those conversations with them that help give us a hopefully a well-rounded thought about whatever that topic is. When you sit down to actually do the podcast, you think I would say obviously need to be in a place that is moderately to completely sound protected. This doesn't mean you have to have a soundproof room, but somewhere where you're not going to have pets and kids running around behind you or a TV blaring. It helps and you find a lot of podcasters forget to do this from time to time. Not to turn off all your noise making notifications that are around, be it your cell phone, laptop, whatever it is, particularly the device that you're using to record. Maybe you're working off of a laptop, maybe you're working off of a desktop, but if you've got a computer or mobile phone that you're using to record, you want to make sure that it does not essentially get interrupted during that process. It is easiest to sit down and just go. That's why I like the idea of having some sort of an outline or something like that. Depending on your comfort level with the topic, you may have to have some serious in-depth notes available, but you want to do, the best way to do it I think is to essentially be able to hit it in one sitting. Now, if you have a long podcast with a series of topics, then it may feel like one sitting to the listener, but you may actually sit down and cover topic A, come back later and do B, later and do C, et cetera. I think about the hardcore history, I'm pretty sure that Dan Carlin does not just sit down and start talking for four to six hours straight, particularly with the notes that he has. You do it in sittings or sessions, but you want to be able to ideally do those in one shot and not have to go back and do a lot of producing to reduce side noises and coughs that you have on mic or things like that, because that is time consuming. So I sit down and go through, have an idea or a couple ideas that are that episode, and then I start talking and I start working my way through them, making sure that I'm progressing at the pace that I want to, to match what is our typical timeframe. In the developmental world, it's basically become shooting for about 20 minutes an episode. If it goes a little long or if it's a little short, I don't sweat it too much. I would rather have something short that covers the topic completely than something long that I end up vamping or adding a lot of stuff that's just not useful material or content. Once I get it done, then I go back and do a one pass through of editing, of audio editing. This is really to just sort of prime it. As you get in, if you do this a couple of times or maybe several times, you'll see patterns in doing audio editing. So you'll be able to yank out things that are pretty obviously don't need to be there. Maybe a sneeze or cough or maybe there's a period where somebody drops something. You may also have long periods of silence. You can go in and tweak those. Usually in a 20 minute episode, I don't know, I'd probably spend 10 to 15 minutes. I can move through it pretty quick. One of the recommendations is get a tool that you're comfortable with and then make whatever changes you need to in the preferences and the quick keys and things like that so that your common tasks can be done as fast as possible. Of course, if you can automate any of this stuff, then more power to you. Now once we get the first editing pass through, which is basically like I said, 10, 15 minutes, sitting there with headphones on, highlighting some areas that probably can be cleaned up and then listening to them to make sure that that's correct. Then I go into the, actually then I write the blog article, which is the post article you see if you go out to the developer site. I've actually gone back and forth on that. Sometimes I've written the article beforehand and sometimes I do it afterwards as, and I'll step into that in a second, but as I'm listening to the podcast, I've found that it's easier for me to, and this is a personal thing, it's easier for me to talk about it and then write about it than it is to write about it and then talk about it. It's simply because of the nature of how I approach this. When I write beforehand, I go out and write an article on that topic and then use that as an outline or the source material for the podcast, then it tends to limit me because I look a little too much, I think, at what I wrote as opposed to allowing myself to just sort of editorialize as I go through things and sit down and sort of just start thinking through things. And while I have an outline, I have an idea of what I want to say. There will be things that will come to me actually during the podcast sometimes, and I want to capture those. I'm going to throw those out there as well. I might tweak stories and things like that as I'm going through and sharing experiences and stories that are related to that topic. The nice thing is that when I also is that when I afterwards do the writing of the article, it's easier for me to sort of map what was covered in the podcast episode to what is in the post. I don't try to do a word for word or a verbatim. I try to make the post stand on its own as well and maybe be different enough that it's worthwhile in my mind. It's worthwhile to not only listen to the episode but also read the post, even though I sometimes do that secondarily to the fact that the post will have links and things like that. At times it can be helpful. There's also just a slightly different approach to how I talk about the topic and what I cover. What that also does for me as I mentioned is I actually sit down and listen to the podcast, which I highly recommend is you just every episode, you just listen to it to make sure that there's not some weird thing that goes on. I have had that occasionally where when I do my prep, everything's good. I get done and it's got something weird, maybe very badly echoey or, you know, there's all kinds of things that go wrong. And that prep is making sure that you put the proper filters on and things like that, which is part of what I'm listening for, because there's certain things that you can do fairly easily with most tools to tweak how it sounds so that it comes out in a way that is the way that you want it to. It can maybe reduce some hiss, reduce some background noise, maybe reduces some of the echoey kind of sound you may have depending on where you're recording. And those sort of things, you want to have a stock bunch of settings that you can do so that you can apply those to the audio. And then when you listen to it, it should have a moderately consistent tone and feel from the audio side as well as content and in your approach. And so to me, it sort of helps to sit down and listen through the entire episode. And I actually, so that I'm killing two birds with one stone, I'm writing the article as I'm listening. Sort of like taking notes, except I've got my process. So there's the content, but then there's several other things that go into that blog article. I've got to grab the image for the podcast because I throw the same image out there and I've got to make sure that I title it and schedule it appropriately because these obviously are done beforehand. So, you know, if you hear this on a Monday, I probably did not do it Monday morning. I probably did it a week or two in advance. And I do that. That's just something I've learned over time. Give yourself some, some sort of buffer in time. Ideally I've found for me about two weeks ahead is best, but I can be comfortable with a week lead time. And it, and that sort of works out for me anyway, since this is a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I try to have a target that the previous Sunday, I have the week done sometimes, you know, things back up and I'm getting it done the Sunday night, and then you turn around the next day, the first one of those released for the week. But I try to stay ahead to give myself at least an extra week buffer if not to, because things come up. And if you want to be able to do a consistently scheduled podcast, you're going to have to probably work your schedule around that unless that happens to be all you're doing or, you know, your time is not pressed enough so that you could easily crank out a couple episodes in whatever your, we'll call it free time is also is going through the, the writing I use, as I've mentioned before, I use Grammarly so that I can catch typos and spelling errors and grammatical mistakes and things like that. And so there's a, that's my sort of my editing pass. So I go in, I'm listening to the podcast, I'm writing the blog article. I'm going back through and correcting grammar. I'm adding things like the, the podcast information for Apple, which, you know, the title and the subtitle and episode numbers and season numbers, a little, the blurb that you would see if you do a Google search and that shows up. So it's sort of the summary of the article. And I'm able to do that because of how the speed it is for me to write the article along with the length of the podcast. So normally it works out pretty well. It takes me between 15 and 25 minutes, typically to write an article for a podcast episode. And a lot of it I use as sort of a template. So I can, I can get in. I've got an idea of what I'm, you know, the structure right away, start filling in content, you're off and running. And of course, you know, part of this is doing this over 400 times you get into a rhythm. So the first, you know, your first 10 podcasts are going to be probably far more time consuming and a headache than, you know, your thousand first, thousand second, thousand third, et cetera. So there is a, you know, there's definitely a learning curve, a hill to climb early on, but it does get better. I think that's why a lot of places they have seen several people say, you know, recommend you do, you know, two, three, four episodes before you quote launch so that you've gone through them. You've got a little bit of buffer and you've, you've worked out some of the kinks at least of your, of your system. I did not. In the first hundred to 200, there were, I don't know, four or five times that I made adjustments. The, the intro and the outro were something that you may have seen as I think it's sort of progressed over time. I can't remember what version I'm on, but I'm on the, I think the third or fourth version of the intro and the outro. Those are things that you do as part of the setup. Ideally, you don't have to, you can always do it in the intro. Ideally, you don't have to, you can always adjust those as you go further down the road, but you almost need a break in your cadence of delivery of churning out episodes in order to actually get those kinds of things done, because those, those are going to be a little more produced and a little more of a pain in the neck to get done. I don't do advertising basically, which does make it somewhat easy. That way I can sit down and I can crank through an episode and don't have to worry about splitting it up and all that kind of stuff. If you do something like that, then you're going to have to, you know, probably have to time yourself a little bit differently in how you do the, the breaks and the way that you're going to essentially introduce advertising into your episode and the course, you know, sit down, listen to it, write it. I use Adobe's audition and I take the, the raw, essentially the source of that content, and then I do, you know, last sort of last minute touches, I put the intro on it, put the outro to it. I've got a couple of little blurbs that you probably have heard a hundred times by now that will be, you know, mix in somewhere in there, maybe at the beginning, maybe at the end. I try not to break it up in the middle just to make it easy for those that have heard this several times to work their way through and jump to the content. I do not add, you know, some people add timestamps and things like that, which can be very valuable, but time consuming to generate them. So I don't really bother with those too much. If I wanted to thought about that. And the way to do that, I think is to actually just be watching the time as it's elapsing and as you get to some, you know, a point where you want to mark that just have a little notepad and write down, you know, 10 42 that would, you know, and then maybe a little note to tell you what was there that you want to time mark, and then you can add that into your show notes. Uh, the show notes themselves can be, you know, could be your outline that you use. Like I said, I've, and as you've seen, I like to use a full blown article, a blog post, and it's not long, uh, you know, they stay, uh, typical around 350 words, but it's enough to be a, an actual blog article. And if you never listened to the podcast, uh, my hope is that you could actually just read the post articles and get, you know, at least as much as you do listening to the podcast, uh, that's the purpose is to provide something that's easier to consume when you're not in front of a computer, as opposed to, I don't know, some way to just have people hear my voice or something, something useless like that. So there's, there's several things that I've learned in this, you know, these 400 plus episodes. I hope this has helped you. If you're thinking about one, it's pretty, it's really not as hard as you would think. It's simple is probably oversimplifying it, but think of a topic or series of topics, start talking about it, record yourself, see how it sounds. You're going to have to listen to it. That's the hardest part. You have to listen to your own voice. You have to listen to your own voice, but, uh, listen to it, see if it sounds good enough, you know, as far as comparing it to other podcasts, uh, preferably the higher end ones, the more popular ones. Some are highly produced and you're, you're probably not going to get to that point, but you can find some that are not heavily produced that sound fine and are a good fit for your, uh, your time investment for what you want to put into your situation, into your, uh, your series. That being said, I think I'm gonna, I am gonna, I was going to skip the challenge of the week, but you know what? This is where I can edit tutorialize as I go. I am going to have a challenge. If you were to do a podcast, what would you do it on? And I'm pretty sure I've had this challenge out there. I've thrown it out there before. Hopefully last time you looked at it, came up with a topic and recorded some episodes, if not do so, you know, go out there and it's very easy to record. You don't have to do anything produced. You can sit there with your phone or your laptop or whatever. That's got a mic. You can even use like a, uh, maybe zoom or something like that, that I think you can record, even if it's just you and just sit down and record yourself on a topic and see how that goes. It's, it doesn't have to be heard by anybody. It should be something that is comfortable and natural to you. And just see how it goes, because it may be an opportunity for you to expand your brand, to give back to a community, to just have some more fun talking about. A topic that you enjoy. And as always go out there and enjoy yourself and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to building better developers, the developer Nord podcast for more episodes like this one. You can find us on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developer.com. Just a step forward today is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. There are two things I want to mention to help you get a little further along in your embracing of the content of developer. One is the book, the source code of happiness. You can find links to it on our page out on the developer site. You can also find it on Amazon search for Rob Broadhead or source code of happiness. You can get it on Kindle. If you're an Amazon prime member, you can read it free. A lot of good information there. That'll be a lot of information. A lot of good information there. That'll be a lot easier than trying to dig through all of our past blog posts. The other thing is our mastermind slash mentor group. We meet roughly every other week, and this is an opportunity to meet with some other people from a lot of different areas of IT. We have a presentation every time we talk about some cool tools and features and things that we've come across, things that we've learned, things that you can use to advance your career today. Just shoot us an email at info at develop a newer.com. If you would like more information, now go out there and have yourself a great one.