Insights on Podcast Production Challenges

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back to those of you that are on the podcast side. We've just been talking to our video people and they've had to stare at our faces, so they have to suffer through that. However, you just get the dulcet tones of our voices. This episode, we are going to talk about basically production type issues. We've been talking about in this season, developer stuff, some of the things that we've been changing around. One of the things we've changed around is how we do the podcast. We've got our trusty friend, Michael, who has been doing the sort of taking over the editorial reins right now. I did the videos, did the audios for the most part for the podcast and he would do stuff here and there. I got into a pretty good rhythm and had a good process. But now in handing it over, we're going to go right into talking to Michael about some of the snags and such that he has run into. So welcome, oh grand editor of all now. And why don't you just start venting a little bit about some of the issues, the challenges you ran into this week? Sure. So one of the biggest challenges I ran into this week was we found out very quickly that I did not have access to a lot of our social media platforms to publish. I had access to make comments, publish things, make some edits, but not actually publish videos for content. So we went through a couple of days of, oh, what's this account? What's this account information? And when you set these up initially, especially when you're first starting out and you're setting up your branding, you're setting up your social media sites, typically you're going to write that down somewhere and you're going to save it in your Google or save in some password reminder. And then you're going to forget about it. Except if you ever start growing or you add people to your business, you're going to need those again. So make sure you save those off. Use something like KeePass or something, or put them in like a Wiki somewhere internally that you can reference. That was just one of the kind of hangups we had initially getting started. The other one hiccup I ran into, which kind of runs into what I go through daily, is software updates. So it's been a hot minute since we've done some video recordings, since we worked on the school.developmenter.com. And I haven't really done a lot of video editing in a while or even audio editing. And I found out that all of my software tools got updated. And being on the SoCon Mac, found out that some of them don't work anymore. And I had to go download new versions and get everything set up again. So that's something else to keep in mind with is make sure that you're constantly staying up to date on your tools that you're going to be using, even if it is checking on them once a month to make sure that they still work. Because you don't want to be in a situation like me where at the 11th hour, I'm trying to cut something and all of a sudden, whoops, stuff doesn't work. And now you're starting to hit a deadline and you're like freaking out. And it's like, oh crap. That was kind of the other thing I ran into. The other fun thing we ran into is I'm going deaf apparently because I can't hear half the audio that comes out of my machine. So apparently my speakers are set at max. So when you're doing audio edits and video edits and you're trying to test things, set the volume as low as you can go to just hear things. And then as you're going through the process, crank up your audio within your tool and get as loud as you can get without too much distortion. Then test on multiple devices. So I tested on iPhones, iPads, my phone. The problem I had initially when I first started doing this was I used headphones because I was not in a quiet space where I could just play through my computer speakers. And I found that these headphones I had actually had an audio booster in them. So I was actually hearing things louder than they actually were in the video. So we kind of went back and forth on that a little bit. And that was kind of the big issues I ran into getting things started. The other thing is, again, just getting comfortable with your tools. So I'm actually going out and looking for some newer tools because the ones that I have kind of work now on the Maxocon, but may not be what we need going forward if I'm going to be doing a lot more of this all the time. There's a couple of great little points that I do want to follow up on. The first one was the idea of the initial headaches. And it is a lot of us, we talk about this all the time in the development world about automating stuff and building processes and things like that. And using the tools are out there. The problem is, is that when you change everything, you've got to make sure that your processes also change accordingly. And so if you're like me, you automated this a long time ago. And the next thing you know, you have to change it. So now you got to remember what the heck did I automate? And this is where we rickety talk about doing like, maybe six months or once a year, do sort of essentially like an audit or checking a pulse of your business, of what you're working on, what you're doing, what are the tools you're using. Now this has turned out to be a great opportunity because it's forcing us to go through this. So we have, as he sort of wrapped up there talking about, there's some tools that he's going to look at. Michael's going to go sort of look at what one thing may work better for us as an organization, but also may work better for him because I have my set of tools and what I've been working with and what I've gotten comfortable with, but they may not be the best. They may be the thing that I've gotten used to, gotten in a rut. And now we're sort of forced, as I said, to sort of reevaluate and see what's out there. Same thing is when you're doing the automation process is make sure that you, now this is like a bad word to some of you, but document things. Have somewhere a list of what you're doing, how it's working, you know, what it is, maybe it's where the key, the password's stored or things like that. And you don't want to have it, you know, on notepads on your desk, but you do want to have somewhere that you can look at it and say, here's the, if I want to hand this over, here's the five steps or the 10 steps I need to do in order to do so. If you've ever had something happen where you've had to change a credit card or bank card where you were using that for automated payments, you know the pain. You know that it's one of these things where you've got all these automated things going out, everything, and suddenly everything blows up because you, you know, swap the different card or something expired. And now you've got to go back and figure out where were all of those automations being done. So you could go through it the pain. Obviously it's less painful for me. I just had to hear about it, but other than that, didn't have to live it. But in assuming you're a solopreneur or something like that, save yourself the trouble of going through some of this and the being cursed by somebody else that's going through it because of you. And periodically just sort of like keep track of these things. Make sure it's easiest when you're building out the process, but then periodically go back and say, Hey, did I change this? For example, did my passwords have to update? Did I update my password keeper? Things like that that you can run into. Now, one things that we've looked at that I do want to go into a little bit more on this is that we've now, as part of this, we've really taken a closer look because we have shifted gears a little bit. We've taken a closer look at the podcast and what it looks like in some of its topics and also the video, because in the past we've done more. It's always been screen shares. So I think I'll throw this to you a little bit. I'm like, what are some of the things that that you worked with from the video side? Now, granted, podcast people, I know you're not seeing all of this, but there is a video side and we'll be talking about in a way that hopefully will help you if you're doing a video or when you do a video. Thoughts, Michael? Sure. So you're looking at kind of some of the, I guess, challenges or differences between the video of like the presentation side of things versus the podcast. Yeah, sure. So one of the nice things about it is the podcast because this is a little more informal. It's just more of a conversation we're having. We're talking through topics, coming up with the content or I guess, editing the content. Is a little more streamlined because really we don't want to cut out too much, right? We want to keep as much in the conversation as possible. But when we go through like a course content, we're really trying to build the content in such a way that it can stand on its own. It can be it's like an educational how-to videos or kind of an educational series that we do. The trick with those is like if we're writing code or we're showing code presentations, sometimes things go off the rails and the computer crashes, reboots, or we go down a rabbit hole and we spend 20 minutes doing something. That takes a lot more editing because you actually physically have to watch the entire video and go, OK, where did I make that mistake? Oops, caught it. But in something more like this, it's yes, we still have to listen to it. Yes, we have to go through it, but it's not as labor intensive as much as it is to cut the like a how-to video because you and I have done this many a times. We'll be doing a presentation on Java or Python or Django and we get to a point where we try to run the application and something breaks. Now, if it breaks in a way that we can kind of explain why something broke, that becomes an educational moment. But if it breaks to the point that we're dead in the water, we really don't want to put that 20 minutes in the video. We want to cut that out and just really show what it is that the user is there to see. That's kind of the big two takeaways from that. Yeah, that actually leads to a good one that little tips and tricks, I guess, a portion maybe of this. When you're doing a video, something that has video where you have some visual thing, visual cues are awesome. Sometimes there'll be things like people wave their hands. Sometimes they'll do like little finger counts. Things like that are very useful. And often our tips of the tricks trade, whether you're doing something that's going to be like a go out on TV or if you're doing a streaming of some sort, you're going to be doing a streaming of some sort or recording of some sort that you're going to go back and do some editing, particularly if somebody else is going to edit it. Because then you can have things you can always say like, hey, if I do this thing, it means that as you're looking at it, then you want to jump ahead to the next time I do this or something like that. There's cues that you can put in there that will help you out. A good example from and then also from a video side and a little trick that I learned because the tool that I used with the with the editing side of video, it's not like a high end tool. It's just like, you know, I movie a lot of times, but you're below that. You will see the audio and you'll see the little, you know, jagged little things of your little audio moving along. Well, the nice thing is if you do something that is a very sharp sound, like whether you clap or you could like some people will rap on a desk or they'll tap their mic. Hopefully I didn't just mute myself when I did that. Another thing that I can video or audio do three, two, one, and you will see like the peaks of that in the audio. So it's real easy as I'm scrolling from left to right across the, you know, trying to jump through my video is to say, oh, here's where I started the, you know, the pause or whatever. And here's where I came back. And a lot of times there'll be things like I'll have a very flat line. I'll shut the audio off for a while or I'll just shut my mouth for a while or something. So you have a very obvious those like, boom, this is where I can cut it. And this is where I'm going to bring it back. So those kinds of things you can do it. But if you're editing yourself or if you've got somebody else that's editing is figuring out a couple of those cues and some ways to make it easier on the life of the editor. So they don't have to listen through the whole thing. And it's very often things like, hey, cut out the last 30 seconds because I didn't want to do it or things like that, that with somebody's listening or watching, they now have a way to more easily edit out the pieces that you obviously want to edit out. So we've changed our gears around a little bit. One of the other things that we've gone into or that we looked at was it's two different people. And even though we have we put together content now for several years and we've got sort of a rhythm, there is a difference between when one of us writes versus another one or one of us speaks versus the other one. And one of the things that we went into this one was now Michael was doing a lot of the related blog work. And I want to you hadn't really done much of these, particularly the summaries that we do and the synopsis that we do for the podcast or the even the videos. Usually they've been more focused. So talk a little bit about that. What was your experience in taking that the sort of like the meta content or the summary content and copy around these things? Sure. So one of the wonderful things that we have because of Zoom's updates is we can now get transcripts from a lot of our video calls. And I'm able to take that and kind of to put that into like a Word document or something, just kind of cleaning it up so I can read it. Because unfortunately, Zoom is not perfect at the way that it cuts the text. However, still walk through the video sometimes, but some of the ones that just kind of skimmed through the text, pulled out some of our highlights and went through and wrote some pretty good copy around some summarizing, not just what we talked about, but also including some additional links and bullet points to help the reader or of the podcast or the video kind of quickly pull out, Oh, this is what it's about. I want to listen to this or hey, that's something I'm really struggling with. And then at the end of the last few, I've actually started adding some additional links out to thedeveloper.com and the school.developer.com to help give you more additional references to things that we do, things that we've talked about in relation to what we've talked about in these podcasts and these videos. The other thing that is kind of fun that I've enjoyed doing is it's like, Oh, yeah, like we talked about the other day, you know, building the business, the branding and stuff like that. It's like, Oh, yeah, where's my link to 99 did not 99 designs. I've thrown some additional links out to our sites because, you know, we're not just developer. We are developers. We live and breathe this every day. You know, we are consultants, so it doesn't hurt to actually go out and check out and see what else we do. You know, maybe one of our side hustles or our other jobs is something that you do and you may have something more personal or even general questions that we can talk about here for you. And that brings us to a good close for this one is sort of that. That's what we're looking for. That is what we want to do is we want to provide you all the guys and gals that are out there with some tips and tricks. You know, just sort of frontline stories where that's why this episode, you know, pretty good. Hey, we're starting a new, you know, making some changes. We learned a few things. We've got a few bumps and bruises, so we'll share those war stories and some of the lessons learned. So hopefully you don't have to have the same bumps and bruises when you go through that. So that being said, wrap up this little episode. We're cruising right along in the podcast world. Season 21. We're just getting started on this season. We're going to continue providing you guys. It's not not a as much a continuous series of instructional as much as we're going to be hitting on a different topic, probably every episode for this season around at least. As always, you can check out developer.com if you want some more information or if you would love to see the video side of it and some of the occasionally some additional content like there will be on this episode. Check out the YouTube, go out to develop an or D E V E L P R E N E U R or you can see that right. Getting better at pointing into my background. You can't see that if you're on the podcast though, so apologies for that. But check us out there on YouTube, develop an or I've got channels for different topics. We'll also have some here that you'll be able to catch up on all of the latest news. That being said, get out there and have yourself a great week and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to building better developers to develop a new podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. Thank you.