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Ask HN: What is your favorite Tech Podcasts these days?

75 points by Hixon10 ↗ HN
During COVID-era we got a lot of new podcasts. So I am wonder, what is the current list of Tech Podcasts, which you consume these days?

My current list:

1. https://www.codingblocks.net/category/podcast/ - deep dives into different tech topics

2. https://anchor.fm/happypathprogramming - scala/kotlin/java + interviews with different tech people

3. https://postgres.fm/episodes - deep dives into different parts of PostgreSQL database

4. https://www.softwareatscale.dev/archive - interviews with different tech people

5. https://bootifulpodcast.fm/#/all-podcasts - java/spring + interviews with different tech people

77 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] thread
running101
Software engineering daily
swyx
including the modern iteration?
andrewstuart
I’ve been disappointed with podcasts over the past couple of years. I tend to listen to YouTube videos now.
411111111111111
That's interesting, i keep getting annoyed by the wild inaccuracies and downright silly mistakes whenever I find a YouTube creator that produces videos on a topic I've got decent working experience in.

I.e. rxjs code like this behaviorSubject.pipe(mergeMap() => of(behaviorSubject.getValue())

With podcasts, you usually get people that actually do the things they're taking about for a living as they're often not primary content creators

azangru
> I.e. rxjs code like this

As with everything, we should be picky. For rx, Ben Lesh - always yes, obviously. Michael Hladky - yes. Deborah Kurata - maybe yes? Random youtuber - no.

[deleted]
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actionfromafar
The SAAS Podcast

Ukraine: the Latest

Startups for the Rest of Us

You're Wrong About

Built to Sell Radio

Disrupting Japan

Advent of Computing

Darknet Diaries

The Art of Product Podcast

Signals and Threads

Practical Founders Podcast

I Dream of Cameras

jayy-lmao
Shout out to Unruly Software! Love these guys.

Australian dev duo. Casual conversations around web dev, mostly the experiences of the hosts over the last month or so. Informative but relaxed.

10/10 parasocial relationship

nicolaslem
Without doubt Darknet Diaries, it should be a mandatory listen for anyone touching computers. It is a crash course on building secure systems by learning from the failures of others.

I highly recommend starting from episode #1 because they are almost all great and episodes often reference past topics.

https://darknetdiaries.com

Raed667
I like Darknet Diaries, but I feel it is geared towards techies and not engineers.

The concepts are high level, the details are vague and the stories take a lot of shortcuts to make the podcast accessible to more people.

Maxburn
True, but it's an entertaining listen which is something that can't be said for a lot of the more technical and complex podcasts. The engagement he gets has enough technical that you can jot something down and research it but the overwhelming takeaway on WHY such and such failure or vuln was a problem is more important IMO.
Timpy
I listened to quite a bit of Darknet Diaries back in 2018 but he had a few episodes that were such complete misses for me that I hopped off the train. The episode about trying to get to the top of Apple's podcast charts wore my patience, but a few episodes later the content was padded out with getting up to date on some Youtuber drama or something? I figured it was just hard to keep finding content for this niche. Should I give it another chance? There's 100+ more episodes now than the lats time I looked.
thehappypm
It’s true, not every episode is amazing. It’s a bit of a tangent, but I feel like podcasts don’t make it easy to get started. Unlike a TV show, where you obviously should start with S1E01, lots of podcasts either get outdated over time or have hugely improved over time and starting with a recent episode is better. But then you dive in and you don’t get any of the references, get blasted by ads, and so on!
QuibbleQuota
Could you recommend some episodes?

I started with “Jeremy From Marketing” and really liked that one

nicolaslem
One that stuck with me was Ep 86: The LinkedIn Incident. It is about how one seemingly inconsequential device at home being compromised can lead to a massive data breach.
dewey
I was also going to post your 3). https://postgres.fm is great, and I feel like every episode I learn something new or find something to look into more in detail.
mellosouls
I wonder if there is a gap in the audio market for low-level podcasts aimed at building technical "muscle memory".

Example: repeated syntax step-throughs in a rote/kata style, like foreign language courses.

I've never seen anything like that and have often wondered if it could work without the visual accompaniment.

dewey
I don't see how this would be that useful. If you are learning a foreign language, you already know what you want to say, but not how to say it in the new language.

Syntax doesn't really matter after programming for more than a year, as the important part is how to solve a problem, and not how to write down that solution.

mellosouls
True, but stumbling over even basic idioms and syntax can be quite frustrating if you have not used them enough to absorb them, especially for those like me with dodgy memory retention.
Kwpolska
That would be best solved by writing more code and practicing. A lot of syntax is just hard to convey over audio.
frou_dh
I've actually found it quite an active/engaging experience to take in some normal code-presenting videos/screencasts as audio-only (i.e. earphones in, phone in pocket), because you build up in your minds eye the code they're talking about.
mellosouls
Ah yes, that's a good idea. I think I've actually done that in the past, come to think of it, when walking; listening to a video course and occasionally screenshotting the phone at a bit I wanted to come back to.
nsteel
Do you mean like https://newrustacean.com by Chris Krycho? Although you have to really concentrate when he starts reeling off those generic method signatures, I love that he went that way with it. And I think it works.

Please do some more, Chris!

mellosouls
I was actually thinking more of an audio version of something like learnxinyminutes [1] but yes, that also seems a good use of the medium at a higher level, thanks! I didn't get to the method signatures/other syntax recital part yet, so it may be what I'm thinking of as well.

[1] https://learnxinyminutes.com/

frou_dh
Software Unscripted https://twitter.com/sw_unscripted is good. I don't know whether it's well known or not. Possibly a hidden gem.

Already mentioned, but Signals & Threads https://signalsandthreads.com is a very notable one. Probably the best episode hit-rate of any development-related podcast I've listened to.

Core Intuition https://coreint.org Apple-platform focused. Hosts have endearing personalities.

The Changelog https://changelog.com/podcast Good interviewers and wide-ranging episode topics (some get deleted - I won't subject myself to Kubernetes-related blather!)

thekaleb
I could not figure out how to subscribe to software unscripted with a regular podcast application. I don't see an RSS feed anywhere.
thekaleb
I haven't really used the Apple podcasts website before but apparently I can find it there.
hanklazard
I enjoy all of Jupiter Broadcasting’s output (mostly shows about Linux) but especially “Self-Hosted”

http://jupiterbroadcasting.com

nicolaslem
Linux Unplugged was recommended on HN a while ago so I gave it a try but found the signal to noise ratio very low. I felt it was 30% content on topic and 70% noise about meetups, crypto...
swah
For some reason I mostly consume Twitch/Youtube over podcasts these days - I stopped with podcasts when I stopped driving 40 minutes to work. (I kinda miss that...)
swyx
here's my list: https://www.swyx.io/fave-podcasts#tech

and i've done annual updates you can find at the top of the post

Hixon10
But what exactly podcasts from the list do you consume?
swyx
probably the more recent (2022, 2021, 2020) are more consume-heavy. the original list is pretty old by now but reflective of where i started out when leveling up in tech
b0afc375b5
That's a lot of podcasts. You must have one hell of a commute.

But seriously, how do you find time to listen to all of these?

swyx
i work remote, no commute haha. i just play these in the background while i work (example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvd9JFFRI5Y). also i skip pretty aggressively if i dont like a guest or topic. you should skim podcasts like you skim HN titles and tweets.
lysecret
100% Signals an Threads. Super technical extremely well presented.

Some more fluffy ones: Hard fork. Pivot. All in.

warmfusion
For the SRE in the room, check out Slight Reliability Podcast https://www.buzzsprout.com/1698445

His perspective on SRE really resonates and he shares some really great strategies and book recommendations for adoption of SRE practices, cultures and technologies without pretending he has all the answers.

Very good!

heywire
Late Night Linux, Linux After Dark, Linux Downtime, 2.5 Admins