Stop Wasting Your Commute!

Do you have to drive to work everyday? Are you able to do anything productive with your time commuting? Until we get fully self driving cars, there are very few things that you can actually do while you are driving that would be productive (other than get you to your destination of course). I have found that podcasts are an excellent way to be able to absorb information on my long commute to and from work.

I first started listening to podcasts on my commute a few years ago. I had around two hours of driving each day, and I couldn’t find enough new music to stay entertained. Once I found a few interesting podcasts, I discovered that there is a wealth of information available that would keep me endlessly entertained. I mainly listen to software engineering podcasts (which is my profession) so I learned a lot of information in a short period of time.

Today I have taken my podcast listening even further by incorporating it into my other activities. Going for a run? Playing a casual video game? Shopping at the grocery store? Ditch the music; listen to a podcast. The only time today that I prefer music to a podcast is when I am actively programming because I can’t keep two different streams of thought (but maybe one day).

Below I have listed some of my favorite podcasts with a good example episode if you want my thoughts. The first two are excellent general podcasts where the topics change show to show, but the others are all software engineering related. If you are in software engineering, I recommend you check them out, but if you are in a different profession I bet there is a podcast out there for you as well.

General Podcasts

Radiolab is a podcast that dives deep into specific subject matters for a variety of different topics. Their journalism and reporting are extremely thorough and very impressive on all of their shows. One of my recent favorites was Dinopocalypse Redux where they explored what happen on Earth the day that the dinosaurs died.

Reply All is self described as “a podcast about the internet”. Each show is different from the last with the exception of a few recurring segments (the tech support segment is my favorite). The hosts are upbeat, funny, and pleasant to listen to. Episode #135 Robocall: Bang Bang is a great listen if you have any interest in learning about how the robocall industry works.

Software Engineering Podcasts

Kubernetes Podcast from Google is an excellent weekly podcast where the hosts (Adam and Craig) discuss projects and news in the Kubernetes ecosystem. You should listen to this podcast if you have any interest at all in Kubernetes. In March they had a show covering SPIFFE (which is an identity framework) that was excellent.

Software Engineering Daily is, as the title suggests, a daily podcast about software engineering. I only discovered this podcast in the last six months from a coworker, but I wish I would have found it much sooner. The host interviews engineers from the most well known projects and companies. He recently did a series of Kubernetes interviews at KubeCon EU, and his podcast on Kubernetes Vision with Joe Beda (a creator of Kubernetes) was packed with information that you probably wouldn’t hear anywhere else.

Go Time is a podcast about the Go programming language and community. The podcast has a panel of well-known developers within the Go community that discuss everything from language changes to running open source projects. I particularly enjoyed a recent podcast All about APIs! where you get insight about how these Go veterans develop, iterate, and find a proper level of abstraction for the APIs that they expose to their users.

Soft Skills Engineering “is a weekly advice podcast for software developers about the non-technical stuff that goes into being a great software developer”. Their own description sums up the show quite nicely. The subject matter is actually quite entertaining, more so than I originally thought it would be. If you have a similar sense of humor to the hosts then you will really enjoy this podcast. This may be the only podcast that I went back to listen to the entire catalog after I discovered it. Episode 150: How to fight imposter syndrome as a technical lead and Getting in to meetups is a good introduction to what this podcast is like.

TechSNAP is a Systems, Networking and Administration Podcast (SNAP). The hosts are veterans in the field of systems administration, and they do an excellent job to deep dive into specific technical aspects of the field. I would personally recommend episode 395: The ACME Era to learn more about the ACME protocol.