I’m a huge podcast fan, usually listening to several during my work day, especially when I’m cranking out code or debugging. Yet I’m also very picky – I have my favorites I listen to religiously, but rarely venture into new territory.
Yet even with that backstory, about twenty minutes into my first Design Details episode, I was hooked. It’s got solid guests that get asked a diverse set of questions. And unlike most podcasts, the show notes are time stamped and very detailed.
Influential developer Julie Ann Horvath was recently in tech news for her public resignation from GitHub over harassment during her two year tenure. It’s illuminating hearing her story first hand and underlines a startup tech culture that’s can be very unfriendly towards women. It’s not an easy listen, but it’s important for the community to hear more stories like this so it can actively change for the better.
It’s not just a talk about Julie’s GitHub work experience either; she gives advice for moving your tech career forward, sharing workload among a team and much more.
jQuery creator and Khan Academy dean John Resig was a recent guest on the Shop Talk web design/development show. It’s a solid, smart listen. Pay special attention around the 46 minute mark, where John and usual hosts Chris and Dave discuss the lack of women in the web development community.
Podcasts are a big part of my daily workflow; they are always a part of my outdoor runs and often part of my workday, running in the background. I’ve got my favorites (e.g. Giant Bombcast, The Slashfilmcast, ShopTalk), but I’ve always found the discoverability of new podcasts pretty limited. That’s why Podcast Thing works so well; you get short interviews with various personalities where they talk about their favorite podcasts. Highly recommended, especially for podcast newbies.
There’s a nice interview over at iMore with Instagram’s former head mobile designer. Given his track record Tim is clearly a talented guy. It was interesting hearing his brief takes on porting Instagram’s design from iOS to Android along with a bit on his overall design workflow. I do wish there was more on his motivations for now jumping over to Dropbox, but I bet we’ll hear more on that at a later date.
This extended chat over at the Giant Bomb headquarters post wrap up of the Game Developers Conference was really fun to watch. You get expected appearances from the GB crew (Patrick Klepick, Jeff Gerstmann) and lots of game industry veterans (Phil Fish of Fez, Robert Ashley). It’s a good balance between random humor and some actual serious discussion on game design and music.
I’ve recommended the ShopTalk podcast in the past, but hosts Dave Rupert and Chris Coyier touched on a pressing topic here for me: finding unused CSS selectors in your code. I didn’t realize until it was mentioned in the podcast that one great way to do so was to open up the Chrome web tools, click on the Audits tab and let it run. Scroll to the bottom where ‘remove unused CSS rules’ are listed. It’s far from perfect, but it’s a good starting point for trimming excess CSS.
Every few episodes the Iterate podcast team add an extended roundtable discussion to the mix with generally great results. No exception here: host Rene Ritchie gathers a mix of mobile app developers to predict where the iOS and Android app economy will shift in the long run.
I’ve been listening to the design/mobile/tech podcast Iterate for a while now. While it’s often pretty jargon dense and gets pretty deep in the weeds in terms of iOS and mobile design, as a full time web designer/developer, it’s a must listen each week. Episode 36 with designers Louis, Brad and Jessie of group Pacific Helm is one of my favorites to date. Very funny with plenty of little design tools and tips I didn’t know about.
This episode recorded this last Saturday at CES has some good back and forth specific to the web in the first twenty to thirty minutes. In particular, hosts Josh, Nilay and Paul discuss the recent spat between Microsoft and Google due to the removal of Google Maps web access on Windows Mobile. There’s talk about monopolies on the web, Webkit and web standards.