The 5 Developer Podcasts I Listen to Every Week
Podcasts have played a critical role in my development as a software engineer. When I was first trying to get into the industry, I would constantly listen to podcasts like Software Engineering Daily to learn how people talk about their work. I would hear terms that were completely foreign to me and write them down to dig in on my own time.
Today, several years into my career, my podcast habit continues. Now it’s more focused on specific technology interests as well as how people think about and approach their work.
The Changelog (++)
This feed is a collection of podcasts that make up the bulk of my podcast listening time each week. I pay for the ”++” subscription to support the team behind these podcasts. It’s certainly a worthwhile investment for the quality and amount of insights I’ve received from The Changelog over the years.
They recently brought back my favorite podcast to the feed, Ship It!, which covers deployment and system architecture at scale. I love hearing how others are tackling the same problems I deal with everyday at work and getting inspired to try different approaches and workflows.
Good first episode: Beyond Heroku to Muse
Syntax FM
Wes and Scott, with their team, are incredibly consistent at producing meaningful and entertaining episodes multiple times per week. This is where I go to get insight into the frontend space. I like that they also get into practical development related issues like organization and working with ADHD.
Good first episode: Design Systems with Brad Frost
Developer Tea
These are short episodes, I like them as meditative reflections on how to self-actualize to be more productive and calmer at work. I do my best when I can focus and identify the right points of leverage to acomplish a task. This podcast helps to highlight where those points of leverage might be found and how to approach them.
Good first episode: Protecting Flow State - Plan Now, Pause Later
Lenny’s Podcast
This podcast is all about product. In growing as a developer, further progress now seems to lay in better understanding my relationship with the product organization and long-term projects. It’s good then, that this work fascinates me. I want to get better at identifying product-market fit and aligning myself with other teams’ incentives so we can better work together. This podcast interviews some of the smartest product people out there. It’s fantastic to learn from their experiences and take their learnings to heart.
Good first episode: Radical Candor: From theory to practice with author Kim Scott
Postgres FM
I’m here for the deep dives into Postgres. It’s my go-to database and I hadn’t realized how many layers there are to understanding it. Over the last two decades, database specialization has somewhat fallen out of fashion with much of the focus being on application engineering.
However, the beauty and complexity of databases has only increased in those same years. This podcast helps me learn how to truly think about and use Postgres as well as understand its trade-offs.
Good first episode: Beginner tips
Lastly, as an honorable mention, I have to include my favorite new podcast:
LocalFirst.FM
The only reason I don’t listen to LocalFirst.FM weekly is because it only comes out every 2 weeks.
If you want to set me off on a passionate rant for anywhere from 30 minutes to 8 hours, bring up local-first development. This is the technical horizon that excites me most about the next generation of development. Local first is all about having state based on your users device, allowing them to update that state, and synchronizing it seamlessly with other users’ changes.
As solutions like Google Docs and Notion have driven this approach of always-connected synchonous online co-editing, I think the generation of applications that replaces them will focus on offline-first model with genuinely novel approaches to syncing (see CRDTs).
LocalFirst.FM is a new podcast, but it is a spiritual successor to Metamuse which is complete, but also worth checking out.
Good first episode: #4 – Martin Kleppmann: CRDTs, Automerge, generic syncing servers & Bluesky