Learning New Stuff During the Daily Commute
12.11.2009 • 13:43 • permalink • Comments (0)
Save for those of us who work from home we all have a daily commute, so why not take advantage of that fact and use this time to learn some useful stuff? For quite a while I've been using these daily 2x20 minutes to learn about all sorts of different technologies and tools through the wonderful medium of the podcast. It's just a matter of finding enough interesting shows to provide enough content for your commute. If you have several hours of traveling time each day you might have to look around a bit more, though.
Personally, I have three core shows I follow as well as a couple of others when I'm out of content. They've helped me get to know about all sorts of different technologies I would never have heard of otherwise and to hear other people's perspective on the stuff that I think I know provides tremendous value as well.
The Stack Overflow Podcast
The Stack Overflow podcast is a weekly hour of random chat between the two founders of Stack Overflow, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. The seriousness and level of actual content varies but its fun and interesting to listen to none the less. It leans a bit more towards entrepreneurial stuff than the other shows as it has been used to document the thoughts and ideas behind the development of the Stack Overflow site itself. They are mostly just the two of them but they occasionally bring in a guest to interview.
The .NET Rocks! Podcast
Second, there is the .NET Rocks podcast which deals with all things .NET related, each week seeing one or more guests. This show is hosted by Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell, two very experienced and entertaining guys. They are currently at their 498th show, so they know how to handle a technical interview. This show is highly recommended for anyone working with the .NET stack or who are just interested in seeing what it is all about. More exotic topics such as GPU computing, robotics and home automation are also covered.
Herding Code
Herding code is a weekly discussion between K. Scott Allen, Kevin Dente, Scott Koon, and Jon Galloway. They discuss all sorts of interesting technologies with their guests, with no particular technology or company bias. They provide a lot of interesting views on practical things from working in the industry - to a greater degree than other shows with fewer hosts.
The Rest
Other interesting shows include Hanselminutes and Spaghetti Code and for a more comprehensive list, go here.
