Podcasts I listen to — 2019 edition

Most of the time I use my commute to listen to podcasts. Because they reflect my interests at this point in time, I thought it would be nice to share my current list.

The last time I posted my selection of podcasts was back in 2012. Since then, a lot has changed:

  • Only two out of the six podcasts on the 2012 list are still in my feed. But there are quite a few new podcasts to compensate.
  • My commute has reduced from six hours/week to about four.
  • Out of necessity I no longer listen to all episodes of all podcasts—I just do not have enough time to listen to them. But all podcasts in the list below have interesting episodes, so unsubscribing from them is also not an option. (I know, first world problems…)

My podcast feed with the reason why I listen to each show:

  • AWS Morning brief: I use this podcast to quickly get up to speed on AWS related developments. Oh, and I like the snarky way Corey Quinn summarises the news.
  • Command line heroes: a fun and educational podcast about topics that interest me as a developer. For example season 2 was focussed open source development and season 3 was all about (the history of) programming languages.
  • Darknet Diaries: interesting stories about the dark side of the internet. I love the stories and the way Jack Rhysider tells them.
  • Freakonomics Radio: a completely different show because it is not technology focussed. Stephen Dubner discusses topic I often don’t know much about or have not thought about much. I think the episodes are not only educational but also fun to listen to.
  • O11ycast: this one I recently discovered. Since I’m interested in the subject of observability, this podcast gives me new ideas to think about.
  • Real World DevOps: I really like Mike Julian’s interviews with people from the tech industry about DevOps related topics. Unfortunately there has not been a new episode for a few months; I hope Mike will start podcasting again in the future.
  • Reply All: a brilliant show. I had lost track of the hosts, PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman, after they stopped with the TLDR podcast. Unfortunately I did not search for them, otherwise I would have found Reply All a lot sooner! I listen to this podcast primarily to get amused; learning something from it is a nice side effect though.
  • Screaming in the cloud: another podcast from Corey Quinn which I listen to, to learn more about cloud related topics from the interviews on this show.
  • Security Now: I listen to this podcast for the security related news and an occasional deep dive into a technical topic.
  • Shop Talk Show: although these days I’m more into infrastructure and automation, I like listening to this show allow to keep in touch with web development.
  • Talk Python to me: more or less the same as with Shop Talk Show: I like this podcast for its (Python) development related topics.
  • Tech45: a podcast I’ve listened to for quite some years now and one of the few shows I want to listen to every single episode of. I enjoy the way the panel discusses the (tech related) news each week. Informative and “gezellig.”
  • The privacy, security & OSINT show: the most recent addition to my list. I have only listened to a few shows yet, but the topics seem interesting. We’ll see if this one sticks or not.

And there you have it: my list of podcasts of October 2019. (Also available in OPML format.)