Under the Radar
Introducing Under the Radar, a new podcast for independent app developers, with “Underscore” David Smith and me on Relay FM.
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I’ve been wanting to do another development-focused podcast for a while, but kept talking myself out of it. I didn’t think I could afford the time commitment of another full-blown tech podcast, I didn’t want to take away from the one I’m already on, and I wasn’t sure what form it could take and who I’d want to do it with. So I knocked those out, one by one.
The co-host was the easy part: David and I talked about potentially doing this at WWDC this year, and we very quickly agreed that it could work well.
The distinction from ATP is straightforward: ATP occasionally has developer topics, but it is not a developer show. It covers such broad topics within technology that there usually isn’t time to delve too far into programming or software-business topics, and many people in ATP’s audience aren’t software developers. The new show would be, completely and unambiguously, a show for developers about development.
Time and format concerns were solved together. I always enjoyed David’s Developing Perspective podcast, mostly because it’s great, but partly because it was always explicitly “never longer than 15 minutes”. I’d have my Overcast playlist sort it as the top-most priority so its episodes always showed up first, because I knew I could get through the entire short show while running almost any errand.
Short episodes with an explicit time limit help focus a show, keep it moving, and make it more accessible to new listeners. And, importantly for us, a short show is easier to schedule and takes far less time to record and edit. I don’t have time in my life right now to do another 2-hour show every week, but I can do a short one. We both felt that 15 minutes would be too tight for a two-person discussion, so we’re going with a 30-minute limit.