My favorite webdev podcasts
Today I want to talk about my favorite tech podcasts I hear on a regular basis. I discovered podcasts as a nice way of learning while actually being off-screen (e.g. cooking, cleaning, gardening etc.).
According to my podcastplayer PocketCasts I have listened since July 16, 2017 for more than 21 days to various, not only tech-related, podcasts. Which still sounds crazy to me, but it pick ups the point that I really, really like hearing podcasts :).
And those are my favorite tech podcasts listed in alphabetical order.
The Big Web Show
This podcast is on break or finished. But still it contains valuable episodes. Nobody less than Jeffrey Zeldman from A List Apart is the man and interviewer behind it.
I really sympathize with Jeffrey without knowing him personally. But he also has a really nice voice I would also pay for listening to. I always got a smile on my face when I saw a new episode of this podcast in my feed as I knew it is going to be again a nice episode and a good time for me listening to it. Thanks to Jeffrey for more than 180 nice episodes he did over nearly a decade on this podcast.
IMHO every webdev should look into the archive and listen to them. Even if there will be no further episodes on it.
The Clearleft Podcast
Another podcast with a very popular face behind: Jeremy Keith from Clearleft. It is quite new into the wild, so I expect there is more to come here.
The podcast is done in a more narrative way with many different interview guests speaking about their experiences. It is then cut in such a way that Jeremy can connect them together with a nice story. You can really hear that Clearleft is investing a lot of time into this podcast to publish high quality and good to follow episodes.
For me personally the podcast is very good, but too dense for me to do anything else at the same time. But that's just my personal situation and this does not take away from the quality of this podcast!
The CSS Podcast
This is also a pretty new podcast in 2020 by Una Kravets and Adam Argyle, two Google developers having a very deep knowledge and understanding of CSS.
They just finished the first season of their podcast after 25 episodes which each of them they talked about a certain specification of the CSS landscape.
Also this podcast is full of good, technical information. So you better concentrate on what they both talk about :).
React Podcast
This is for me THE podcast for React developers by Michael Chan (aka. chantastic). Michael manages to produce every week a new episode with some guest and a topic to talk about.
The episodes themselves are done in a discussion/interview style and for me personally it is good to follow.
In case you are a JavaScript or especially a React developer you definitely should subscribe to it!
Syntax
I bet 99% of you all know this podcast already. As their founders, Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski, their podcast gained A LOT of popularity during the last months.
They also just finished up their season after ~280 episodes on a lot of different topics and types of episodes like the "Hasty Treats" – an episode type where they shortly speak about particular questions and topics asked by their huge community.
This podcast is on average less technical than many others which is a strength and a weakness at the same time for me. The amount of AHA moments I get from their episodes is relatively small, but the sheer fun listening to both of them and their webdev stories is something I really like about it!
The Web Platform Podcast
This is a very nice podcast hosted by a group of people doing episodes in discussion style.
Their topics and guests are great, but sometimes I miss the red thread and structure during the whole interview. So often I have to stop somewhere within their conversation due to lack of concentration on it.
IMHO the podcast has high potential to improve on certain areas so I can and will listen longer to it. But please try the podcast on your own, I can really recommend it!
Special: Working Draft (German)
Although this is a not a common English speaking podcast – although there are some episodes in English, I really, really can not leave it unmentioned in this list.
If you are a webdev and a native German speaker you have to know this podcast!
The podcast is actively managed since nearly a decade, starting in 2011, by six webdevs from Germany and Austria. In most of their 440 episodes they speak about one particular topic with one or more guests they invite into their podcast.
I met most of the hosts during some webdev conferences over the last couple of years and they are really nice guys investing their spare time into this podcast.
The topics are wide-spread from CMS systems to frontend unit-testing and everything in between. Besides the hosts behind the show I really like the mixture of the episodes. They produce very technical episodes speaking about different tips and quirks, but also have guests with very light, meta-level topics.
The most funny, but also really interesting episodes are the "wheel of fortune"-specials where they randomly pick and philosophize about W3C specifications.
I really recommend this podcast to any native German webdev and I hope this podcast will last for the next decade as well!