Podcasts are an important part of my personal learning strategy. It’s a large slice of the content I consume in my day-to-day learning activities. They are excellent sources of information that are easy to absorve in the right scenarios. For me, those have been my comute to work while driving and walking.

This post is a list of some of my favorite podcast titles from the last year, and that you might like to discover.

General IT Podcasts

The following are IT related, but a bit all over the place in terms of theme focus. Whether through interviews or presentations, you can get a lot of info on important topics like technologies and techniques.

• Software Engineering Daily : lead by Jeff Meyerson, SE Daily is a wonderful way to get introduced to the most diverse amount of technologies and topics IT related. It’s based on a interview format, where different professionals are interviewed about their area of expertise. I have felt there are specifically two aspects that have been very usefull to me about this podcast – the first is that the interview is rarely an imediate deep dive into the topic. There is always a bit at the beginning where context is established, so if you’re new to a topic, you can get some idea of what it is about. The second is that the topics are very diverse, so you can adquire a wide breadth of knowledge, helping you to grow.
• Developer on Fire : hosted by Dave Rael, this also follows an interview format with tech professionals, but it is less technical in nature. It’s a bit more about the person then the technology, and intersting to see how others have grown and how we can releate to each others stories.
• QCast – InfoQ Presentation Podcast : InfoQ is one of my favorite sites on tech topics due to the quality and relevance of the presentations available. The presentations generally have video, by I actually consume most through audio. It’s unfortunate that slides sometimes are lost in that process, though I due find myself looking at the slide images in the app or on the web while i’m listening in some cases. There is also their actual podcast for the site, with interviews that are worth looking into. The presentation feed is one that I do not download automatically – instead I look at the update and pick which ones I want on my playlist.
• .Net Rocks! + RunAs Radio : .NET Rocks! has been running since 2004 (!) which is amazing in itself, but it is such a fun show to listen too. It’s mostly focused on the Microsoft stack, but not exclusive to it. Lot’s of puns thrown in during the show make it a fun listen and a good learning element. One of the hosts, Richard Campbell , has also been producing the RunAs Radio show that is more IT / Ops / Sysadmin focused, which, for someone focused on development, helps expanding the breadth of topics to understand.
• Hanselminutes : Scott Hanselman’s podcast is a delight and quite inclusive on the guests he has on the show. Most are tech related, but more about the human side of things.

DevOps-Related

Being part of the DevOps Porto community has led to extra awareness about the topic and these focus specificaly on that theme.

• CommandLine Heroes : Saron Yitbarek presents this show from RedHat that recently finished its second season. It walks through the history of how we got to where we are in IT, in a very delightful format. Season one is mostly cloud and DevOps, season two felt more focused on open source. I’m always wanting the next episode to arrive quickly to be able to continue the story. This is a good one to binge on.
• DevOps Radio : CloudBees’ podcast offering is an excellent DevOps relatated interviews offering with top experts in the field. highly relevant in this space.
• Arrested Devops : Another great source of DevOps info. This one has a lot of episoded related to the communiy events going on.
• DevOps Café : This is an interview based podcast focused on DevOps that is also great to listen too to capture a lot of info on what’s going on and how others are aproaching problems.
• Devops Chat: Alan Shimmel’s fireside-chat-style show has plenty of industry leaders and experts and has a good mix of DevOps and Security, which will help anyone find the topics to dig deeper into.

Non Tech or Not-Only Tech

There are some other great podcasts you can listen to to capture info and awareness into other areas, that are not exclusively tech.

• BagMan by Rachel Maddow : This one is about politics, and history, and highly relevant to what we are seeing in the US today, but easy to relate to other corruption related moments in other countries. It’s about Nixon’s Vice-President Spiro Agnew and about all the strategies he put together to get away from the corruption accusations he was guilty of being brought forth. Really well put together, and you can easily connect the dots with actions we hear about today. I kinda tend to relate Spiro to Portugal’s José Socrates, for anyone looking for similarities outside the US.
• a16z Podcast : this is Andreessen Horowitz’s podcast, a VC-firm from Silicone Valley and it is very much about enterpreneupship in tech, including current trends and culture in this area. Tech related, but much more about the social impacts associated to them. Really good content if you’re into that.

So these are probably the main ones I have been going over the past year, and highly recommend. There are obviously many more very good ones out there, and for a full list of what I have subscribed to, check out my OPML backup i recently got out of the Podcast Addict mobile app I use.

So, what are you listening to?