A podcast review – Software Engineering Radio

I am a fan of podcasting.. video blogging and screen casts are fine, but in terms of convenience and bang for the megabyte – nothing beats a podcast :-). I have been listening to podcasts for a few years now. I am usually listening when walking home from work or doing some chores. In fact I wrote an earlier postabout them along with some of my favorites (at the time).Of late I have listened a lot to a podcast called Software Engineering Radio. Actually, I have been listening to this one for a long time now and it has grown from strength to strength. It was started by a German software consultant – Markus Voelter and is based in Europe (the details are here). There is now a team of people both creating episodes as well as supporting the website. A new episode is published every 10 days and the feed for it is available at the website.

The podcast is about the software engineering and is for professional developers (it says so in the title :-)).  IMHO it is the best podcast for professional developers I have come across.  Markus and his team of volunteers do a great job – the interviews are professionally done and the audio quality is great. The post production is also very well done – in fact they have put up videos about their recording and post-production process. All the recording are released as part of Creative Commons 2.5 license and I think the majority of the episodes are gems worth downloading and keeping.

The coolest thing about Software Engineering Radio and what ultimately makes it such a great resource are the subjects and the people they interview.

The subjects are for the most part about software engineering practice – but they are things that are really useful to ones growth as a software professional. Episodes range from discussions about software development methodology to software languages and tools to computer science research.  In fact there was recently a very interesting episode on the – Difference between Software Engineering and Computer Science.

The people interviewed range from professional software developers and consultants to researchers and academics. Some are giants in their field and others I haven’t heard of (admittedly thats a large percentage of them – maybe because I hadn’t heard of their field in the first place ;-)).

Another thing I would like to mention is the format of the episodes. They are interviews and the team at SE Radio
go to great lengths to prepare and ask just the right questions to
illuminate the topic at completely and extract pearls of wisdom from
the people they interview. I think this format is better than a speech or a presentation because of the interaction between the interviewer and the interviewed.

There is sometimes a problem with the English accent – most of the team are from mainland Europe and have European accents, but it is never so bad that one cannot understand what is being said. In fact one of the things I like about the show are the various accents of people from different parts of Europe, UK and America. It makes the show more interesting to me as I try to guess at the nationalities of the interviewer and interviewed from their accents ;-)

Software Engineering, podcast, review

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