@derSchepp had been bugging me about speaking on “his” podcast Working Draft (German). After figuring out my involvement in Smarty, he finally got me. So today it happened, I spoke on the 40th episode of Working Draft.
I’m not the podcast kind of guy. I can’t seem to concentrate on people blabbering into my ears and still do something productive. As I don’t have hour-long trips to work, I can’t listen to them on the bus/train/car either. So, I must admit I never heard a single full episode of the show before today.
I’m not really particularly well known on the web. Not because I’m new to it (15 years and counting), nor have practical experience in its technologies (10 years of PHP and databases, 7 years of Javascript, …) - I don’t self promote, as I had to learn today. It never occured to me to talk about my daily developer life in a way above »Just released version X of Y«. Maybe that’s about to change, (maybe it’s not).
Preparing the Show
Days before the show derSchepp supplied links to a howto-setup-your-frakking-audio-tools and a Google Docs page with potential topics to talk about. Nicely structured all participants (Frederic Hemberger and Markus Schlegel, besides Christian and me) commented and voted on the proposals. That made me feel somewhat comfortable in this rather foreign territory.
Recording the Show
So here I was, sitting in my hotel room at 17:00 CEST. I skipped out early on work at schwabische.de. Plugged in the headset I brought along for the show and found myself not getting any sound off it. The next computer-toys-are-us-store-thing was a 5 minute walk, so I got myself a new headset. Did you now that it makes total sense to place headsets in a different rack than regular ear phones? Did you also know, that you should place ear phones next to computer hardware, but headsets next to washing machines? Freaky. Came back only to figure out that my line-in port wasn’t working. Back to the store, need USB-adapter. Finally Skype (sic!) caught my broken-subwoofer-like voice. awesome start, right?
We used Skype to get together. A piece-of-crap software I downloaded only for this show (and will purge when done). I’ve never used Skype because it supposedly is the opposite of Google, being evil. That aside, the show started out with a rather good sound quality. But suddenly dropped extremely after 45 minutes or so. From that point on, recording was a bitch. I wish Markus and Frederic the best of luck post-processing the garbled sound files each of us recorded independently.
Ah, what did we talk about? Try Flexbox, CSS3 Conditionals, Websockets’ Binary Messages, MediaSource, Reporting Browser Bugs, Mobile Web in Taiwan and Africa, as well as Octopress. We did of course not get to the upcomming release of Smarty 3.1. But in the after-show-chitchat mapped out some possible discussions regarding javascript/jQuery and php/ruby on how ease-of-entry helps ruining the name of a language/tool.
Looks like I’ll be doing more of these funky things called podcast. ☺
