tfnico's blog

I'm just about ship GitMinutes episode 46, which is going to be the final episode. I'll just paste the outro script here, as it sums up the sentimental thoughts pretty well: I’m happy to have finally finished [publishing the last episodes from Git-Merge 2017], just in time before Git-Merge 2018 takes place in March. I won’t be going there myself, so I’m counting on someone else to pick up the mic there. It’s sad to be shipping this one as it is probably the last GitMinutes episode ever. To go a bit down memory lane, 6 years ago, my daughter was born, and as I used a little of that paternity leave to set up my podcasting infrastructure and produce the first few episodes. Initially it was just going to be 10 episodes and call the experiment finished. Instead, I got to 46 episodes, the last dozen or so lazily tailing the last few Git-Merge conferences. To every one of my guests, thank you so much again for coming on to share your passion in this little niche of computer s...

I was a bit unsure whether I should put this post on the GitMinutes blog, but figured I'd rather not mess up the nice episode overview there. I'll share this link via the GitMinutes Twitter and Google+  feeds, and of course everyone listening will hear about it. I am a bit worried that some people will not like that I'm going in a commercial direction with the podcast. Git is an open source project, and all my guests have participated on a volunteer basis. I've received hundreds of micro-donations via Gittip and Flattr , and probably some of the donors expected the show to keep going as an independent thing. If anyone feels hurt by this move, let me know and I'll reimburse your donations at least. The main reason I'm doing this is that I want to create more GitMinutes content. Not only for the podcast, but maybe do screencasts and other stuff as well. I want to engage the community in a lot of new ways, and this will require resources that I don't want...

One of the reasons why I started podcasting , is that I listen to a lot of podcasts . It took me a long while to build up my podcatching portfolio. For half a year, I listened to mostly gaming podcasts because the only programmer podcasts I knew about was Hanselminutes and Java Posse . I simply didn't know what programmer podcasts were out there . Podcast discovery is about as well established as it was 10 years ago, meaning iTunes . Of course you can blindly google for "<topic> podcast", or you might start off with some recommendations from friends, but there still is no established way of discovering more podcasts of the kind you'd like (1). Another problem is that I see very little cross-pollination between the programmer podcasts. Even though they intersect just the right amount, I never heard  JavaScript Jabber mentioned on TheChangelog , for example (2). To help remedy this I've thrown together all the currently active, English-speaking pr...

So, it's been about a month since I launched   GitMinutes , and wow, it's been a fun ride. I have gotten a lot of feedback, and a lot more downloads/listeners than I had expected! Judging the numbers is hard, but a generous estimate is that somewhere around 2000-3000 have listened to the podcast, and about 500-1000 regularly download. Considering that only a percentage of my target audience actively listen to podcasts, these are some pretty good numbers. I've heard that 10% of the general population in the western world regularly listen to podcasts (probably a bit higher percentage among Git users), so I like to think I've reached a big chunk of the Git pros out there. GitMinutes has gathered 110 followers on Twitter, and 63, erm.. circlers on Google+, and it has received 117 +'es! And it's been flattr'ed twice :) Here are some of the things I learned during this last month: Conceptually.. Starting my own sandbox podcast for trying out everythin...

I'm a bit late to my own party here, but I've launched a podcast called GitMinutes . If you've been listening to my amateur/sandbox podcast tfnico's rants , you knew about this already, but now I finally got around to properly flaunt it on my own blog. Why GitMinutes? It's an obvious rip of Scott Hanselman's Hanselminutes , but hey, he nicked This Developer's Life from This American Life . I think GitMinutes has a great ring to it, it's easy to spell, and it had zero hits on Google before I started this. But why a whole podcast about Git? I'll admit it is a fairly narrow scope. But I was listening to a few technical podcast episodes lately that were about Git, and I wasn't really happy with the substance of it. Also, I was recently approached about writing a Git book, but I figured that I could make something cooler than a book instead. Also, there aren't enough technical podcasts for me to listen to, so I decided to add a lit...

Don't you think it's hard to keep up with everything going on out there? You probably think there's not enough time in the day to dig into the latest things going on in IT, science, games, sports, politics, finance, or whatever your interests are. Not to mention all those great books you got off Amazon, which are just stacking up. Maybe you got a Kindle or a tablet to help you get more reading done. And then there are those 200 videos from that awesome conference on Vimeo for free! Will have to dig through them soon. In a vain attempt to trick yourself into believing you'll get around to consuming all the material, you star it on Twitter. You tag it for later. You add it to Instapaper. Read Later. Watch Later. An ever increasing backlog of information you want to absorb, but the truth is that you'll never catch up. What if I were to say: You do have the time. You're just not using it right. You're trying to consume good information, but you'...