i listen to a tonne of podcasts. i find activities such as doing my laundry, driving back home from work, doing the dishes … all delightful because it gives me a chance to strap on some headphones and listen to a bunch of podcasts. in the time that i run those dreadfully boring chores i’ve found myself learning so much about technology and good software development.

as i was driving back home today i was listening to an episode of Ruby Rogues and thought to myself:

why aren’t there more podcasts like this for Android?

the iOS folks have some amazing podcasts focused for the developer audience. heck, i listen to two of them and i’m not an iOS developer (granted they’re slightly more generic).

as an android developer there is exactly one show today that is focused on android development called “Android Developers Backstage”. it’s hosted by google engineers Chet Hasse and Tor Norbye (both of them work directly with Android). they’re funny and the podcast is amazing! if you’re an android developer you should absolutely be listening to it.

my only gripe with the show is that they live in their beautiful google bubble. on a recent show they interviewed Jake Wharton (a.k.a superman android dev) and i found it really interesting that they had genuinely not heard of some of the libraries that Jake works on (like Picasso, Retrofit and ButterKnife). i guess it makes sense though: they’re google engineers working on android directly. if they really needed something, they would have had it baked in.

but i don’t think i’m alone when i say that for some of us android developers, those libraries are indispensable for pushing out quality android apps quickly.

  • i want to hear more about such libraries.
  • what are some of your learnings as an android developer that you would love to share?
  • what are some tricks and techniques you have in your utility belt?
  • can you tell me about some android apps that are top notch and push the boundary in terms of quality and design?
    • what are some interesting things they do?
    • how do they do it?

i’ve been toying with the idea of starting an android podcast with a developer audience in mind. i’ve done a decent amount of sound-engineering in my day so the audio editing part isn’t daunting. it’s the whole planning around the actual podcast that sort of worries me. i’ll have to find developers to interview, do my homework before interviewing them, setup the environment and whole stack for the podcast, find a place to host the podcast and a whole bunch of other things that i can’t think of right now; all in addition to my regular job (which i also absolutely love).

it’s clearly a lot of work and will require a solid chunk of my free time. i don’t intend to make any money out of it so i’ll probably have to bear the costs myself intially (i really don’t mind that part at all though cause i’ll definitely be learning along the way). the effort only makes sense though if a larger group of people can benefit from this.

i’m trying to gauge interest and will explore the specifics only if people seem interested. so i ask you: would you genuinely be interested in a developer-focused android podcast? (let me know by answering this poll).

[update: many people were interseted, so i teamed up with the amazing Donn Felker to start “Fragmented - An Android developer podcast”. Let us know what you think.]