How to transform your blog into a podcast for free

Gabriel Romay Machado — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 05:48:16 +0000

Audio version of this post

Some Context

I recently developed a solution to turn old books into a podcast 📚. I had the idea of adapting this for transforming my text blog into an audio blog 🦻. Because I don’t have a decent microphone in order to use my own voice 🙊. And because we live in the future 🌟.

Anyway, it seems that one of the blogging platforms I’m currently using, is already offering a similar feature. I listened to some examples and it sounds great 👍🏽, I wanted to try it on my own blog!

But it’s still experimental and you can only use it if you’re an Ambassador 🤷🏼‍♀️. In addition to that, I wanted to be able to fully customize the audio output and play with it a bit, so the way to go was clear: Hacking Time 👩🏻‍💻!

What I needed

A way of getting all my articles from Hasnode into my task 📃
An adaptation of my text-to-voice task ⚙
A way of getting the voice file into anchor.fm, my podcast platform of choice 🎧

How it went

I believe Hasnode already offers an API that lets you get your posts quite conveniently, but I was more interested in its backup feature. You see, if you create a github repository and give permissions to Hashnode, it will download your posts in .md format after every new creation or edition. It's quite easy to configure ☺! You only need to go to your blog dashboard and select “backup”.
I decided to create my new tasks in an independent repository for security reasons ㊙
I found a github repository, made by an Italian organization named Schrodinger-Hat 🐱‍💻, for converting a youtube video into an audio file and uploading it to anchor.fm. The upload task used puppeteer for that and I thought it was quite cool and simple, so I just forked it 😏. They are great, check them out!

Lessons learned or pending to learn

This project wouldn't be possible without three wonderful open-source projects: the node-gtts library, the fluent-ffmpeg library and the youtube-to-anchorfm repository. I have known for years how wonderful our software development global community is, so I’m impressed, but not surprised 🥰.

The fruits of hard work

As I said at the beginning, you can already check the audio version of this post in anchor.fm. And one great feature of anchor.fm is that it distributes it to other platforms too: Spotify (which makes sense, as the same company owns both), Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts… so convenient 👏🏻.

And of course, this repository is available on github.

Is there a future for this project?

I’m still developing some features related to the voice file generation: using sounds as substitutes for emojis 😶, adding all the links inside the blog post text into the audio post description 📋...

The original repository I forked contains code for creating a Github action to execute the download and upload task. When I finish adding the rest of the features I mentioned, it would be nice to have it all automated and just need to access GitHub to publish a new audio post ⚙.

And the best thing is that this project can be easily adapted to work with different blogging and podcast platforms 😏!

So yeah, its future looks just bright ✨.

What you need to know about interviews

Gabriel Romay Machado — Fri, 16 Apr 2021 07:26:54 +0000

Audio version

Talking about myself

Last week it was my anniversary of becoming a Professional Web Developer. I have been doing this for 6 years now 👴🏾. That's a lot of time in developer-years, so I have been in many job interviews already.

I have never been an interviewer yet, but I have worked with people designing and "evaluating" interviews so I know a bit about both sides.

The best and the worst

👌🏽 An interview with an American company where I was rejected on the first interview because my English wasn't good enough 🙊. I didn't agree with the concept, but I liked the way they did it: at the beginning of the process and offering me free 💸 online tools to improve, and letting me know when I could try again to have an interview with them in the future.
👍 An interview with a local small company. The interview was wonderful 💖: it felt just like having a chat with an actual coworker about tech. But a better opportunity had arisen for me so, days later, I wrote back to them to let them know that I wasn't interested anymore. I didn't expect an answer at all, but the email they sent me 💌 telling me it was a pleasure to chat with me and hoping me the best really got me.
👎🏻 An interview where I was rejected after a long code test without any explanation: was it the UI? Was it the tests? Guess we'll never know 🤷🏾‍♀️. I tried to ask them because I honestly wanted to improve and know what I did wrong. Never got a response.
🥰 I was in a selection process with Habitissimo, a Spanish company, and I had 3 interviews with 3 different employees in the same morning: HR, CTO and Agile Coach 🤯. That same afternoon I received a call to let me know they were interested. Talk about being efficient ⚙!

What I expect from interviews now

Interviewers should be clear and honest with the candidate from the beginning 🔓. Do not ask the candidate to do anything that does not really affect at all the decision of hiring them or not. In our industry, many candidates have other jobs and studies to attend to, so respect their time 🕒 as they should respect yours.
If the candidate has a good github portfolio, maybe there's no need to make them do a code test, especially if they are not going to receive any feedback about it at all afterward 😓.
Interviews should be fun and engaging 😀, not just a report from the candidate about how many responsibilities they handled in the past, not an interrogation 🕵🏻‍♀️ about why they left past companies… thinking more about talking with the candidate than evaluating them helps.

How I try to help as a candidate

Have questions for the first interview: remember that you are deciding if that company is a good fit for you too 🧩.
Engage in any opportunity of giving a talk or writing an article: some interviewers have told me that they read some of mine and that's always a good conversation starter. And, of course, that way you can tell if they're really interested in you 💘.
Let's face it: many developers lack in the "soft skills" area 🥀. I include myself there too, but we can always improve. I think we all know that developing is more about communicating than anything else. You code to communicate with a computer 🤖 and the current or future human maintainer of the project 👨🏽‍💻. You are sharing ideas through code.

DEV Community: Gabriel Romay Machado