Over the past few months, I've had several ideas for bringing a podcast to life. Initially, I just wanted to do a generic podcast aimed at developers, starting with web development. Listening to podcasts like Syntax FM, The Undefined Podcast, and The Ladybug Podcast had me really interested in creating one on my own. None of my initial ideas really stuck however and I quickly realized I was doing it just for the sake of doing it. I eventually did a guest episode on the TechJR podcast and loved the fact that they built something off of providing junior developers a platform to come listen and learn.
Now while this was all happening there was also a lot of constant negative press around the big tech companies and some not so great ways they were using our data or treating their employees. It struck me at that point that there so many ways to find out about all the bad things tech is contributing to but not so much in how it's helping us as a society. That's when it hit me and I realized what I wanted to talk about and what I wanted to bring to life. The idea for Tech4Humans came about and I wanted to showcase people and projects who are making a real positive impact on humanity.
I then coerced...erm...asked my best friend Hasibul who was in the midst of completing a coding Bootcamp to help me out and be my cohost. He quickly agreed and we got to work on planning out how we wanted to record some episodes. I worked with a designer to get a landing page designed and awkwardly live coded parts of actually building it on my Twitch channel. In the meantime, we started reaching out to several people on Twitter who were doing some great things in tech. We were amazed at how receptive people were to the idea and how easy it was to book episodes. As of writing this, we have released two episodes and have a backlog of episodes ready for the next 3 months.
Our initial episodes were recorded on Anchor, and I highly recommend it if you just want to get started and get a podcast out. The best way to get started is to just do it and don't worry too much about the details. We appreciated that aspect of Anchor but we wanted a little more. Anchor didn't allow us to have a video call and it took some liberties in mixing down the episode for you. We wanted a better nuance in our conversation that we felt could only be achieved over a video call and we wanted more control over what our podcast sounded like. This led us to a new podcasting product called Riverside.fm. Riverside as a product gave us absolutely everything we wanted. We got video during conversations, a no download needed web app, and it even saved the local recordings of each speaker separately in the host's dashboard. It was also super easy to use. If you want a better experience with your podcast recordings, definitely go with them.
Now came the next part, actually launching this thing we've been working on for two months. We got the episodes together, gathered additional information for our show notes and used the software, otter.ai, in order to generate transcripts for the episodes. I even went as far as getting a producer to hook us up with an intro beat(though I may someday make my own version of it) and did an alright mixdown of everything in logic pro. I'm definitely not a sound engineer but definitely hoping to improve that aspect of things as time goes by.
We launched episode 0 where it was just the two of us introducing ourselves and talking about what the podcast was all about. We didn't promote it too much but put it out there and waited a week to put out our actual first episode. This one was with Pete from No CS Degree. We spoke to him about how he highlights developers who have become successful in the industry without a CS degree. We thought it was a wonderful way of getting into the podcast, giving the message that this podcast is for anyone no matter how you're getting into tech.
It was a difficult thing to get off the ground and into the world but I'm very proud of the fact that it is out there now. It isn't perfect but after some effort, it seemed better to get it out and get things rolling and improve it along the way.
We hope you might start this journey with us, every Thursday we will be releasing a new episode of Tech4Humans which is available on most popular podcast platforms.
You can view all of our episodes at https://www.tech4humans.io/ or https://anchor.fm/tech4humans
Follow us on twitter @tech4humansio.
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