Podcasts: Earfuls of Ruby knowledge
Until this year, the podcast format had failed to win me over. I never really found a podcast I was particularly interested in, only ever listening to the podcasts that I thought I should listen to and never, it turns out, the ones I wanted.
I travel a lot, whether it’s commuting, visiting friends, or escaping the city for a bit of remote working. BBC Radio 4 provides most of my go-to audio with particular highlights being: I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, The Unbelievable Truth, Cabin Pressure, John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme, The News Quiz, and anything starring Milton Jones.
When I started as Staff Engineer at Florence, that all changed. I wanted to make sure I was keeping on top of the latest changes and trends in our tech stack to ensure that the decisions we were making were sensible given the direction our dependencies were moving in. For me, the podcast ecosystem turned out to be an untapped source of Ruby/Rails discussion and knowledge.
I started with…
The Ruby on Rails Podcast
This podcast publishes weekly and discusses a great range of topics with guests from across the community. Brittany Martin has a natural and relaxed hosting style which makes for very easy listening. My former colleague, “Schwad”, is a regular cohost and a welcome addition to the lineup.
As of September 2023, they have over 480 episodes. Pretty daunting and certainly enough to fuel my travel plans for a few years!
My suggestion: start with the most recent episode and work backwards.
The Ruby on Rails Podcast, introduced me to another two valuable podcasts for anybody looking to keep up with all the features offered by Ruby and Rails. At the time of writing (September 2023), both of the following podcasts have fewer than 15 published episodes so I hope to be up-to-date with them both pretty soon!
The Rails Changelog
Emmanuel Hayford hosts biweekly(ish) episodes covering the latest developments in the Ruby and Rails community. He is also co-editor of This Week in Rails.
Some of the topics can be pretty niche or heavyweight, even for a self-professed Ruby/Rails nerd like me! However, almost every episode prompts me to do some further reading into one of the topics they cover.
My suggestion: Start with the oldest episode and work forwards.
The Tightly Coupled Book Club
This biweekly podcast is the brainchild of cohosts Mina Slater and Aji Slater of Thoughtbot. Each episode discusses a page from the Rails Guides. The premise of the podcast: nobody reads the guides cover-to-cover. Why not?
Even as a Ruby/Rails staff engineer, with the help of this podcast, I am discovering little nuggets of Rails functionality I didn’t know about because there are so many sections of these guides I have only ever skimmed over or not read at all.
My suggestion: Read the page from the guides before listening to its respective episode. You’ll get a lot more from the discussion. Start with the oldest episode and work forwards.
Happy listening!
Sam 🎧
