Since announcing the podcast idea yesterday, I’ve booked the first two guests.

My usual recording day will be Thursday evenings, but I intend to get a few in the can and launch it in early 2014 (which is closer than I remember it being).

I’ve also thought a lot more about it, including a probable name and what I really think are the intentions behind what I’m wanting to create.

At least at this early stage.

First off, for a name, I’m going with “The Hallway” for now. The reason for that (aside from being a nod to Rands) is that I want it to be largely a series of informal chats about work and life as a developer and/or manager of developers these days.

The kind of conversation you have in office or conference hallways.

There are plenty of more-technical podcasts out there, and I don’t really want to talk about libraries or text editors or anything related to the bits and bytes of being a developer.

I’m much more interested in the softer (so to speak) stuff. How’d you get to this point in your career? What’s it like working remotely on a team of mostly on-site employees? What did you like most about the best job you ever had? If it’s not your current job, what changed?

My own journey, career-wise, doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense (Sports Journalism to dev to management, back to dev, back to management), and I tend to find other people’s stories along these lines fascinating.

But more than that, I’m less interested in what the work is than how it happens.

Every project and, for the purposes of this podcast, every person involved has a story.

And those stories are what ultimately interests me.

A few other miscellany:

  • I have no intention of ever doing sponsorships on this thing. I don’t generally mind sponsorships on the podcasts I listen to, but I’m not doing this as a direct means of income. The primary reason is I just want to have these conversations and talk about these things; if it brings me (and my guests) a larger audience, so much the better, but it’s not the primary goal.
  • I largely want the guest list to not be the usual suspects. As I alluded to earlier, everybody has stories and insights, and I suspect we’ll find out that those from a more unknown developer or manager will be just as fascinating (if not more so because the stories are new) as the names you know.
  • For audio production purposes, I’m getting my new Blue Yeti mic delivered today. I’ll largely be following Jason Snell’s advice, except using Audio Hijack Pro instead of Ecamm Call Recorder, mostly because I have it already. Myself and my guest will each record our own end of the conversation and then I’ll stitch it all back together before publishing.
  • I’m still a bit undecided on hosting for the podcast. This blog is running off Ghost, which doesn’t exactly support that sort of thing. Most of my other sites are running off Paperplane at this point, but I don’t feel like finagling a static site generator to produce a podcast site and feed. I also have no intention of running Wordpress. In short: I’m exploring my options here and if you have suggestions, let me know.
  • To start at least, I don’t plan to have theme music or anything more than a cold open and then maybe tacking a bit on at the end. We’ll see how that goes.
  • Every episode will have show notes, and hopefully fairly extensive ones.

Thank you all for following along. I’m still booking guests, so drop me a line if the sort of conversation outlined above sounds like something you’d be interested in.