The podcast for developers, testers, and SREs. And their managers. I explain complex and convoluted technologies in a clear and concise way avoiding buzzwords and hype.

Transcript

Around IT in 256 seconds. Episode Zero: Meta. Welcome to Around IT in 256 seconds. The podcast for developers, testers, and SREs. And their managers. I explain complex and convoluted technologies in a clear and concise way avoiding buzzwords and hype. Never longer than four minutes and sixteen seconds. Because software development does not require hours of lectures, developer advocates’ slide decks and hand waving. For those of you who want to combat FOMO (fear of missing out). 256 seconds is plenty of time. If I can’t explain something within this time frame it’s either too complex or I don’t understand it myself.

So how did I come up with this idea? Well there is this common wisdom that if you love eating you should never ever open a restaurant. I love podcasts. And I decided to create my own. Why do I start with zero? Well, do you know a book by Jules Verne called “Around The World in Eighty Days”? I don’t want to spoil it to you if you haven’t read it yet. However the the basic problem off the main character is an off by one error. Off by one error which is so common in our industry because so many languages, most of them actually, start counting from zero. But not all of them. Pascal, Matlab and most recently getting more and more popular, COBOL. They all start counting with one. And how did I come up with 256? Well if you’re listening to this podcast you probably know what this number actually means.

So what’s the idea behind four minutes? Well it’s not because I’m lazy or I don’t have time to record more. To paraphrase a great quote by Blaise Pascal: if I had more time I would have recorded a shorter podcast. So the idea is that I’m spending majority of time studying the technologies and exploring how they work so you don’t have to. I’m doing my best to compress all the knowledge and experience in this short time frame. So what you should expect from the upcoming episodes? Well I’ll be discussing everything but with a strong emphasis on distributed systems, integration, databases, middleware, software architecture, platforms, programming languages data structures. But all the way up to frontend and hardware.

I do have a backlog of about thirty or fourty technologies that I would like to describe in this podcast. However it’s going to be much more enjoyable to all of you if you give me some ideas that you would like to cover. In the show notes you will find a link to a user voice where you could submit your own ideas. I will do my best to explore, study and make sure you get the best knowledge you can in four minutes. For the time being I’m recording this podcast on my own on a very cheap equipment, covered by a dusty blanket to avoid echo. However if you’re an expert in some area or some domain or if you know some technology really, really well I would love to host you as a guest. In the meantime I hope you enjoyed this podcast and I’m looking forward for the next episode! Bye!

That was your host, Java champion, CTO O’Reilly book author, and an ever learning software developer. Tomasz Nurkiewicz