My Favorite Programmer Podcasts

I use to have an hour long commute to work. It has been reduced to 35 minutes now with my new position, but I still have 5 hours a week where I’m not being at all productive. I used to listen to books on CD to pass the time, but what I really wanted to do was learn more about programming!

Since Code Complete isn’t out as an audio book yet, I had to turn to podcasts. At the time, I still had 10 hours of drive time, so I was really burning through them. At first, all I had was my nerd-crush Scott Hanselman’s podcast “Hanselminutes”. However, I blew through the archive in a hurry and I needed more.

I had a really hard time finding good podcasts that were updated fairly regularly and that talked about the kinds of things that I wanted to learn about. Since that time, I’ve built up a nice little rotation and I thought that I would share my favorites with you. I wish I could have found a list like this when I was searching, so maybe I can be a help to someone else who is starting out.

Here is my list. In order of preference. I don’t waffle and I calls ’em likes I sees ’em.

Hanselminutes

My absolute favorite podcast. When I discovered this, I liked it so much that I went back and listened to every single episode. When a new one comes out, I bump it to the top of the playlist and hear it next. Worth a listen for the theme music alone ;). Description from the site: Hanselminutes is a weekly audio talk show with noted web developer and technologist Scott Hanselman and hosted by Carl Franklin. Scott discusses utilities and tools, gives practical how-to advice, and discusses ASP.NET or Windows issues and workarounds.

StackOverflow Podcast

This is the podcast to discuss Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky’s joint business venture of StackOverflow.com. Well, that is what it is intended to do. In reality, they talk about a lot of issues that are tangential to Jeff’s work or things that have annoyed either one of them in the past week. They also take user questions.

Polymorphic Podcast

This podcast isn’t updated as frequently, but I still like to listen to it when it is new. The tagline is “Object Oriented Development, Architecture, and Best Practices in .Net” and that about sums up what the show is about. Craig Shoemaker, the host, also does webcasts over at getpixel8ed.com. A bit of trivia: I won an ASP.Net Infragistics Controls license for answering a trivia question posed on this podcast!

Deep Fried Bytes

Deep Fried Bytes is a new podcast with Keith Elder and Chris Woodruff. It is described as “The show discusses a wide range of topics including application development, operating systems and technology in general”. Some great recent shows have covered .Net development on a Mac and scaling large websites.

.Net Rocks

.Net Rocks. If you don’t know about this one, you’ve been hiding. Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell do an hourlong show and discuss all sorts of topics in the Microsoft world.

Google Developer Podcast

This podcast isn’t updated very frequently at all. It isn’t boring and does let you know what Google is up to for developers, but I use it as “filler” if I’m all caught up on other podcasts and I need something to listen to on the commute.

Alt.Net Podcast

If you haven’t heard of Alt.Net, it is a group of developers who develop using .Net technologies, but they like to have some choice in how they do things, borrowing heavily from what other development communities are doing. This podcast has a lot of information, but is really dry and another one that I use for filler.

I have a few more that I dig deep on if I am totally out of stuff, but by that time, my regulars have churned out some new podcasts and I don’t need to go much further. If you have one that you really enjoy, leave it as feedback in the comments, I’d love to check it out.