Category: Podcasts

For Episode 10 (double digits!) of the Pete on Software Podcast, my special guest was Dustin Rogers. Dustin is an extremely skilled interactive designer based in Columbus, Ohio.

I know Dustin from a few projects that we collaborated on in the mobile space and I can vouch for the fact that he is very talented. He is also very practical and his designs not only look visually appealing, but they are also eminently usable and intuitive.

During this episode of the podcast, we talk about the tension between developers and designers, how to get through creative roadblocks, the importance of communication, the nature of inspiration, why infographics are awesome, and the exciting promise of mobile.

Dustin also recently did me a solid and created cover art for my Pete on Software Facebook Fan Page. He took my cartoon avatar from the podcast art and put him in a studio with a microphone and some headphones with the Columbus skyline. Very cool and something I never could have put together.

Dustin is also a very talented sketch artist and you can see some of his work at his site. And when you are done there, why not check out his interview?

You can also subscribe to the podcast at any of these places:

Thanks to all the people who listen, and a special thanks to those who have rated me. I really appreciate it.

The episodes have been archived. Click Here to see the archive page.

I just published my most recent podcast yesterday and it is my most favorite solo (non-interview) podcast yet.

In this podcast, I talk about the best ways to prepare to give a talk. In my case, my example was for my upcoming Stir Trek talk, but I also make sure to talk about ways that you can apply this preparation to business presentations, best man toasts, or oral book reports. I made sure to include a lot of practical resources and steps you can take to ensure that you can give a great presentation.

Preparation truly is key and I’ve seen some smart people give terrible presentations because they didn’t prepare properly, so I’m very paranoid about the subject. However, one of my old bosses really drilled the importance of preparation into me, so I take it very seriously and I’m pretty passionate about it. It doesn’t matter if you are leading a meeting, giving a keynote, or writing a blog. People can tell if you’ve put the background time in or not.

I’d definitely appreciate a listen.

You can also subscribe to the podcast at any of these places:

Thanks to all the people who listen, and a special thanks to those who have rated me. I really appreciate it.

The episodes have been archived. Click Here to see the archive page.

I recently came across a great tool called TextQL. I thought it was so useful that I reached out to its creator, Paul Bergeron, that day. He was gracious enough to come onto the podcast and we had a great conversation. You can hear that conversation here.

Inspired by Paul’s own demo of TextQL that you can see at its Github repo, I decided to install it and try it out myself. I created my own simple CSV of dumbed down blog data and showed it off a little bit here:

(I do realize that join was pointless, I just wanted to show that it could do joins).

Another interesting (for varying definitions of interesting) note about this podcast is that I’ve made a change to the quality. I had been encoding the MP3s at 128kbps (because that’s what Audacity/LAME just did) and I was unhappy with how the vocals were turning out. They were a little “fuzzy”. I upped that to 160kbps and I think that the episode sounds a lot better.

If you have any comments about the episode or if you notice a quality difference, let me know.

You can also subscribe to the podcast at any of these places:

Thanks to all the people who listen, and a special thanks to those who have rated me. I really appreciate it.

The episodes have been archived. Click Here to see the archive page.