We’ve changed our minds. No! Not about podcasting. Our apologies, but we’ll continue! Deal with it!

Seriously: we’ve changed our minds about the swearing. In the middle of the process of getting out episode 4. Yes, seriously. Just listen to it and you’ll understand. Why? Well – as you’ll find out when you listen in, we came up with approach no 1 quickly, which is to make it a feature instead of an incidental thing. Approach no 2, on the other hand, is quite interesting as well: just don’t do it.

We couldn’t decide. Or rather, we did decide, and then we thought well, perhaps that wasn’t right. What if people don’t like us because we swear? Okay, maybe we don’t really care about that so much. But what if these people don’t want to listen to us because we swear? Are there people like that in the world? Yeah, I guess there are… what if they miss something important because they don’t listen to us because we swear? See what I mean?

Okay, or perhaps we just wanted to do whatever is necessary to get the largest podcast audience the world has ever seen. You pick.

Without further ado, here it is: Sod This Episode 4 (right-click and save to download the file instead of playing it in the browser)

In this episode, I talk to Dino Esposito about things he does, Web programming, Silverlight, Ajax, Basta Italia, … and some other stuff, I think. Great guy, Dino, and we have a good time. Listen in and enjoy!

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Links from the show:
Craig’s contest: http://www.craigmurphy.com/blog/?p=1417
The APL Wiki: http://aplwiki.com/

I’ve heard two questions several times now, about keeping up to date with Sod This episodes as they become available. Number one is the really clever question: Will Sod This be available in iTunes?

The answer is, Sod This is already available in iTunes! You can go to their podcast directory and search for “Sod This” and you’ll find it. We haven’t announced this publicly so far, because there’s an outstanding problem with our logo, which for some reason doesn’t appear in iTunes. But if you can ignore that for the time being, you should be fine!

(Note on the side - one listener told me he was only seeing one episode in iTunes. Me myself and also others are certainly seeing all three, so I don’t really know what that is about. If you see the same problem, please let me know so we can look into it.)

Of course it is also possible to subscribe to normal RSS feeds in iTunes - apparently a less than well-known fact. The process is nicely described here: http://learninginhand.com/podcasting/subscribe.html

This brings me to the second of the two questions, the slightly less clever one (with apologies and thanks to the people who asked it!): Is there an RSS feed for Sod This?

The answer is, yes, of course there is! In the top right corner of the window there’s a big orange icon and a Subscribe link for the RSS feed! I didn’t think it was easy to miss, but apparently it is - from now on, I’ll include the necessary links in each post, like this:

Subscribe to Sod This:

Subscribe in iTunes

Subscribe RSS

Follow us on Twitter

Finally, another good way to keep up with myself and Gary is to follow us on Twitter. Here’s my profile: @olivers - and this is Gary’s: @garyshort

Especially for the podcast, we have also created another account on Twitter: @sodthis

This account will tweet for each new post to this podcast blog, and myself and Gary will typically also re-tweet in our own accounts.

Welcome to episode 3 of Sod This (yes, amazingly we’ve not given up yet!), where Oliver and I are joined by Michael Foord for a discussion on dynamic languages in general and IronPython in particular.

Btw - for those confused personality types among our listeners - the “I” in this post is me, Gary, in spite of the post author given above.

Here’s the episode: Sod This Episode 3 (right-click and save to download the file instead of playing it in the browser)

Also in this episode Oliver and I do our best to sooth the troubles in Northern Ireland (cough) and struggle to remember the name of Microsoft evangelist Eric Whatishisname (it’s Nelson by the way - we looked it up ). We close out the episode with a short discussion on whether or not it’s taboo to give your daughter away as a prize on the show (seriously she’s just turning 18 so knows everything - you know what I mean, right?).

As always, if you have any positive comments about our show then send them to us, mention them on Twitter and blog your little hearts out. If you have any negative comments then, well… keep them to yourself. :-)

Enjoy the show!

Btw, we’re glad to mention that Michael looks nothing like the picture on the right. Oh well.

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Links from the show:

Michael’s book: http://www.ironpythoninaction.com/
Michael’s blog: http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/weblog/
Resolver Systems, the company Michael works for: http://www.resolversystems.com/
Barry Dorrans, the sock monster: http://www.sturmnet.org/blog/2009/03/10/improvements-to-barry-s-book-cover
Eric Nelson’s blog (sorry, Eric!): http://geekswithblogs.net/iupdateable/Default.aspx
DDD Scotland: http://developerdayscotland.com/main/Default.aspx

It’s here: Sod This Episode 2 (right-click and save to download the file instead of playing it in the browser)

Gary and I talk about using 3rd party components in development to ease your workload, and other ways of saving the world. An interview with Richard Campbell is included, talking about his experiences with German people at the recent Basta conference, his work with Strangeloop Networks and other things. Richard is of course well known as a Microsoft RD, a speaker at conferences, podcasts like .NET Rocks and RunAs Radio, and he’s also unfortunate enough to have the picture of him on the right published on the internet. No, I did not take that!

Regarding some of the technical comments we got for the first episode – we have increased the volume of the recording a bit, for those who were complaining. But my real advice is, go get a proper pair of headphones, with good isolation or noise cancellation. It’s more healthy and it allows for good dynamics in the recordings, which makes them sound better. Anyway, keep the comments coming, we appreciate them!

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Links from the show:

Instant gratification for developers

Basta Italia

Sod This goes live! After much thought, preparation and general fucking around we finally did it! Congratulate us, we need it.

To those of you who haven’t been introduced properly to the podcast elsewhere, let us introduce ourselves. This is us:

Gary	Oliver

As you can see from these pictures, we are

• not equally sized

• lazy

• extremely handsome

Sod This is our podcast. It is our podcast. It is our podcast. It’s our… hm, you get the idea. We’ll spend a good deal of time talking about things that are on our minds. Since we do what we do, we’re interested in computers, programming, technology in general, … and a hell of a lot of other things. We’ll talk about those things and, well, things. Yeah!

Seriously, it’s going to be seriously serious. Sometimes at least. It’s not a comedy show. Not most of the time at least. We just hope it’s fun and maybe interesting to a few other people!

As part of our jobs with DevExpress, we travel quite a bit, go to speak at conferences, and meet a lot of people. So it seemed kind of natural for us to talk to these people we meet, and for the first podcast we started with Hadi Hariri at the recent Basta! conference in Germany. He doesn’t really look as good as in the picture, btw. Anyway, we talked to him about airports in fields and things. Seriously, he’s a nice guy and he was friendly enough to serve as a guinea pig for our amateur attempts at recording. Thanks, Hadi!

You can find Hadi’s blog here. I’m sure he’ll appreciate some readers. Some more readers, I mean, of course. Hm, better stop right here! :-)

So without further ado, here it is now: SodThisEpisode1.mp3 (right-click and save to download the file instead of playing it in the browser)

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Links from the show:

Here’s the link to the (German) Clean Code Developer page: clean-code-developer.de

And the one to the book: Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

A possible connection I stumbled upon just recently – does anyone know if the German CCD thing is associated somehow with the more international Software Craftsmanship movement? For some reason those latter guys sound a bit like a religion to me…