Those who know me well will have realised I have a bit of a thing for podcasts, firstly in terms of consumption (20-30 episodes a week on average since the early days of TWiT back in 2005/6), and then in hosting and producing my own shows (Collaboration Matters, the Lotusphere Podcast, This Week in Lotus, Serendipity) since 2007.
So at an event in Austin in the summer, two years on from the previous TWiL show, it was fantastic to get together again with Darren (and his wife and occasional TWiL co-host, Lisa). Amongst many other discussions, we came up with the idea of a new podcast that took the best of TWiL in a brand new direction – taking a rather large step away from the IBM/Lotus pond and dashing headlong towards the much larger and rather less stagnant lake of broader enterprise technology.
Alongside the change of target focus area, we agreed that it would be fun to shift from the ever-changing weekly panel model of TWiL to a consistent set of hosts meeting regularly, and thus developing a narrative that would flow from episode to episode. Whilst Darren and I would still co-host the show, we agreed that a third host was needed. It didn’t take us any time at all to agree that Jesse Gallagher was the ideal guy to bring some additional positivity, humour, development tooling insight, a less-cynical younger perspective and all round knowledge of the industry to the party. Thankfully Jesse didn’t run a mile when we asked, and actually jumped at the opportunity – crazy, huh?
To kick things off, Jesse joined Darren and I to put TWiL to bed back in September with a final episode (115: Doing a three-way) discussing the MWLUG event, and offering a final ‘state of the union’ view on the ICS landscape.
And with that, WTF Tech was born…
Thus far we’ve recorded and published three shows (all 50-75 minutes long), with the latest being released yesterday:
- 001: What have they been doing for two years?!? (discussing that week’s events and announcements from IBM, Microsoft and Apple)
- 002: Slack Knockoff Fatigue (trying to avoid mentioning the US election, but end up discussing “fake news”, the new UK surveillance law, followup on the new MBP USB-C ports and Touch Bar, plus the newly announced Microsoft Teams)
- 003: It’s All About Me (taking aim at Fitbit’s acquisition of Pebble, rumours of IBM refactoring Connections using modern web frameworks and the upcoming Connect conference. We then start a new recurring topic reminiscing about old tech, kicking off with first computers…)
You won’t be surprised to hear that we are really rather proud of the shows we’ve recorded so far. Interesting topics, good conversation and lots of laughs. We have even brought back the much-loved tips from TWiL, with a good balance of technology, apps and development tips shared so far.
If this sounds up your street, then please go try out one of the episodes listed above – you can stream it direct from the site. If you like it, subscribe to the show…
Here are a few links that might be helpful:
- The WTF Tech podcast site
- Podcast (RSS) feed
- WTF Tech on iTunes
- WTF Tech in Overcast
- WTF Tech on Player.fm
- WTF Tech on Twitter
- WTF Tech on Facebook
Have a listen (maybe on your final commutes of the year, or whilst ‘driving home for Christmas’, and do let me know what you think!