Why It Is Beneficial To Listen To Podcasts

First, let's start with some basic math because it's a nice and objective way to chime in.

So, let's say you spend one hour every weekday to commute from home to work, that's two hours per day. Let's also say that you do solitary exercise like jogging or gym for one hour every other day than Sunday, that's six hours per week.

Because there is 5 weekdays in a week and 52 weeks in a year there is 5 * 52 = 260 weekdays in a year. That means you spend 2h * 260, that is 520 hours per year on commuting alone.

In addition, you spend 6h * 52 = 312 hours on doing solitary exercise. In total that is 520h + 312h = 832 hours per year, which is 832h / 8h = 104 full working days.

Of course in these calculations we don't take into account vacations and those sort of things and we also hypothesise that you can follow the exercise discipline like a machine. Still, this at least gives you a nice ballpark estimation on how much time that is altogether, so please bear with me.

In a normal European university that complies with the ECTS-credits standard a school semester equates to about 1500 - 1800 hours of studying, that's 1650 hours on average.

So, finally 832h / 1650h equals roughly 50%.

What does that mean?

Now, what if you were to use all that time to your advantage in such a way that you were actually doing something equivalent to studying whilst enjoying the whole process? Would it then mean that during one full year, you would potentially get an extra half school semester's worth of knowledge assimilated and at your disposal in very pleasant way?

Even if that is not the case, should that amount of time just be neglected and untapped?

I'm of the belief that that is not the case.

Podcasts

In the beginning of last semester (2008 - 2009) I was talking with a course lecturer about the benefits of podcasts. I mentioned to him that I listen to this one particular podcast called Software Engineering Radio whilst commuting to school. After explaining what the podcast was about the lecturer got instantly curious and commented that he'll definitely take a look at that.

A week later he mentioned having listened to one episode whilst jogging and that he really liked it. He said it was really nice to be able to use the jogging time more effectively and that it also helped him keep his heart rate from getting too high during the jog.

That is one of the rare cases where I've met a person who listens to podcasts regularly and even there it was only the beginning for that particular lecturer. Personally I know only two other people who do that and I don't really know the reason for that.

It makes so much sense to me to listen to these things. I get to kick back and just immerse myself in a topic by having some experts analyse and chat about it. Occasionally I take notes of interesting tidbits or websites I should check out. Sometimes I stop the playback completely and let my mind work at some new idea that occurred to me whilst listening and then I write that down in my notebook or cell phone for future reference.

All in all I have to say that I enjoy listening to podcast quite a bit.

Nutrition For Your Mind

I think about listening to podcasts the same way I think about reading useful books. It is simply awesome to start your day by tuning in on an intellectual conversation about some topic that you're interested in. It can be like catching up on news in a way that is very pleasant as you don't have to do much but just listen.

There can be some podcasts which you cannot really listen to easily eg. whilst commuting. I found that some se-radio episodes are so tightly packed with knowledge that listening to them demands a level of concentration that I just can't attain whilst travelling. What happens is that I valiantly try to keep up with the conversation by pausing, rewinding, and even taking notes but still to no avail as I slowly but surely am left guessing at what the people in the podcast are talking about.

One of such episodes that comes to mind dealt about service oriented architecture. I tried to listen to that episode actually 3 times whilst commuting and it always had the same result sooner or later. I believe it was the result of the topic being too abstract to me and of one of the hosts way of presenting information in a very straightforward German fashion with almost no fill up words or sentences where one could relax even for a second or two.

Listening to those heavy hitters require you to just sit down and listen to apprehensively in a place where you can concentrate only on studying.

Rob Walling of Micropreneur Academy suggests in one of his learning modules that you should be taking notes when you listen to podcasts and audio books or when you read books, magazines and blogs. This way you start eliminating resources that don't generate actionable items and that results in you filtering out unimportant chaff. So in his philosophy, non-actionable resources equal unimportant.

A Look Into the Future

Now that was about podcasts. Naturally you can also choose to listen to an educative audio book every once in a while. You might just as well take up on studying something that is directly beneficial to your main studies at school or at work.

I believe this learning through podcasts and/or educative audio books is still very much a growing phenomenon and not yet a mainstream thing. I don't think it is mainstream because eg. in my social group I'm among the very few who actually do listen to these things.

I foresee podcasts becoming a general way of acquiring any type of knowledge and different school systems adopting them as a new way for the students to "attend" lectures. This opens up a new channel for the students to get to the course material and as such it's only a positive thing. Some universities are doing this already.

Another possibility for universities is the outsourcing of lectures. Now that the economy is down and costs have to be cut, how about contracting an expert in some field to lecture a course he or she is a top scholar in? That could be possible by simply using the Academic Earth video lectures as the course lectures themselves. It could lower the costs for the university as the person organizing the course could be supervising many more courses than the currently.

To finish off, here's a couple of simple things to keep in mind when listening to podcasts:

• Pause the playback for a while if you think you need time to process something that was said. It is always good to let your mind work out the details instead of just listening passively.
• Rewind the podcast back if you missed something that was said. If you don't do this you might find yourself falling out from continuous stream of thought that listening to a podcast creates for you and that is a bad thing.
• Take notes when you hear something of value. It is all too easy to forget what you heard if you don't make an effort to remember it. What I do is just write down a couple of words in my cell phone as a txt message and then save it as a draft.

The podcasts I currently listen to regularly are (in no particular order):

• Software Engineering Radio
  
• Stack Overflow Podcast
  
• Startup Success Podcast
  
• This Week In Tech
  
• Free Libre Open Source Software Weekly aka FLOSS Weekly
  
• This Week In Startups
• This Week In Google
  

I'll write a blog post later where I review each one of those and give comments on what I believe I've gotten from and why I listen to them.

Grinding At Work

I had an interesting idea this morning whilst commuting to work by bus.

I was listening to This Week In Startups podcast episode 11. At one point in the podcast Lon Harris mentioned how Jason Calacanis is sometimes unreasonable as the CEO of Mahalo.com by suddenly demanding something new and expecting it to happen instantly.

Lon mentioned that it gets a bit crazy sometimes at work at Mahalo and that he'd wish Jason would give people more time to adjust so that the company would feel more stable as an environment and not like a mad house.

Jason took the open critique, which he specifically asked for earlier, maturely as something constructive and then began to analyze the situation. He conceded that he can be difficult at times and also revealed that he sometimes flips out and yells at people at work. That's not something he's proud of but he reckons some of it might actually be useful, like somewhere around 10-15% of the cases.

Jason then commented that with growing companies the situation tends to be such that if the CEO is not constantly expecting more from the company and trying to come up with something new, the company might as well go out of business. It's these kinds passionate people who make the companies what they are with their unrelenting urge to constantly reach new levels of awesome.

That means the companies that are growing can be hectic to work at from time to time.

Lon then commented that the reason why he likes to work at the company is that he feels he is growing personally as the company is growing. It does not feel like grinding at a boring desk job where each day is similar to the other but you can actually see the progress taking place.

Now the thought that came to me at the moment was that that very notion is quite similar to how the term grinding is understood in computer games. You do some boring menial thing repeatedly ad infinitum which you don't care about at all to get to some far looming goal.

Does it make sense to be grinding at work day after day, or would you rather do something that you care about and make a real difference?

Becoming a Game Developer

Contrary to my first blog post this one is going to be a bit more personal one, akin to something like a real diary entry. So, if this is not your cup of tea, please feel free skip this one :)

I've always been intrigued by game development. The idea of experimenting with a bunch of novel game concepts and game technologies, building something truly your own, and then unleashing it for other people to enjoy is somehow inherently very compelling to me.

However, I'm yet to do anything notable in the area of game development. So far my own projects have been very modest at best, ranging from a simple worm game (Java applet link) and a pong clone to a game of life simulation (Java applet link), which hardly qualifies as a game in the first place.

I've also participated in two larger projects that had to do with game development. Both of them were university of Turku (a port city in Finland) project courses where we, the students, were tasked to design and build a game.

Neither of these project courses however resulted in an actual working game.

Now, a lot could be said about both of those courses in terms of what went wrong there, but a much more fruitful discourse can be given in the light of what was learned.

I shall go into more depth with this in another blog post, but to at least give you some idea of what was going on in the courses here's the combined lessons I learned from them:

• Work does not equal the work process. You might think you're doing fine when you have a nice work process going on and when you can measure progress, but concentrating on executing this process alone does not necessarily yield the results you want. The project can still end up being late one day at a time. This lesson came to me when I was acting as the scrum master for the first time and was happily leading the project in a very waterfall like way step by step. I honestly did not see that one coming until the course was over. A huge lesson learned there.

• The existence of a project leader is vital to a project's success. I believe this holds at least in the setting where our projects took place ie. when there are many (10+) students involved with no strict guidance. In the other course we did not have a designated project leader, which resulted in democratic voting (and arguments) to take place whenever there was something of importance to be decided. As you can probably guess this was not a very effective way to work. There are many other takeaways from the course but I think this one was one of the main lessons.

From studying to teaching

In March of this year an opportunity arose for me to take my game development interest to another level altogether. As we were discussing with the teacher ways to make the course better for the next Spring, we suggested having a practical introductory course in Autumn where the students could get a base level understanding on game development before the actual project course took place.

The idea was immediately very compelling to the teacher and we then set out to plan what sorts of things should be discussed in it. I began listing things with a friend that we would have liked to have known before this year's course:

“Basic understanding on graphics engines would kind of be useful, right?”

“Yup, definitely”

“Also the scene graph, graphics primitives, and linear algebra should be familiar to those steeped in code because those are likely to be used often.”

“Oh, and of course the coders should have practical understanding on the chosen game development technology itself before the project course.”

...

After we were done with the “laundry” list the teacher asked my friend if he would be interested in giving a course that covered such topics in the coming Spring. My friend agreed and then after a while he asked me whether I would be interested in participating in the course as a teacher myself.

“Well, I don't understand much about those topics at the moment and I've never been a teacher myself. I am very willing to learn however and I do believe that I can teach what I've learned to other people. So, yeah I can agree to be the co-teacher if such a course will take place. :)”

That was one of those moments that it just made a lot of sense to say yes even though I had every reason to say no as well.

The funny thing with promises something like that is that it's a kind of spoken contract which you will want to honour. You put yourself in such a bind where you're supposed to do something that you would like to do anyway. This creates sort of an external motivator for you to deliver what you signed up for and that is a very good thing indeed.

So now, after studying practical (meaning coding etc.) game development and game engine architecture for the whole summer 2-3 days per week I can proudly say that I've acquired knowledge that I believe is worth passing on to fellow students during this Autumn's introductory course at university of Turku in Finland.

In some later post(s) I shall discuss the particularities of the game technologies we chose to utilize and the architectural aspects of the game engine we've built for the purpose of creating a scifi first-person adventure game.

What Twitter Is About and What Are the Benefits?

First the short answer. Twitter is a simple social media website that can be harnessed as a crowd sourcing tool to filter in news that are relevant to you personally. In other words it increases the signal / noise ratio.

That is done eg. in four different ways. First by following the updates of people you care to listen to, second by following trends ie. generally hot topics, third by utilizing simple string-based search, and fourth by tagging.

In the first case you are not forced to follow anyone so you don't have the problem of spamming as in with email (unless a person's account is hijacked). You get updates from the people you follow as requested be they interesting to you or not. On episode 10 of the TWiST podcast Chris Tolles, the CEO of Topix.com a local news congregator, commented that Twitter is now replacing rss because of this social news filtering feature. On the same episode Jason Callacanis commented: "On Twitter I get the level of curation I want", by which he implies that he can rely on other people to give him the most important bits of news.

The filtering that happens here is only that of selecting the people you want to follow with no further granularity such as 'follow this person on topic x'. This can lead to problems where a person that initially seemed like a good source of news turns sour and instead starts eg. spewing unnecessary details about their private / social life ad infinitum, and thus plummeting the signal / noise ratio. I've definitely seen this happen and am in the process of narrowing down the people I follow.

Some might say that detailed social life updates are exactly what Twitter is about as is kind of expressed on the service's front page, but as I see the trend here is that people are looking for value in the form of news in the updates on Twitter. Social / private life updates are better left on sites like Facebook.

Twitter is different from Facebook because it focuses on doing one simple thing really well: short status updates ie. micro-blogging. Facebook on the other hand is a more complete platform in the sense that it allows for people to add various applications to their profile. Thus users are telling or sharing more about themselves to other people or interacting with other people in numerous ways, such as playing chess or doing comparison tests. To put it simply Facebook is the social gathering site, as pretty much everyone by now can tell.

In the second case with following trends one can quickly get the latest news on wide variety of topics. Whilst it will take bloggers and newscasters in the order hours to produce their material, on twitter people can post news in a matter of seconds or minutes.

What this results in is that we're speeding up the rate of which we're consuming news. The reaction, analysis, and aftermath cycle is now done in 5 days as Leo Laporte commented on the TWiT podcast episode 206, which makes a person fall back in news much more quickly as before. The events of Monday are already ancient history by the time Friday arrives.

Third we have the search capability of Twitter. What this essentially allows the users to do is real time social searching. If for example you see or hear people shooting fireworks in your neighbourhood the most obvious place to check what all the fuss is about is naturally on Twitter. You can search for live updates on the events at your current location simply by using the event and your location as the search strings.

This is at least how it is in the US at the moment. In Finland Twitter hasn't yet come to mainstream such as Facebook, but I guess that's only a matter of time. It took Facebook two years to become mainstream in Finland after it was mainstream in the US.

Fourth way to increase the signal / noise ratio is by utilizing different types of tags. By tags here I mean simple textual markings such as @vesanieminen or #twist that signify something special in Twitter, but only by convention. There's actually nothing special about the tags and they can be thought of as complex emergent behaviour in a very simple system. Personally I find these kinds of things highly facinating.

With these tags people communicate publicly to each other or signify that a particular tweet is about this topic. I think of this as analogous to IRC. People send messages to channels and the channels are tagged with a name such as #gunslingers on the IRCNet. Imagine having that channel publicly available world wide to people with very little computer skills. That can be used to create huge communities way larger than anything on IRC.

There also exists a huge list of third party tools that have been built on top of Twitter by using its public API. There are too many ways to take advantage of Twitter to mention here but via these third party tools we're likely to be able to experience new types of emergent behaviour in this neat little system.

So to wrap up, what are the basic benefits of Twitter?

Twitter is concise, so it takes less time to get to the important stuff.

Twitter provides us multiple streams on the happenings of the world while the blogs and news sites are mainly concerned about giving holistic views.

Twitter is a many to many conversation tool that has various possibilities and business opportunities that people and companies are only beginning to tap in. The benefit here, naturally, is the ability to make money ;)