Tim Bourguignon 0:06
Hello, and welcome to developer's journey. podcast. shining a light on developers lives from all over the world. My name is Tim Bourguignon was always and today, Adam have any guests for you. This is the end of the year episode, this closes, season two Wi Fi may call it season two. And I thought this would be the appropriate moment to take time to reflect and to think about the year that has passed and all the good things that happened to the podcast. As you may remember, I started the podcast in 2016, and recorded a few episodes. And in 2018, I was triggered by a friend of mine and decided to restart the podcast. There, I did one major change back then, until the summer of 2018. I invited only people that I met with air quotes in real life. People they met at conferences, people I knew before people I knew through friends of mine. And starting with summer 2018, I decided to start inviting people that I don't know. And so I started searching for guests on Twitter on LinkedIn on the internet's asking around for people, for referrals for people that I should be interviewing, asking the guests I had already on the show who I who else I should be talking to. And that's what I continued until the the end of the year 2018. And as 2018 closed and 29 heat started, an idea emerged was going from this biweekly schedule that I managed to sustain in 2018 to a weekly schedule. But back then, it was still a bit too hard for me too long to produce an episode a week, it was a lot of work, my automation pipeline was not mature enough yet. And so we took me a few months to to stabilize this. And you might remember it in May of 2019. Seventh of May, exactly with Episode 47. With a guest, Eric St. Martin was the first episode to come on the weekly schedule. And it's been on the weekly schedule ever since. And this has been, I guess, the major event of this year 2019 I just spoke about it being a lot of work to produce one episode. Well, it used to be that way and I won't hide it. It used to be a lot of work I wasn't used to, to argue editing, I was very clumsy with my preparation and the post processing and the whole note taking and preparing for social media etc. So producing one episode used to take me almost 10 hours maybe more than 10 hours. And so that was obviously not possible to produce more episodes than then than once every fortnight thinking a lot about this I managed to streamline my production pipeline. So taking notes at the right moment, writing down the things I need to own to create the the tweets and the the social media afterwards to create the metadata that I need to upload the episode and get everything prepared for iTunes and CO and now I'm kind of down to something like two hours per episode processing, which is additionally to the to the recording itself, which usually takes one hour, and I managed to streamline some stuff and on this end as well using tools like calendly and air table and Zapier. All in all, I've come down to three something hours per episode, which is which is pretty affordable women say now I'm able to go to producing a piece of the weekend. That's that's pretty okay. It's still a lot of work. But, but I take so much out of these discussions and so thrilling to hear all the stories that I do that really gladly, I must say one other major things that happened this year was the podcast grew consequently, in size. When I rebooted the podcast, there were something like 40 to 50 regular listeners. And after a year we've now reached almost 400 listeners that joining every week to listen to this podcast and lose guest stories, which is absolutely thrilling and amazing that so many people listen to the stories. It's It's humbling. I've done a lot of public speaking and getting 400 people in the room. Listen to you. It's just, it's just thrilling. And so this is what is happening every week with those guests. And I just, I'm just so glad to be able to organize this. And I'm so glad that the word of mouth is functioning and that you are pushing it out and telling people about it and, and spreading it out and telling well do stories, this is fantastic. Thank you very much. The amount of followers that we have on Twitter as also grown very rapidly, the beginning of the year, when I created the account for the podcast, and our reach something at 2600 followers, which is which is great. There still not a lot of community discussions, I will I would love to hear more from you listeners, what you think what you what you love, what you like, what you that would interested you with what you thought they could have asked and give it more discussion in there. But still, it's amazing. And the few discussions I have had so far, I just, I just fantastic. It's always great to hear from you. This year alone, I produced half of the episodes of the podcast. So it was 43 episodes this year. And we've reached now 81 guests, which is amazing. And I managed to keep the amount of women to 30%, which is not as much as I would like it to be. But I'm thrilled that I was able to keep it like this, and I'm gonna try and do better in 2020 and try to reach more women. One thing I tried to do this year, as well as try to reach out to people in Africa, I had very little, I have no guests last year in, in on this continent. And so this year, I had the first guests in Ghana in Nigeria. So I hope I'll be able to, to have more guests from Africa and maybe some from Asia, I think it didn't have any guests from Asia yet. So we're going to have to compensate there and get some some more diverse, diverse profiles. We also had a developer from from South America, we're gonna push there a bit more as well. And when for the caribbeans. The demo that was very interesting to hear these different profiles that are a bit different yet. Still, it's software developments. And it seems to be a bit the same over the whole world. One other thing I did this year was to create a new website, my holster has been providing on automatic website for forever, which was very convenient, not having to do anything for it and just pushing it to the in the back end and the website would be updated. But I felt a bit too closed in at some point I wanted to start doing a bit more. And so I created a website with GitHub Pages and created the pipeline to to push everything else medically and the Python scripts to feed it with the new data coming in from from my holster. So the took a bit of time to to get this sorted out. But now it works pretty fine. And so the website is updated almost entirely automatically. I just have to push a few Git commands in the backend and everything is sorted out. And this enabled the discus comments in on the on the guest pages. Maybe you didn't check this out yet. So if you go to dev trainee dot info and click on one of the guests in the archive list that's below the player. On the homepage, you will see below the show notes, there is a discus comment box and you can leave a comment there. I wanted to be able to, to enable more discussion here, not just on Twitter, one of the thing I wanted to do was to start having different sections on the website. So the first one that you might have discovered is the quotes from the guests on the sidebar, when you refresh the home page, there is a small JavaScript functions that pulls one quote one random quote from a guest and links to the show where these quotes come from. So if you just keep on hitting refresh, you will get new codes, new quotes from the different guests and be able to then go back to the episode and listen to it again. If you've forgotten where the school's from come from and listen to it in its context. One more thing I wanted to do was add a page with all the book references that were mentioned on the on the show. This is done as well and I think this is a this is great to have. It's all in in one place. That is way more convenient for all of you. One other thing I wanted to talk about is finances. So Pressing the button the podcast cost me a few hours. This is time that I really gladly invest into I don't really want to, to hire someone to do it. But I still have a few tools that I need to pay for. So the the holster bills and the few tools I use on the back end to ease my work from from and reduce the amount of time, I need to invest from something like 10 hours, as I say to something like two, three hours. Now, this costs a bit of money. And so I created a Patreon account. I'm not a fan of Patreon, but I I'm not sure what what else it could be using. So if you have any other ideas, that could work better, I be glad to hear this. But so far, I settled on Patreon. And it was a good effective way of setting it up and having it out there. And so I have first Patreon, Patreon, that adds a few coins here and there. And so it helps pay the bills. So whichever amounts you can pledge would go directly into these bills, which amount to something like 30 euros per month. So if you are able, and if you think this podcast add value into your life, we will gladly accept it and help pay the bills, I have a lot of ideas of what we could be doing in 2020. The first one is going to be continue like this getting always interesting guests, sometimes bigger guests in terms of of reach and people that have big communities around them. And also keep having those, those beginners and not well known developers, normal people in air quotes that just started their journeys, and to whom we really can relate. I'm not saying we cannot relate to those well known developers, but some of them are out there with with hundreds of 1000s of listeners. But the the normal developers that have just a few 100 Twitter followers and are just living the same thing as we do, the stories are important as well. And so I'm still trying to keep a balance in there and keeping this balance raising the the number of female guests on the show, trying to get people from really all over the world. And not just Europe and the USA is going to be a hard task already for 2020. But I'm gonna try that anyway. And if you could see the big smile on my face, this is something I really look forward to doing. In addition to the few private stuff I have going right now, like a new child that is going to call me know home very soon or third child and we're so excited to have him or her join our little family. And at the same time we're renovating a house. So it's it's a lot of work outside. But still the podcast is my top priority after those two, and I'm gonna keep this up. No matter what, that's gonna be great. One more thing for 2020 you logo as much as I have in my face on this, on this podcast logo. The podcast shouldn't be about me. And so I've been wondering for a while if I could and should do this. Getting you visual style for the podcast and get it to the next level. Maybe then get some, some t shirts and stuff. So I can go with my own t shirts at conferences and advertise the podcast even more. That would be amazing. We'll see if, if that's something that I managed to do. In between my other projects. We'll We'll see about that. Last, but not least, there is. But one thing that I want to ask you actually to. The first one is get in touch, start a discussion. Each time I push an episode on social media on Twitter on LinkedIn. I always add the guests to the to the discussion. Use this opportunity to start the discussion, ask more question, get the discussion going. This is always amazing to hear from guests and say what they tell me. Well, this and that person reached out and the athletes in that question and that was just great to hear that it started on the show. And it's always, always amazing for me to hear this. The second thing I want to ask you is tell somebody about it, about the podcast. Tell them what you like about it, tell them why they should listen to it, and help those stories reach even more ears. It's for me so important that stories get spread out even further. When we hear on Twitter all the time. discussions about the Rockstar developers and a 10 x developers and who's working nights and weekends, developers. This is not what software development is like. You've heard it on these stories. Really, somebody said that they had to do this. wearily, somebody said that they did it. And it was great. Maybe some of them did it. Some of them said, Yeah, they work a lot. But it's not what our industry is all about. And I think this message needs to get out these stories and tales and journeys need to get out. This is just so important. So tell people around you just try and convince one person on the tribe managed to convince one person and this is going to make an avalanche. And two stories are going to reach even more people, and maybe help a little bit our industry to become more calm industry and more mature industry. That would be absolutely fantastic if this podcast could participate into this. Dear listeners, that's all the things I wanted to tell you. And this closes Season Two of the software developer's journey, podcast, or dev journey. And I'm thrilled to Open Season Three was fantastic guests, I have already five or six recordings lined up, and it's going to be amazing. You're going to love it. With this. I wish you a great year 2020. And we'll see each other next week. Bye bye. Dear listener, if you haven't subscribed yet, you can find this podcast in iTunes, Google music, Stitcher, Spotify, and much more. Head over to www dot journey dot info to read the shownotes find all the links mentioned during the episode. And of course links to the podcast on all these platforms. 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