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I enjoyed listening to and being a guest on Running in Production, and I'm sorry to hear you see the podcast as a failure. One difference I notice between Runn

I enjoyed listening to and being a guest on Running in Production, and I'm sorry to hear you see the podcast as a failure. One difference I notice between Running in Production and some other podcasts that are popping up in this thread (e.g., CoRecursive, Darknet Diaries, Lex Fridman) is that those podcasts focus on people and stories, whereas Running in Production focused more on technology. After writing my blog for several years, I noticed a pattern in that the majority of my popular posts were stories from my life rather than technical posts about a particular technology. The stories were highly related to technology, but they usually made sense to people who knew nothing about the technology. Even for fans of the podcast, I think the narrowness in topics means that not all fans of Running in Production are a match for most episodes. Comparing it to the Indie Hackers podcast, I'd listen to any episode of IH if the guest sounds interesting because there are a lot of potential things they can say that might be useful to me. Because Running in Production is more narrowly about tech stacks, the percentage of episodes that are relevant to me is much smaller. I'd be interested in hearing about someone talk about their Flask stack because that's what I use in my business, but if the guest is talking about Elixir or Ruby, I'm unlikely to learn anything useful since I don't use or plan to use those technologies.

nickjj 4y ago
Thanks Michael and congrats on all of the success with TinyPilot. It's nice to hear this from the perspective of someone who was on the show. I tried to make the story about going from development to production but it is for sure super focused on the technology choices that take you from A to B. There's the lessons learned which kind of apply to any tech stack but that's also near the end of every episode so you have to listen to the whole thing to get there. There's a number of little funny stories hidden away in some episodes. Like one guy was on vacation driving with his wife and ended up switching his web server from Apache to nginx while literally driving as a passenger. Deployment is a tricky topic to "promote" because in my opinion deploying a Flask app is almost no different than Rails. If they both have a web + worker + db + cache component, it's basically the same pieces (especially if you're using Docker). The hosting provider choice, monitoring, logging, CI / CD workflows, etc. is all the same. When I went into making this show I came at it from the perspective that even if you didn't use Ruby you could still take away a few nuggets of info from a Rails episode since there's a lot of overlap but I'm beginning to realize that's not how this works in real life. What I'm thinking now is maybe exactly what you said around being interested in Flask. You care about deploying a Flask app, not deploying in general. You are right though, I have no problem sitting down and listening to a 5 hour conversation with John Carmack and Lex because I'm interested in hearing John's stories. I'm not there to learn the gory details about z-fail stencil shadows. I care about why he ended up inventing that and how it helped him build a cool looking game. When looking at things from that angle, that changes everything. Running in Production is like "90% technical details / 10% story" but "80% stories / 20% technical details" is a more enjoyable listen for a podcast. If this were a technical video course that would be much different, but it's not. It's a podcast. Now to be fair, I did try the best I could to avoid going too deep into the technical details about a specific topic because I know most folks will doze off or lose interest because it's not relatable but still, bouncing around a bunch of technical topics at a surface level is still very tech heavy.

nickjj 4y ago

Thanks Michael and congrats on all of the success with TinyPilot. It's nice to hear this from the perspective of someone who was on the show. I tried to make the story about going from development to production but it is for sure super focused on the technology choices that take you from A to B. There's the lessons learned which kind of apply to any tech stack but that's also near the end of every episode so you have to listen to the whole thing to get there. There's a number of little funny stories hidden away in some episodes. Like one guy was on vacation driving with his wife and ended up switching his web server from Apache to nginx while literally driving as a passenger. Deployment is a tricky topic to "promote" because in my opinion deploying a Flask app is almost no different than Rails. If they both have a web + worker + db + cache component, it's basically the same pieces (especially if you're using Docker). The hosting provider choice, monitoring, logging, CI / CD workflows, etc. is all the same. When I went into making this show I came at it from the perspective that even if you didn't use Ruby you could still take away a few nuggets of info from a Rails episode since there's a lot of overlap but I'm beginning to realize that's not how this works in real life. What I'm thinking now is maybe exactly what you said around being interested in Flask. You care about deploying a Flask app, not deploying in general. You are right though, I have no problem sitting down and listening to a 5 hour conversation with John Carmack and Lex because I'm interested in hearing John's stories. I'm not there to learn the gory details about z-fail stencil shadows. I care about why he ended up inventing that and how it helped him build a cool looking game. When looking at things from that angle, that changes everything. Running in Production is like "90% technical details / 10% story" but "80% stories / 20% technical details" is a more enjoyable listen for a podcast. If this were a technical video course that would be much different, but it's not. It's a podcast. Now to be fair, I did try the best I could to avoid going too deep into the technical details about a specific topic because I know most folks will doze off or lose interest because it's not relatable but still, bouncing around a bunch of technical topics at a surface level is still very tech heavy.