It started with a simple statement, “We should record this.” I made that statement said during a dotNet Miami after party. The after party always has interesting discussions about programming, projects, and life. The next month I made a recording of the dotNet Miami after party hoping I could get some usable audio. What I got was interesting but not interesting enough to publish and the audio quality was poor. I spent the next few months mulling the idea of a dotNet Miami podcast. I started talking to Cecil Phillip about it and we realized that having a dotNet Miami podcast, although cool, wouldn’t be compelling.
Richie takes a selfie with Lou at Podcast Florida.
I was still enamored with the idea of starting a podcast and so was Cecil, so we made a day trip to Orlando in December to attend the Podcast Florida conference. The conference was amazing. We met some fantastic people that make phenomenal podcasts. I was able to Meet Lou Mongello, host of WDW Radio, a podcast I’ve been listening to for years. We also met Jared Easley, host of the Starve The Doubts, a great dude that gave us some awesome encouragement. We also met Steve Cherubino, who’s Udemy course was a great help in understanding how to get a podcast up and running. It was a long day but Cecil and I got a lot out of Podcast Florida. We came up with a name, Away From The Keyboard (I registered the domain name in the middle of one of the sessions) and we got a better idea of what we needed to do to execute a podcast technically. We also came up with a concept: “a podcast for technical people that focused on the human side of technology”. Lastly, we got a ton of encouragement and a feeling that “we can do this”.
Two months later we found ourselves at the South Florida Code Camp in the speaker room with a bunch of audio equipment and a slate full of guests. We were able interview five very talented technologists and had some great conversations. It was great to be able to finally sit down and record. A month later we recorded another couple of episodes at the Orlando Code Camp and we set a deadline of April 7th to launch the podcast. We still had two Trello boards worth of tasks to do, the biggest task was to create the Away From The Keyboard website. We’ll, we missed the April 7th date but we were able to unveil the website a week later on April 14th.
It was a long road, taking an idea from concept to reality, but pushing our first episode earlier this week felt so good. We’ve have a bunch of interviews recorded and we have a bunch more planned. We hope you enjoy the stories that the guests going to tell. We hope that these stories entertain, enlighten and inspire you to do great things.