This is a special episode that we released earlier in the year to those that subscribe to our newsletter. To get more episodes like this sign up to our newsletter! Thanks for a fantastic 2015. Happy New Year!
Way before we became podcasters we were podcast listeners. In our first bonus episode, what we’ll be calling our Extra episodes, Cecil and Richie go over their top three podcasts and throw in a few more for good measure. You can listen to the episode or you can just review their picks below. Enjoy.

Cecil’s Top Picks

This_Developers_Life_cover170x170 This Developer’s Life – I love this show because it’s so introspective for me. The topics they cover such as learning, and even the most recent episode, they talk about faith. They’ve also covered motivation, pressure and criticism. Those topics for me, hit so close to home. I’ll go back two or three seasons and I just re-listen to the old episodes over and over again because I just love them that much.
Get Up and Code – So I’m not a super-athlete like John is really or anything like that but I like working out. It’s another dimension of me that I do when I’m not writing code or doing something involving technology. I like swimming. I like going to the gym. This podcast actually discusses a lot of little techniques, discussion nutrition, different types of workout techniques, and even about the technology behind it and different apps that you can use to help supplement your workouts.
The Freelancers Show – I really like this show because they discuss a lot of the things you wouldn’t know about freelancing. This show really goes into the different things a freelancer needs to do such as budgeting, how to plan out your projects, how do you bring on new people, how you quote estimates, and acquire new clients. They give really good advice. I love the show and I highly recommended it.

Richie’s Top Picks

Rachel and Miles Xplain the X-Men – Rachel and Miles have endeavored to go over the entire forty year history of X-Men and explain every issue. This show is funny and honest look at the X-Men comic series from two of it’s biggest fans. It’s so enjoyable to hear people talk about their passions and for these two, it’s the X-Men. The unique way they explain the crazy, somewhat nonsensical history of the X-Men is truly amazing. I love it. You need to check it out.
WDW Radio – I’ve listened to this show almost from its inception. I enjoy this show because as a kid I really loved Disney. Walt Disney World meant so much to me growing up. So much so that when I was in college, I interned there for two summers. Lou Mongello does such a great job of showing what’s going on in the parks and interviews interesting guests. One would think, “how long can one person talk about for Disney World?” Well for Lou, it’s over nine years. The show has won numerous podcast awards and has some of the highest production values in any podcast.
.NET Rocks – I’ve been listening to this .Net Rocks from the beginning. Back in the day when .NET just came out, there was no content for .NET except for the documentation but we did have .NET Rocks. Even if you listen to those early episodes they’re still relevant. From a technical perspective, I don’t think you get any better than in Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell they both really know their stuff. But my favorite episodes are the Geek Out episodes. They are just straight wonderful. If you’re a .NET developer and not listening to .NET Rocks, you really should be.

Cecil’s Honorable Mentions

The Web Platform Podcast – I’m a big web guy. I love talking APIs, HTTP, and JavaScript Frameworks. This show talks to a bunch of the people that are in the web space. They’ve talked to the Angular team,  the HTTP2 team, and the people that are creating browsers and web servers. Most of the technology they talk about is upcoming stuff and things we should be paying attention to.
The Changelog – I really like The Changelog because they talk about stuff that I have no idea about. They discuss Ruby, PHP, Go, concurrent systems, and all this other stuff that I typically don’t touch in a regular day. So for me, it’s good to step out of my comfort zone and expierence something that I’m not completely familiar with and really try and see where the other side of the development world is going.

Richie’s Honorable Mentions

Freakonomics Radio – I think what makes Freakonomics Radio a really great show is that they really get into the kind of the ‘why’ certain things work in the world. They obviously have a more of a business-y, economic way of looking at things, but they always make it interesting. It always makes you step away and think,”Wow. I didn’t think of it that way.” That’s why I really love Freakonomics Radio.
Hanselminutes – I love the way Scott Hanselman interviews. He gets down to the nitty-gritty of things and always has different and unique guests on the show. It’s not what you expect from a technology podcast. Hanselminutes is definitely one of those unique shows you should check out.
Nerdist – Nerdist interviews a ton of different celebrities and people in the entertainment industry. Chris Hardwick is really, really good at interviewing people and he just has a conversation and things just really flow. It’s really funny. It’s not safe for work. Doesn’t mean you can’t listen to it at work but just have headphones on. It’s really one of those shows that I really enjoy to pick up.

Special Mention

Serial – Serial is amazing.  Serial is a long-form reporting that investigates a murder of a girl. Throughout the show, they take different aspects of the case and you’ll constantly going back and forth saying, “He did it. He didn’t do it. He didn’t do it. He did do it.” It’s a really great mystery.

Cecil asks Joel about the beginnings of ONETUG (Orlando .NET User Group). Joel tells us how the group got started with his curiosity in the .NET Framework and how the community stepped up to help out. Cecil asks how was Joel able to rally the community prior to the advent of popular social networks. Joel talks about he leveraged contacts, mailing lists, UCF and more to grow the group.

Joel then goes in the how being involved has helped his career and made him much more knowledgeable about aspects of .NET. Cecil asks Joel if his networking helped in guiding him to become an author. Joel tells us about how his mentor, Ray West, got him into writing.

Cecil asks what technology has got Joel exited right now. We get into a discussion about the Maker movement and IoT. We then get into a discussion on fitness as Joel talks to us about boxing and breaking through mental barriers. Joel makes sure to warn his kids to be prepared for the zombie apocalypse. We then get into a discussion about working remote for Xamarin.

Links

Bio

Joel_Martinez_BioSoftware Engineer at Xamarin. He is the founder of the Orlando .NET User Group, and an author of several books. Joel is also a functional programming enthusiast. Joel is excited about  data science, machine learning, the simplification of hardware, hacking, and connectivity. More on Twitter @joelmartinez and his blog at codecube.net.

Cecil and David talk about the amount of information on the internet and how we need to find better ways to filter information. David discusses how he feels how some social apps are creating a generation of vanity. The panel discusses the difficulty of remote work and the need for personal human interaction. Richie asks David how was the transition from developer to manager. Richie shares how he went from developer to manager then from manager to developer again. David shares how being a manager is emotional work and it’s something you can’t just leave at work. David shares how he’s taken up golf and explains his love of the movie going experience.

Bio

David_Haney_BioDavid Haney is the Core team Engineering Manager at Stack Overflow. He practices servant leadership by solving problems and improving processes. Previously he was a lead developer on Fanatics’ e-commerce platform which hosts over 10,000 websites including the NFLShop – The Official Online Shop of the NFL and NBAStore.com – The Official NBA Store. David is the creator of Dache, an open source distributed caching framework. His spare time is spent brewing and drinking beer, playing video games, and watching movies at old-school one-screen theatres with his wife.