Podcasting Business
Have tech podcasts become, or maybe they've always been and I'm just now noticing, yet another advertising channel?
I'm not talking about the ads that are read before, during, and after the show, but the podcast itself. Listened to several technical podcasts lately and it's mainly an interview for the guest to speak about their product but there are no real counter arguments. No true discussion about some of the product’s shortcomings. A very generic and clear-cut Q&A formula that most seem to follow. Interviewing is an art-form and not everyone has learned that art-form.
The host, with decent technical background and knowledge, skims the product site, but seldom have they actually used the product themselves or at least beta tested it to have a real discussion about the product itself. In that sense it just becomes yet another marketing/advertising channel. Not expecting the podcast host to bash someone's product and/or hard work, but have to be realistic about the shortcomings and push back a bit. However, it’s now a one-hour or so commercial disguised as an informative learning experience.
You, as a newly informed and trusting listener, then take the product for a test drive since it sounded like it would resolve this one problem that you haven't been able to figure out. Only to find out, it either doesn't really work as advertised and it introduces more problems, or solves the one issue, but brings with it a bunch of other issues that now require a new tool for you to solve.
And we're back to the podcast listening business.
The noise vortex is beyond control whereby it's drowning the signal. What’s unfortunate is the fact that those podcasts are masking themselves as a signal and now we have another layer to peel before we can get to the reality underneath.
More noise, more work on the individual to peel away that added layer, in pursuit of zero layers.
AI Homework
With all the hype surrounding ChatGPT, figure it’s good to keep things in perspective and not be completely taken by all the hype.
Postgres For Everything
In the last and first issue, I had a rant about complexity and this week, I came across this very brief post with several useful links about how you can leverage the use of Postgres for a lot of tasks in order to reduce complexity. At times, we tend to over-engineer our architecture and forget the notion that part of the job is to manage complexity and this is a reminder of that idea.
Think Like A Git
No matter how comfortable you are with git, it’s always helpful to go through a refresher and brush up on some of your knowledge. I believe this should be helpful to you as it has been for me.
Tooling
If you’re in need of a free universal database tool, then DBeaver is worth a try. Not gonna be a podcast host and tell you how awesome it this as I only took it for a brief test-run. It appeared to be fairly useful at first glance. Not sure about all the bells and whistles as my day-to-day doesn’t require me to use that tool and when I need to do something exploratory with DB’s, I have been provided a license for JetBrains Datagrip.