No Episode This Month

Hey, it’s Adam. Quick update for September 2025. I do not have a full episode ready today. I’ve been making this podcast for years now, and I always at least get out a monthly episode, but I don’t have one. And instead of silence, I wanted to share just a couple reflections on making this podcast: where it’s at, what’s next, why I keep going, why it’s hard.

Can One Episode a Month Be Enough?

My first reflection is about consistency. Consistency versus reality. For me, it feels like this one episode a month is a minimum, right? Anything less, and it doesn’t really feel like a podcast. There’s so much that I’m not doing right. I— I could be doing more frequent episodes. I probably should be doing video.

I should probably have some sort of clips that I share online. I am not keeping my newsletter up to date. There’s a well-worn growth playbook and I just haven’t been keeping up with it.

I have amazing Patreon supporters who should probably getting more custom and bonus content, but it’s hard for me to keep up sometimes. But I had my bar one episode a month and— and breaking that hurts. Consistency is hard because I’m making each episode from scratch each month. And also, you know, I like to experiment.

I’ve done some recent audio essays. I’ve done some smaller stories. I’ve done some research-based stories. And that variation excites me, keeps me interested and engaged in putting out this content. But it does work against consistency. But don’t worry, I have two episodes coming. One is a story about software injustice, someone harmed by a system, by the code behind it.

It’s great storytelling experience. I think, you know, I still have a lot to do on it. The other one is an interview with Matt Godbold. I talked to him five years ago and he’s back again, and it’s just exciting to hear from Matt.

I’m disappointed that neither of these episodes will be out, but I’m choosing quality over the schedule.

Inconsistency versus reality. Reality has won. But if I’m not able to get an episode out, I’ll try to put out a note like this in the future.

Racing Ira Glass to the Deadline

Which brings me to my second point about my struggles, the creative cycle.

There’s this graphic novel. It called Radio— an illustrated Guide. It’s pretty old and it’s about Ira Glass and how he makes this American life. And it has this panel in it where he is like running with a tape to push into a player to like broadcast live on the radio.

Because that is the experience of making this American life, like, every week they are down to the wire to get something out.

And I feel like this podcast is like that as well. After all these years, it’s still a race every month to the deadline. And this creates kind of a— a sign wave effect, right? There is the high points of finding a guest with a promising story and doing sort of a pre-interview and talking to them. But there can be like a slog of doing research and doing scheduling, and make sure you get things in time so that you’ll have time to edit the episode.

And there’s the peak of getting to interview them and getting excited about their story and getting to connect. And then the trough of editing that takes so much time and how the episode won’t seem that great and how it just takes hours to shape it and clean the audio and make the edits sound hopefully all right.

And then, yeah, setting up the website and shipping the episode and all that— it’s not fun for me. But then the high point is getting the episode out, getting listener feedback, hearing people say that they listened to the episode and— and it affected them. It used to be I would get a lot of attention on Twitter and on Reddit for episodes.

That happens less now. I mean, Twitter is different than it used to be. Most feedback comes with people just sending emails or connecting with me on Slack, but I’m grateful for it all. That is a big deal, even if I sometimes forget to get back to people. Recently, Ron listener told me that he and his son listened to the latest episode while he was driving him back to college for his second, his sophomore year in computer engineering, which is wild.

That’s an important trip— important father and son trip in their in their lives. And I’m excited and shocked, that my voice was riding along with them. That’s humbling. But yeah, those messages mean a lot to me, and that’s one of the high points in this sine wave up and down, feeling positive or negative about the podcast.

And I have been hunting for sustainability wins, like ways to make it lower effort to do the episodes, and that may improve some things. But beyond this, like sine wave, uh, each month of getting the episodes done, there’s also just the sine wave up and down of life. The seasons, right? I am a human. I— I have a job, I have a wife, I have other hobbies.

Sometimes I have the energy to go deep and— and sometimes I don’t. And I think that the podcast will end at some point.

I won’t stop creating. I— I like to create things, but I mean, it seems unlikely the show will last forever. But for now, I’m here. I’m working hard at it. I’m doing the work.

Chasing Depth, Not Downloads

Which brings me to 0.3: depth over scale. When I started doing the podcast. You know, in some ways I hope that nobody listened to it because, you know, I didn’t think it was very good, but in other ways I wanted to be the most important person in software development ever. Right? I wanted to be this huge trendsetter and influencer with great— with a great big audience.

But what holds me now is depth, right? Is talking to somebody and really understanding their story and the specific moments in their life. I think that’s where my strength lies. I think there are bigger tech podcasts. There are bigger YouTubers.

I don’t know if I can compete with the large interviews that Lex Friedman shares, but I think I have my own strengths in the recent John Walker episode. I didn’t know his full story, but it unfolded a little bit in the pre-interview and then a lot while we talked and it was powerful for me. And I think about that all the time and I care about those details, right? I care about, you know, where were you sitting when the bug finally made sense?

You know, what did you do? Did you punch the air and say, like, found it? Yes. Did you wake up your wife in the middle of the night accidentally? I like that depth. I like to understand where people were at, and I think that’s impactful for listeners, hopefully, but I think it can also mean that there’s fewer listeners, but that’s okay. Right? I’m aiming for a deeper connection, even if it means fewer downloads.

There have been guests that have been unhappy with the final result of an episode because it shares too much, but that’s okay because I’m aiming for that deeper connection, even if it means fewer downloads. So that’s kind of my third reflection, which is that I will keep choosing that intimacy and depth even at the cost of reach, even if occasionally it means I don’t get an episode.

A Microphone That Changed a Career

So, yeah, there is a new episode coming, more than one, but it’ll be next month. Right? The podcast has been good to me. I’m on my way to Atlanta right now to give a talk about how AI affects cloud infrastructure and that path started here with me talking into a microphone, and now, you know, I create content for developers for a living, different types than what I do here, but I can do it because of this and because of you, I guess because people listened.

So thank you for the notes. Thank you for the feedback because people listen, because people gave me feedback. I kept doing it. I built up those skills and now I have a pretty interesting job. All thanks to that. If you’re a listener and things impacted you.

Yeah, feel free to share your thoughts online or, or send me an email. It does, uh, mean a lot to me, and I don’t always reply to everybody, which I feel bad about, but your messages keep this going. And especially thank you to the people who are supporting me on Patreon.

But yeah, two episodes are coming and when they land, tell me which one that you like and why. And stay tuned for new episodes. Uh, most of all though, thank you for your patience with my cadence and my constraints and the reality of my life. I’m still here, I’m still making this.

And until next time, thank you so much for listening.