Hey Folks. I Need a Favor!

November 21, 2019

Episode

53

Today, Joshua makes a personal appeal to you. Getting Apps Done is just over a year old now and it’s been quite a ride. The community has always been a huge influence and resource for fuelling and driving the podcast and now Joshua has a couple specific requests from you, the listeners.

As always, our Slack channel is an important part of the podcast, but doubly so today!

Be sure to check out our new Slack community to meet others who are facing the same things you are and share your journeys!

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00:00 Joshua
Hey folks, welcome to Getting Apps Done. A mostly non-technical podcast about building software.
00:11 Joshua
I'm your host, Joshua, and I'm missing Kel today.... but on the show, instead of talking about syntax and frameworks and really technical things related to software development, a lot of what we like to talk about is more practical things. And today we were meant to be coming back to talk about scoping... and how to define a scope and make sure that you are honing in on a scope that you can actually estimate appropriately.
00:33 Joshua
But due to illnesses and other various things, we've had to slightly derail. So I wanted to do something a little bit different today instead of talking directly about software development today, I wanted to come from a slightly more personal side of things and I wanted to just talk about the podcast because we've been doing this for over a year now and some things have changed, some things are the same.
00:56 Joshua
And in particular, the way we have begun to view the podcast and what we're attempting to do has changed quite a bit over time. And one of the things that has changed is that, originally, we intended.... in fact, I'll be completely honest... we had intended this to be some content that we could generate for people who are in business to help them understand software development better. And what we found was actually we connected much better with the development community than we were in the business community.
01:23 Joshua
And I suppose that makes sense. We're developers, we like to talk about software development, we like to talk to other software developers and we have a slightly unique perspective on software development because of our concept of not everything being about the code, not everything being about syntax and patterns and all these things that are taught in boot camps and at college trying to teach people how to be developers. But it's actually a lot of other skills that are interrelated and help us become better at what we do.
01:48 Joshua
So I think our journey in the podcast has been a little bit winding, but also, now retrospectively looking at it, actually headed in a very distinct direction toward helping other developers with these insights that we've had on how to become much better software developers.
02:05 Joshua
Now I will be the first one to tell you I don't even class myself as a programmer. I have actually very little interest in programming in general outside of what it does. I love programming and I love software development because it solves problems in a particular way. My first entry into software development was actually just writing scripts because I had problems that I needed to solve and it was much easier to write a small script to do something than to do it 432 times myself. And my career has naturally evolved around that. A lot of what I like to do is actually making life simpler for people by using technology in ways that are contributing to that. Not purely for the sake of just building technology.
02:46 Joshua
And one of the things that I find with the podcast is sometimes we start to go down an avenue and I realize that I'm really not happy with the way it's going because, again, we are doing it for the sake of doing it and not actually looking at how to contribute and make people's lives better.
03:03 Joshua
So I wanted to take a step back today and just be completely honest with you and ask you for a couple personal favors.
03:12 Joshua
The first one is to tell us what you want to know because Kel and I can guess... We might have done a good job of guessing every once in a while, but I think realistically, and we have found this in the past, the best episodes we have ever done, or the ones we were proudest of are the ones where we asked you what you wanted to know and then answered your questions.
03:32 Joshua
So I really want to get back to that and I want to do more of that because obviously we do this because we want to help you. And if we're just talking about the stuff we want to talk about that may or may not help you, hopefully some things do anyway. But I think if we ask the question first, that means we're going to be much more likely to actually tell you something that's useful to you.
03:49 Joshua
So what I'm asking for is just for you to send me a tweet or to pop onto our Slack channel gettingappsdone.com/slack and tell us about the sort of things that are happening in your journey. Tell us your story. Tell us what's going on. Tell us what you're struggling with, what you would love to know. Some themes seem to be recurring, some are unique to a particular person, but they're all really great things to share and to understand better and to starts to answer together as a community.
04:18 Joshua
And that's really what we have found is the podcast was meant to be a source of content, but it has actually become a source of community for us. And I think that's really important because I have to admit I'm not particularly good at community. I believe it's important and I have always felt that way, but I have never been a... I'm a bit of a loner when it comes down to it. I tend to learn best when I just dig into things and get into it and move on and move forward. And that doesn't always mean going out and talking to a lot of other people. So sometimes I have struggled with that and actually doing the podcast has helped me participate in communities in ways that I never did before. So that's absolutely been great for me.
05:00 Joshua
But certainly at times I struggle and I know Kel does as well with whether or not what we're doing is useful at all. So the more feedback we can get from you as to whether it is useful in the first place is great, but also just even if it's not useful, what would be useful to you? Because that's what we want to do. We want to do something that's actually useful and providing value to you.
05:22 Joshua
The second big favor I would like to ask for is... we are a relatively small podcast. We have been doing this for a year but we haven't promoted it drastically because, again, we are admittedly kind of crap at doing that. Again, community is not necessarily a concept that is our first call to action and that's really what we're trying to build here is a community and we probably should have asked for help beforehand because we do have some devoted listeners. It's amazing to me still that there are people who have been listening to us for months and haven't gotten sick of us.
05:55 Joshua
I'm very grateful for them and they contributed in a lot of different ways by asking questions, by being on the show, by talking about the show to other people and that's really kind of where I'm going here is we would actually like some extra help from you to talk about us a little bit more and tell your friends about us, anybody who might be on their development journey anywhere along it who might benefit from what we're talking about. Let them know that we exist and that we're here and ask them what they want to know. Because again, back to that first point, we would love to be helping people and if the message we're talking about isn't helping people enough that you feel like you should be telling everybody about us, then please share with us what they need to know so we can make episodes specifically for people who you know, because in general, most developers run into the same sorts of problems throughout their career.
06:44 Joshua
There are various learning curves there, patterns that we have to figure out. There are things that we will run into that most other developers will run into at some other points in their career as well. So by sharing and helping one person in general, it's probably going to help a lot of other people as well. So we're looking for not just problems that you think are common problems, but problems that you face personally. Things that you aren't certain about or you could use a little bit of help understanding a little bit better or just want some advice or guidance on anything that would benefit you will probably benefit a lot of other people, so please share that, ask other people to share what they would like to know about or what they would like to talk about.
07:23 Joshua
In fact, if you know somebody who you think would be great on the show and could provide some valuable input, we'd love to hear about that as well. We would be thrilled for you to make an introduction.
07:32 Joshua
I think really what I'm trying to get at here is that, Kel and I have done this for a year now and we were looking back at things and realizing that sometimes I will be completely honest, we're phoning it in. And I don't want it to ever be that. When we started this, we were admittedly at first, not actually that keen on it, but once we started to talk to other developers, we got for the excited about it. We were thrilled to do our episodes every single week and we were constantly looking for new people.
07:58 Joshua
But as with anything, at some stage, most things plateau and it's hard to get over that hump and to move on to the next step. And that's really, I think where we are right now. We want to move on to that next step and we want you to be a part of that because you've always been a part of that and we want you to carry on being a big part of our podcast and our community and our journeys as well because personally we love having you around and we love talking to you and answering your questions and helping you as much as we can. So that's what we want to carry on doing.
08:31 Joshua
This is a short episode and there's not a whole bunch of really great valuable input in it. I apologize, but I think it's good to also just communicate with you and to talk to you directly about where we stand and what we're doing and what we want to do and how you can help as well. So that this can be something that's really for you and not just for and I to ramble on about and talk about whatever it is we've decided we want to chat about today.
08:55 Joshua
As always, I will put some transcripts up at gettingappsdone.com. Please be sure to check out my website at joshuagraham.info and Kel's website at piffner.com. And this whole episode is all about wanting to talk to you and to hear more from you and to have you share with us more. So please pop onto our Slack channel, at gettingappsdone.com/slack. We would love to chat with you. We would love to find out what you are doing, what your journey is, where your journey is, what you're struggling with, what you're curious about, what you're interested in, what you're excited about. So please pop in even if it's just to pop in and say, hi, this is what I'm doing, and then go away again. That's absolutely fine too, but we'd love to hear from you. We post every week on Thursdays, so we'll be back next week. Thanks for listening.