Iteration (AKA the shortest episode ever!)

February 07, 2020

Joshua and Kel discuss some changes to the podcast and how iteration plays into all things, development and otherwise.

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

• 00:00 Joshua

  Hey folks, welcome to Getting Apps done. A mostly nontechnical podcast about building software. I'm your host Joshua.

• 00:11 Kel

  And I'm your cohost Kel.

• 00:13 New Speaker

  And today we are going to change things up a little bit. We have been discussing and iterating our concepts around the podcast because as we've said before, iteration is a very important thing. It's very good to test out your theories, to try different things, to work around different things and approach things from a different angle. And that's what we wanted to do. We have decided that we're going to make the podcast shorter for a couple of different reasons.

• 00:38 Joshua

  One, we think a lot of people don't have enough time to listen to us ramble on for 20-30 minutes about whatever the hell we want to talk about. And that's perfectly valid.

• 00:47 Joshua

  Two, Obviously we've got our own time concerns as well. We do have other things going on and sometimes it's difficult to fit in everything that we need to fit in and actually produce the podcast we want to produce. So by shortening it means we can put more attention into the few minutes that we're talking.

• 01:03 Joshua

  The other thing is just we think that it can open up more topics for us because it's sometimes very difficult to talk about a particular subject for 20-30 minutes. But that doesn't mean that it's not an important topic. Small things are important too. And we'd talk about this all the time. It's not always those big things that everybody thinks about, like syntax and frameworks and things like that that are the focus of software development. But it's a lot of small things put together that make a really great developer. And we think that's true about topics as well.

• 01:31 Kel

  You say it's really difficult to talk about a topic for a 20 minutes, but really that's the easy part. It's the part where we don't repeat ourselves over and over and over and over again. But yeah, we would like to, so part of this is to talk about new things and things that weren't interestingly enough. Like they weren't like a full episode content. You know, maybe we were responding to something we saw on Twitter, whatever, that would only be five to 10 minutes. And so that's kind of where we're looking at and this opens up some new options and some new possibilities for us. And today's episode is on iterating on those things. So,

• 02:03 Joshua

  Yup, and we've talked about iteration a few times in the past, but really what we're talking about is just this concept of doing something and agile is built around this entire concept. You do something small, a small chunk of it, test it out and see how it goes, and then you change a little bit and you test it out, see how it goes. So we may be back in a few weeks saying, okay, we're going for two hour long episodes now because that wasn't working, but that was boring. But that's okay. Sometimes you do have to do something that goes wrong to know how to iterate to get something that goes right.

• 02:38 Kel

  You know, it goes great into our episodes on failure. So yeah, like with agile especially, it's not just the software or the project you're working on, but the process itself is also Iterable like this is a really key point that what you're doing today might not actually work tomorrow because you have new team members or the situations of those teams might change and like that's why it's called agile because you are agile and you can quickly change things and so that's what we're attempting to do.

• 03:05 Joshua

  Absolutely. Alright. I will put some transcripts up gettingappsdone.com. If you'd like to talk about iteration, or you're not really clear on what it is because it's a complex subject and we have done this in a very brief amount of time, pop onto our Slack channel at gettingappsdone.com/slack we'd love to talk with you and the rest of the community about that and share ideas and iterate on some ideas with you.

• 03:27 Kel

  And thank you for listening to our shortest episode ever!

• 03:29 Joshua

  I think yes, it probably does qualify for our shortest. Most of them probably won't be quite this short, but we're trying something new, so bear with us. We'll see you next week.

• 03:39 Kel

  Cheers.