Herding Code podcast update: 3 years, 115 episodes and 25TB of traffic later...
Back in May 2008, K. Scott Allen accidentally called my on Skype, and we joked that we should start a podcast. And then we did - we roped in Kevin Dente and Scott Koon since the four of us tended to argue quite a bit on Twitter anyways - and kind of figured it out as we went along. Along the way, we've recorded 115 episodes (pretty much an entire week of audio), discussed the comings and goings of myriad technologies, and had the opportunity to talk to some incredible guests.
If you're not currently listening or subscribing, you can find shows and show notes here, and subscribe here.
Bandwidth
Initially, I tried to host the audio on SkyDrive, quickly found out that SkyDrive files didn't send correct media headers so it wouldn't work with FeedBurner. At Scott Koon's recommendation, I set up a simple WordPress blog at Site5 which has turned out to be a great decision. They've had great uptime and phenomenal prices. We pay about $7/month for an unlimited storage and bandwidth, and they've delivered that with great uptime as well. Here's a look at the download bandwidth per-year:
| Year | Bandwidth (GB) |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 1830.36 |
| 2009 | 6134.74 |
| 2010 | 10705.6 |
| 2011 (to date) | 6678.78 |
| Total | 25349.48 |
Popular shows
Here's a look at our top 25 shows of all time - the listener count is actually a bit higher since we also distribute via BitTorrent, but the order is pretty accurate. Remember that some of these shows have had 3 years to build up a count, so it's pretty cool to see two of the last 15 (102 and 106) already showing on this list:
| Rank | Show Title | Downloads |
| 1 | HerdingCode 0063 Victory in Software Development | 29762 |
| 2 | HerdingCode 0010 LINQ | 15410 |
| 3 | HerdingCode 0011 Glenn Block Part 1 | 13521 |
| 4 | HerdingCode 0005 Firefox 3 Released | 13084 |
| 5 | HerdingCode 0049 Search with Bing and Wolfram Alfa | 12976 |
| 6 | HerdingCode 0012 Glenn Block Part 2 | 12307 |
| 7 | HerdingCode 0064 Phil Haack on MVC 2 | 12078 |
| 8 | HerdingCode 0035 Fun at work | 11476 |
| 9 | HerdingCode 0051 Greg Young on Our Grand Failure | 10510 |
| 10 | HerdingCode 0046 Mistakes and News Recap | 10481 |
| 11 | HerdingCode 0037 Jon Udell | 10014 |
| 12 | HerdingCode 0047 Joe Brinkman on Webforms vs MVC | 9869 |
| 13 | HerdingCode 0048 Dustin Campbell on Visual Studio 2010 | 9751 |
| 14 | HerdingCode 0102 Tim Caswell on Node js | 9664 |
| 15 | HerdingCode 0027 What every web developer sh... | 9659 |
| 16 | HerdingCode 0009 Rob Conery on SubSonic, MVC Storefont, and the Silverlight Ninja Squad | 9402 |
| 17 | HerdingCode 0058 Presentation Patterns with Jeremy Miller, Ward Bell, Rob Eisenberg and Glenn Block | 9389 |
| 18 | HerdingCode 0050 Damien Guard on LINQ to SQL, Entity Framework, and Fontography | 9316 |
| 19 | HerdingCode 0013 Back To Basics (but which ones?) | 9266 |
| 20 | HerdingCode 0038 NHibernate Performance with David Penton, and Ben Scheirman | 9255 |
| 21 | HerdingCode 0087 Jeff Atwood on Area 51 and Stack Overflow | 9213 |
| 22 | HerdingCode 0032 Windows 7 First Impressions | 9118 |
| 23 | HerdingCode 0059 Web Standards with Milan Negovan | 9001 |
| 24 | HerdingCode 0106 Mark Rendle on Simple Data | 8980 |
| 25 | HerdingCode 0015 Chris Tavares | 8975 |
Our top show of all time is Victory in Software Development, talking about an interesting post K Scott had written. I think it was a really interesting discussion, but it's not clear how that show got so many listens. Stats don't really show anything obvious. Strange.
The full archive is here. For nostalgia's sake, you might want to check out our Hello World first show.
Show Topics and Guests
The one rule we've tried to stick to is avoiding the standard .NET podcast circuit. There are some great, well produced, very popular podcasts out there that cover the standard fare pretty well, and we thought it was important to try to surface topics and guests who are a bit below the radar, especially for the majority of our listenership with a mostly Microsoft development background. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and we try not to duplicate what any of the others are covering.
A lot of our show topic and guest ideas have come from guest recommendations, so I recently set up the Herding Code Guest Suggestion form to make it easier to submit ideas. Got any?
Show Notes
The show notes and links take a lot of time. We've had a good amount of volunteer help on these from Ben Griswold over the years, as he has time available. He really stepped up the quality there - pretty much any topic mentioned during a show is listed in the show notes with links provided. Thanks!
Podcast Announcement Posts
Before we set up a site for the podcast, I used to post the episodes here. When I set up the separate site, I thought it was important to keep this blog and the podcast separate. In retrospect, that doesn't make any sense. I'm going to try to at least announce each show here, but also put in some sample code and additional info that I found interesting while editing and compiling notes.