A Year of Coding QA - Matthew M. Osborn

This is one of those posts where I don’t talk about coding, sorry, but it’s still about technology so hopefully I don’t scare you guys off.</span> So what is this I want to talk about, well my podcast of course, Coding QA.

Somewhere February last year (2009) I got the idea that I wanted to host my own podcast. I had been listening to various podcasts for awhile and thought it would be fun to host my own. I spent a few weeks bounce ideas around in head about what I wanted my podcast to be about. After awhile I settled on testing. Next, I went looking for a co-host as I figure there was just no way I could be that entertaining by myself. I found that co-host in the office right across the hall, Federico Silva Armas. To make a long story short on March 11th of 2009 Federico and myself published the first episode of our podcast, Coding QA. Okay to be fair it was actually our second episode but we were so embarrassed about the first one we didn’t release it (maybe one day). As a side note the name is a play on words. Both Federico and I believe that testers should be coders too, so we are Coding QA, get it? Yea bad but give me a break you come up with a podcast and find a funny name and then you can criticize.

After a few episodes I was starting to get concerned about the technology we were using to record and host the podcast. I figured if I was going to be in this for the long haul I should upgrade. For the first few episodes we were using simple gaming headsets and recording individual tracks on separate machines. There was a couple of problems with this. One, the audio quality was just not up to par, I mean what can you expect from a $10 microphone? Two, the different machines would record at slightly different speeds so after about 15 minutes the audio would be one to two seconds out of sync. So I did a little research and and upgraded to a couple of nice microphones and a proper hardware mixer. Here is what I ended up getting

Here are some “glamour” shots of the equipment and “studio” I know you guys just ready my blog for the pictures:

The Next problem was bandwidth, previously I was hosting the files on my Windows Sky Drive and simply linking to them from an embedded player in a blog post. The podcast had no official site or way to subscribe to it other that the podcast tag RSS feed on the blog. So I started doing more research and found a company called Liberated Syndication. They specialize in hosting startup podcasts. We got a decent amount of bandwidth and storage along with a blog engine geared towards podcasts. Before you ask yes it is a PHP site, I do see the irony, but I am always one to choose the best service and not blindly choose something because “X” company produces it. However, I do have to say that since Coding QA has gotten a lot more popular we are considering moving to Amazon S3 as it is far more cost effective for the amount of bandwidth we are going through each month (30MB an episode and an average of 3000 downloads each month is a lot of bandwidth).

So now that I have claimed that Coding QA is popular I guess I have to back it up with some numbers. Currently we have 39 episodes and have been “on air” for over a year now. We have had over 33,000 total downloads, now let me tell you I have no idea how Federico and I have fooled people into downloading us that many times. I mean okay I give you that maybe half of those are from my mom but still, WOW. Below is a graph of our monthly download totals from day one to today. (The dip in December is because we only had one new episode due to the holidays, Microsoft shuts down in December :) )

Monthly Downloads

Okay, so what have I learned over the last year? First rule of podcasting is if you can get it in one take your life is far better off! Trust me, I spent countless hours inside of audacity trying to splice episodes together and its a pain! I have found that Coding QA functions as a release for both Federico and I. Almost every episode is based on something we want to bitch about from our week and it feels good to rant sometimes. Another lesson is that audio quality is important if people are bothered by pops or breath noises they just simply wont listen why would they? Lastly is that the episodes that have been most popular are the episodes that Federico and I have fun on, so have fun with it. It’s my podcast and I’ll laugh if I want to.

So if you haven’t listened to an episode yet I invite you to give it a try. I promise Coding QA isn’t a gateway podcast :) Also, and this is a pure plug, if you do listen to the podcast and like it please go to our site and give the ad on the side a click. They help to cover some of the cost of running the podcast, which is out of our pockets not Microsoft.