A retrospective of the first 110 episodes of the TechZing tech startup podcast

This is a guest post by Gordon Oppenheimer who submitted these comments on the TechZing blog for episode 110.

In the past month and a half, I have listened to all 110 episodes [of TechZing]. Here are my thoughts:

The Show Name

In my opinion, you were committed to the name with the first link/mention pointing to TechZing. All the discussion about it got kinda old but in retrospect it is one of the aspects of the show I like the best. I got to listen in on your struggles about the name and your decision making process (more on that later).

Unusual Guests

It is a great idea, and I like the choice of guests. This is the “Zing” part of the show.

Straying off Tech Topics

You seem to have a good balance. The non-tech topics, for the most part, do interest me. More “Zing” parts.

Build vs Reuse

You most often talk about this with regard to frameworks. In different ways, you both advocate writing your own framework. You have both been coding for a long time and I think you forget what it is not to know all that you know. For me, I started using a framework (Codeigniter) about a year ago because the possibilities for coding were too vast and I felt lost. The framework gave me some structure that was built on what others had learned. I may not understand all the reasons it helps or hurts yet but at least it gives me a reasonable direction.

Justin and Jason Projects

This is the BEST part of the show. I get the sense that you feel a little guilty asking guests about your own projects. However, this is where I learn the most. The rest of the stuff on the Internet tries to distill everything down to THE answer. But as you have mentioned, there is no ONE answer. When you ask about your own projects or discuss them with each other, I get to listen in on the decision making process.

Show Suggestion

Get a panel of guests and use the whole show to discuss all aspects of a single project (yours or some other struggling startup). Discuss marketing, pricing, freeium vs trials, payments, technologies, A/B testing, revenues, costs, professional help (accounting, legal, business entities), etc… It would be like a case study.

Thanks for the show!

End of guest post. If you haven’t heard TechZing and you’re looking for a totally new type of tech podcast we invite you to check it out at http://techzinglive.com

How We Record TechZing

Hardware

We both have Macs (and did the same thing when we both had PC’s).

Jason’s mic (at the time of writing this is a standard Plantronics skype headset) Justin’s mic is a combination of Centric Mic Port Pro, Sure Headset Mic & Sony Headphones. The headphones were chosen because they are light and can be comfortably worn with the Sure headset. Jason will soon be switching to the same mic combo.

Software

During the shows we talk to each other using Skype. Justin records the audio using Audio Hijack Pro. As a redundant backup we also record the show using Call Recorder at the same time (on both sides).

Audio Hijack Pro is setup to record audio into two separate mono audio files. One file is a direct input of Justin’s mic recorded to raw aiff. The other file is a recording of skype’s input also recorded as raw aiff.

Editing & Processing

After the files are recorded both are processed via Levelator. Just drag and drop files onto it. Then two output files are created. Those files are imported into Mackie Tracktion 3 where the show is edited removing any drops or static. Another part of the editing is removing the cross talk so that it sounds like the conversation flows naturally.

When editing the show both tracks have the Mackie filter “Final Mix” on them and then the same filter is used again for the master output (so it’s used 3 times). It is used for split band compression and dynamic limiting. Also both tracks have dynamics processors on them to stop any clipping and also as a gate to only allow noise above n-DB (test for best results) to be heard (eliminates background noise during silence for either track).

The track is then rendered directly as mp3 with 128 mbps with normalize set to true.

Publishing

Then the artwork and id3 tags are added to the .mp3 using Jaikoz. Then the mp3 is uploaded to Soundcloud. Finally a post is added to techzinglive.com. techzinglive.com uses WordPress and a hacked version Burbery Podpress for podcast publishing. The hack is to enable soundcloud player to work on the website. There is also a cheeky URL 301 redirect from http://techzinglive.com/mp3/techzing-<SHOW#>.mp3 –> http://soundcloud/techzing/techzing-<SHOW#>/download/ to enable us to abstract file location.

82: TZ Interview – Patrick Foley

Justin and Jason interview guest Patrick Foley, host of the Startup Success Podcast, about his background as a software developer and his love of startups, why and how he got started as a podcaster, his role as a Microsoft ISV Architect Evangelist, Jason Cohen’s new startup WP Engine, the benefits of Azure as a scalable web platform and the power of the story in conveying ideas and understanding.

81: TZ Panel – Pete Michaud & Rob Walling

Justin and Jason host return guests and show favorites Pete Michaud and Rob Walling for an experimental panel episode. Some of the topics discussed include scaling via automation, finding and managing freelancers, building a content business vs a software business, Pete’s Goal Mapping web app, the obsession of a new project (The Madness), the relative strengths of blogging and podcasting, the format of Rob’s podcast Startups for the Rest of Us and the value of growing an audience.

80: TZ Discussion – Get That Monkey!

Justin and Jason discuss the successful start of the donation drive, the show’s grand patron Ben Boyter and executive producer Felix Leong, Rob Walling and the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast, why Justin moved Pluggio from Rackspace’s Cloudsites service to a VPS, password hashing and rainbow table attacks, a password strength meter in Javascript, a PHP password hashing framework, developing browser extensions and bookmarklets, the Startup Toolkit, how champions push past the pain, avoiding toxic relationships, the new TechStars book Do More Faster, diffing startup advice and Jason’s idea for doing a startup advice cage match series, TwitterCounter and the growth rate of Justin’s Twitter following, why Jason think’s PHP is to Ruby as SF is to LA and some startup naming suggestions.