Platform

It's a new season, and a very different Platform. New listeners probably already know what this is, but for existing listeners, here’s what’s happening. In its early days Platform was pretty Podiant focuse; not overly technical, except for podcast-specific stuff. It migrated into Bitrate with Brendan Hutchins, which is currently on a break. I always meant to come back and do another episode, so now this show is all about building a product online, with a heavy focus on the technology and its challenges. In June, I started working on third-party integrations for Podiant. At the time my development environment involved runing a number of virtual machines via Vagrant and Ansible.. There were problems with Facebook and YouTube code, so I wanted to iterate on those without disturbing the main codebase. I needed a way for integrations to communicate with the main app, which meant each integration would need its own web server, and another virtua machine running all the inttegrations. I got to a point where I was ready to release but I’d made a fundamental change to Podiant’s codebase and wasn't confident launching without more testing, so I embarked on a massive project to write unit tests for the entire codebase. This is that story, and how I began tearing the product apart, using Docker to piece it back together.

Introducing our new show, Bitrate, hosted by Mark and Brendan. It will replace Platform's weekly show (this show will now go monthly or as-and-when we have exciting Podiant-related news to share), and you can find it at bitrate.podiant.co. What you';l hear is episode one of Bitrate, so be sure to subscribe to the new show so you don't miss any future episodes! Welcome to a new podcast about podcasting. Meet your hosts Brendan Hutchins and Mark Steadman. Mark is the creator and developer of Podiant, a podcast hosting service, and host of Beware of the Leopard and co-host of Thread. Brendan is the creator of Podcast Advocate Network and hosts Podcast Playlist and Nobody Asked for This. In our first episode we examine the latest Infinite Dial report, and Podchaser's collected insights on the future of the medium.

Mark and Brendan are retooling the show, and we'd love to know what you think!

Mark is back fresh from Berlin where ha attended a conference on the blockchain, and reveals the project he's been consulting on. In other news, Brendan finds out what the blockchain is.

Mark updates Brendan on some podTo news and shares a new Indiegogo find, and Brendan debutes a new segment in which he dispenses advice for people looking to use audio compression to improve the dynamics of their audio.