The Podcast Made the Code Better

Decided to podcast everything — every project, every decision, every thing I'm building — which immediately created a problem, which is that my podcast setup was not something you could casually record into.

So I simplified the podcast. Which forced me to think about what I was actually trying to say. Which forced me to think about what I was actually building. Which, somehow, made the code simpler.

I did not see that coming.

There's probably a principle buried in here about how the act of explaining a thing to an audience — even a hypothetical one, even one that might be just you — creates pressure on the thing itself. If you can't explain what the code does in the time it takes to introduce a podcast episode, maybe the code is doing too much. Or doing it wrong. Or both.

Descript is what I'm using to prep it all. It treats audio like a text document — you edit the transcript, the audio follows. It's either the most obvious idea anyone's ever had or a genuinely weird inversion of how you'd expect a recording tool to work, and I can't decide which.

Either way, I now have simpler code and a podcast, which is two more things than I had before I tried to have either.