About Dev Shows

I realize this almost certainly puts me in the minority, but I listen to podcasts in a browser rather than an app. It’s one fewer thing to manage, and I have a browser open all the time anyway. Plus I don’t listen to podcasts while on the go.

Having accumulated a list of tech podcasts I’d frequent, Dev Shows seemed like the perfect excuse to build something fun while learning a bit along the way. And maybe someone else would also find it useful, even if only as a source for discovering a show before listening to it in their preferred app.

Featured shows

Currently, I don’t aim to make Dev Shows a comprehensive source of every software and web development podcast that is—or once was—active. That type of resource does exist for those who are interested, but I personally find they can be hard to weed through.

Instead, I wanted something that:

regularly has fresh, interesting content (that’s subjective, obviously);
skews toward, but isn’t solely about, the front end and Jamstack;
and doesn’t contain a lot of old, discontinued shows.

This may change over time, but it’s my current thinking anyway.

Having trouble with audio playback?

If an episode isn’t playing, it may be due to an extension you have installed in your browser. For instance, I’ve noticed that Privacy Badger blocks MP3s hosted on Simplecast, and that uBlock Origin may block some others. In either case, it could result in an error like this showing in the browser console:

NotSupportedError: The media resource indicated by the src attribute or assigned media provider object was not suitable.

If you run into this, please try disabling your extension for Dev Shows, and if the trouble persists, please check any restrictive browser settings you may have set. If neither does the trick, feel free to get in touch, and I’ll try to figure out the source of the issue.

Analytics

Dev Shows uses Plausible Analytics, an open-source solution that allows me to gather basic usage information (such as browsers, OSes, the amount of traffic, and the like) with a light touch. Specifically, Plausible doesn’t set any cookies and is privacy-conscious; as such, I don’t have information about specific users, nor do I want it. Here’s an explanation of what data they collect and how they handle it.

Tech stack

For those who are interested, here’s a quick rundown of what I used to build Dev Shows:

GitHub Actions to automatically run the data collection multiple times a day and fire off the build process when at least one new episode comes through;
Node.js for collecting the RSS data for each show;
~~Gatsby (I wavered on this some)~~ Next.js for the site itself;
Plausible Analytics (as explained above);
and Netlify for hosting.

Thanks for stopping by

Happy listening!