Sharpen the Saw with a Podcast

Podcasts are a great way to Sharpen the Saw. You can learn a wealth of knowledge from them on numerous topics. The beauty of the podcast is that you can multi-thread your life with them. You can listen to a podcast whilst doing something else so you do not have to specifically set time aside for it. I generally listen to podcasts when I am commuting to and from work and in the morning whilst getting ready for work. Previously this was time when I would listen to the radio but now I have turned it into a lucrative learning opportunity. Look at it this way, each day I roughly squeeze in an hour and a half of podcast listening-- that's 7.5 hours a week or 390 hours a year. Considering the average podcast is an hour long, that's 390 podcasts a year I am listening to! That is not bad going for doing very little more than I would usually do on a day to day basis.

Below is a very brief summary of the podcasts I am currently listening to:

• .NET Rocks - This is the first podcast I started listening to. I am quite a religious listener and try to listen to each episode as it's a great way to broaden your technological awareness in general.
• Hansleminutes - Brought to you by the legendary Scott Hansleman. Each episode is full of his usual humor making them a highly enjoyable listening experience.
• Herding Code - Great line up of host presenters. I generally cherry pick these as they can have similar material and guests to .NET Rocks.
• Hello World - There is lots of inspiration and advice to be gleaned from listening to the stories of how influential developers started and progressed their careers. You can read more about this podcast in my blog post here().
• Adventures in Angular - I have started listening to this to help level up my AngularJS skills. Each show is about half an hour long so you can consume lots of these very fast. It also features one my favorite developers on the panel, John Papa, so it gets a big thumbs up from me.
• JavaScript Jabber - I have also started to listen to this to help broaden my Javascript knowledge. It's a great way to learn about potentially useful Javascript frameworks (if you do not know they exist, how can you consider using them to solve a problem?) and the world of Javascript in general.
• EntreProgrammers - This is a great podcast where programmers come entrepreneurs discuss there weekly activities. It's not your standard podcast setup as it's more a recording of them chatting about their entrepreneur activities but it's a great way to get an insight in the entrepreneurial world from a developers perspective. Highly recommended.

There are lots of podcasts freely available on a vast variety of topics and I am barely scratching the surface with the selection I have listed above.

Grab yourself some podcasts, start multi-threading your life and sharpen that saw.