Category Archives: Podcast

Ten Episodes of Functional Geekery Live!

I just released the tenth episode of my podcast Functional Geekery.

I had been thinking about doing a podcast for a while, in return of all the information I get out of listening to other podcasts as part of my “Automobile University”, but could never come up with the niche. It occurred to me about 3am in the morning when I was taking a shift to get our little one, Ada (yes, after that Ada) who was about 5 months old at the time, back to sleep; the best ideas to come when you are least prepared to think about them.

I told my wife about my “crazy idea”, and explained to her what my goal was, and got her support for this experiment I was wanting to do, and told her I could do this in a very lean manner. I had a headset with microphone already, and told her it would just be a domain, hosting, and recording setup. My goal was to see if I couldn’t start a podcast for only about $100 investment with all things totaled. I would shoot to see if I could get at least 10 episodes done, to amortize the cost to be about $10 an episode.

I figured if nobody listened, but I could have 10 interesting conversations, the learning and exposure to ideas from those conversations would easily outweigh that initial investment, and the podcast would give me a good way to reach out to people I would love to talk to but probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity to talk to anytime soon.

I want to give a sincere heartfelt Thank You to all my guests so far, and everybody else I have reached out to so far to get initial conversations going about being a guest. Everyone has been much more receptive and open than I could have ever imagined. Everybody has been kind, and the worst I have gotten was some deferrals due to busy schedules, which I can appreciate. This is been even more honoring, as most of the people I have reached out to had likely never heard of me when I sent my emails to them asking if they would do me the honor of being a guest on the podcast I was starting. Thank you all for your support, and kindness, and if you ever have more things you would like to talk about, all of you always have an open invitation back.

I also want to thank everybody who has listened, and shared the podcast with others. I have gotten much better reception and response that I realistically imagined. Thank you for your shares, (re)tweets, comments, and suggestions. If you have anything else you want to share I would love to hear from you. If you need to find the best way to contact me, just head over to Functional Geekery’s About page.

Don’t worry, I am not planning on going anywhere at this point. I have another recording “in the can”, and am working to line up some more great guests. I also have a large list of people I would love to talk to at some point, and would hate to end before I got to use the podcast as a reason to be able to have a interesting conversation with them as well. 😉

As always, a giant Thank You goes out to David Belcher for the logo, who took my rough idea of a logo, and transformed it into something brilliant.

And an even bigger THANK YOU goes out to my wife, who has let me pursue this “crazy idea”.

Your host,
–Proctor

Functional Geekery

In a previous post I mentioned I had a new project in the works. I was a guest on the Ruby Rogues podcast and made an announcement there, but for those who didn’t catch that episode, I am now announcing Functional Geekery, a podcast about functional programming.

After some issues with getting the hosting setup properly, and working with the hosting provider’s support for a couple of issues, the first episode is ready to go live! I will be working on getting it in the iTunes store, and some of the other podcasting services, but in the meantime, you can find it online.

I am hoping to have a wide range of guests and topics, from Clojure, to Erlang, to JavaScript, to F#, as well as Scala, Haskell, and functional programming in languages like C# and Ruby. If you have any suggestions on shows, topics, or guests, check out the About Page on the site to submit ideas.

–Proctor