Brian Neville-O'Neill: Hi, welcome to PodRocket. I'm Brian, that's Jonathan. Hello, how are you? Jonathan Cutrell: Hi, doing well. How are you, Brian? Brian Neville-O'Neill: I'm actually really good today, really good today. I think I already asked you how you're doing, maybe you want to tell listeners who you are, that'd be good. I usually have people introduce themselves. Jonathan Cutrell: Yeah, no, we can start there and then we'll see what happens. My name is Jonathan Cutrell. You might have heard my voice if you listen to podcasts or maybe not at all, I don't know. It's possible though because I have a podcast called Developer Tea and it's been around since 2015. January, 2015, so we're coming up on January 5th it'll be seven years that we've been doing the podcast. It's a long time. But most anybody who's listening to this that would be what you might know about me, but I also am a Software Engineering Manager, former Software Engineer and still like to code from time to time. But most of the time I'm working on teams and team structure and helping teams be effective. And I do a lot of other stuff but less of it is relevant to the professional world then we can talk about really, so tons of hobbies, [crosstalk 00:01:47] podcast. Brian Neville-O'Neill: I don't know. You'd be surprised. On my episodes of PodRocket, they are mostly free form so who knows what we'll end up talking about? Jonathan Cutrell: Fair enough, okay. Brian Neville-O'Neill: So, this is one of my favorite kinds of episodes where I get to talk to people who have been doing podcasts for longer than us. We were talking a little bit about this before we hopped on air, was like PodRocket is only maybe 80 episodes deep. Jonathan Cutrell: Only 80. Brian Neville-O'Neill: Which is like a ... oh, I know, but it's like a year and you're seven years in and coming up on what, 1,000 episodes? Jonathan Cutrell: Yeah, it's actually over a 1,000 now we're at, I think 1,025 this week. Brian Neville-O'Neill: Oh my. Jonathan Cutrell: Yeah, it's quite a few. Brian Neville-O'Neill: Yeah. How has, it's a big question, but how has it changed? From when you started to where you are now, were there phases, were there like, these are the things that have happened in my head I can think of, "Oh, these are the watershed moments." Jonathan Cutrell: Yeah, I can walk through what I feel like is the chapters, if there's a biography of the podcast, which is pretty self important, I suppose, but ... Brian Neville-O'Neill: I asked, so I'm curious. Jonathan Cutrell: No, that's fair. In the very beginning, I think my intention was I want to keep this very short, 5 to 10 minutes, maybe 15 if I really get into the discussion or the conversation and talk about one topic per episode. So for example, one of the early episodes was literally just titled Focus. Another episode was titled I think Learning. So, it's this very atomic but very rich topics. And the inspiration came from often, I didn't have a long commute, I had a three-minute commute to work and I didn't have a lot of time in my day to listen to three-hour long podcasts either, which at the time seemed to be the only thing that was really available. Jonathan Cutrell: That wasn't actually true, but it fell like it was true. It felt like every time I listened to a podcast, it was a big investment. I thought, "You know what? I really would like to have these short, atomic, meaningful podcast episodes on a daily basis that cover something that if I miss it, no big deal. If I didn't like it, I didn't feel like I just threw a bunch of time into it, it's not that big of a deal either way." So, since it didn't exist, I actually had an idea for a podcast a long time ago that never came to fruition. I had it rolling around in my head to start a podcast because I have a background in recording music and stuff so I already had all the equipment, all I had to do was just publish it. Jonathan Cutrell: So, I recorded a couple of these episodes and released them essentially with very little intent of the podcast going ... I never could have guessed it would go this long. This was not a master plan by any means. And I think I followed some of the industry standard recommendations on how to, I don't know, how to have your podcast grow effectively, how to release it, what is a release plan? For those first, I think back then it was the first eight weeks or something like that if you climbed to new and noteworthy then that really decides whether or not your podcast is going to live or die. And I think we got, I don't know, what week we got into new and noteworthy, but we got there. Jonathan Cutrell: And I think another really important thing in the early days was, oh, what is the name of the app? Pod ... oh man, Pocket Casts? Pocket Cast, that's it. Pocket Cast picked it up and featured it and the cool thing about that feature is that it lasted a long time. So, the way that Pocket Cast feature works is it shows the album art or whatever, the artwork, the cover artwork, it shows it and then it moves down in this grid of cover artwork and it stays there for like three weeks. So everybody who has podcasts, if they open up the featured tab, they're seeing Developer Tea. So, there was a lot of this opportunity that everything aligned just right, a ton of luck involved in all of that, that made the podcast pretty popular. Jonathan Cutrell: I think we reached 10,000 listeners really, really fast, which is the threshold of, "Oh okay, you should probably take this seriously." So, let's see. So, from there that was on the should I take this seriously as a professional endeavor? That was binary switch that flipped at that point. But I think the more interesting story is how it's changed for me, how I've thought about the podcast. In that, in those early days it was very much a an experiment. I had to talk to my wife about spending $10 a month on hosting to really discuss like, is this worth the shot? Should we put that $10 in our savings account instead? And of course now looking back, it's wild to think that I would not have just gone full on knowing the opportunity that was there. Jonathan Cutrell: And as it progressed, I started like struggling with, do I look for sponsors? How do I handle making this worth really putting time into? I love doing it just for the kind of reward it gave me intellectually, the kind of social reward that it gave me and the theoretical professional rewards. But I didn't know if I could monetize or not. And I ended up finding sponsors, I guess it was about half a year in. Jonathan Cutrell: Around the same time, another podcast, a couple of guys from another podcast called Design Details came to me and they said, "Hey, we started a podcast on January 5th," which just so happened to be the exact same day that I started my podcast. And they didn't know that, but they talked about how theirs was growing and what did they think about mine kind of joining with theirs in a network. Jonathan Cutrell: And that was the first conversations of what eventually became Spec, Spec.FM. Spec lived until December of last year. And I think at our peak, we had, I think, 12 podcasts or so? Somebody's going to be very upset if I get that wrong, but anyway, it was- Brian Neville-O'Neill: You should overshoot it. Jonathan Cutrell: Yeah, yeah. Okay. So 20 podcasts. Brian Neville-O'Neill: Right, yeah. Jonathan Cutrell: So 10 to 20. But it was a network that was solely designed to provide other podcast creators with the ability to say, "Okay, I don't want to worry about the editing. I don't want to worry about finding sponsors. I just want to worry about making the content." And so we ran basically right at cost, and part of the kind of consequences of running at cost for that, we couldn't really grow the network pretty substantially, and the kind of operational side of things, eventually it became too much to handle for the people that we had. And so we had to make the decision to let everybody go back to being independent, which ultimately was probably a very good decision for all of the podcasts that were involved. So we all went independent at the end of last year. Jonathan Cutrell: Along the way with Spec, I think some of the biggest lessons that learned about the podcast process, or I guess about my relationship with the podcast, at some point I decided to start having guests on, which was a huge shift because initially I did not plan on doing interviews. Jonathan Cutrell: And then also I realized that I really needed to hone in what I considered my kind of personal intent, my mission, whatever you want to call that, what are the values that I'm trying to portray through this show? And I came up with my own kind of, I guess, tag. I wouldn't call it tagline or intro, value mission that I put at the beginning of every episode. And so that was a turning point for me because it started guiding how I did content. I stayed away from highly technical content. I started moving more towards, I won't call it soft content, but kind of content like psychological content, that kind of thing is what I ended up focusing on. Brian Neville-O'Neill: Yeah. So that's one of the things I wanted to ask you, right? So for me, looking at kind of the history of Developer Tea, there was kind of a sea change between very technical content and then what you called soft content, or we'll just call now other stuff. That seems like a pretty big risk or it's how did you anticipate reception and how was reception? I mean, I know you have, like recently ... the reason that I even think to ask this is I noticed a couple weeks ago you put a tweet out that was like, "Here's someone who didn't like that you had moved away from technical content." So yeah, maybe talk a little bit about that. Jonathan Cutrell: Yeah. It's kind of interesting. I've always considered the show evergreen. I've never considered it to be topically technical in the sense that we don't really cover releases of JavaScript frameworks or something like that. Right? That wouldn't be something we'd talk about on the show. We might talk about in the merits of a language so that we can discuss the philosophy that make it good. Or we might say, okay ... for example, I did a series on career path and the kind of basic steps towards a career path developer career roadmap series, which turned out to be a fairly popular kind of step by step way of progressing in your career from nothing to job and fulfillment, et cetera. And we talk about, for example, what language do you choose? Jonathan Cutrell: Okay, pick one of these, because right now the market will ... you will likely be able to succeed with this. But very rarely do we get into discussion about specifics on what is happening in the market or what's happening ... I say the market, but what is the hot tech right now? Instead we've tried to focus on philosophies, models, et cetera, for most of the podcast life. But what did happen is we continued kind of ... I say we, I really, I continued getting more and more interested in more and more abstract concepts. So further and further away from that core of practical advice that we started out with. Jonathan Cutrell: And I think in some ways that reviewer that you're talking about was a good moment for me to say, "Hey, wait a second. While this stuff is interesting, the podcast can't just be my musings or reflections, it needs to be practically useful. I need to have some kind of anchoring in, what are these people listening for? What is it that they're actually trying to do with the information I'm bringing to them?" And so there is some balance there, and it's an awkward balance, to be honest, because we aren't ... I'm strictly drawn a line where I'm not technical at that deepest sense, but I'm also having to draw an upper line, right? There's some kind of margin there where the upper line is, if you go more abstract than this, then it becomes less of a podcast that's directed at software engineers and more of a journal almost. And many times kind of treated this podcast like that, for me. It's a little bit of a selfish notion, but something that helps me kind of process through my thoughts and ideas about what it means to be a good manager, for example. Brian Neville-O'Neill: Yeah. I don't know that that's especially selfish, right? I mean, whose podcast is it, right? It's yours. But I mean, no. The way that we get around that, and it's again, one of the reasons I ask is at this point a year in, or almost a year in, I think six people have hosted PodRocket. So with each new host, you get kind of their own take on things. So my episodes, I don't really know how we would describe mine, but like Ben's episodes are ... they have a different, a very distinct feel. And when the engineers host episodes, obviously those are the more technical ones where it's back and forth. Brian Neville-O'Neill: But if you're one person, obviously it would be much more difficult to make everybody happy. Right. And I think that's sometimes ... when I read reviews of other podcasts, that's what I see like, "Oh, that's tricky. How would we do that if it was just me?" Jonathan Cutrell: How you balance that line. Yeah. Brian Neville-O'Neill: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then also like what, yeah. It's the hardest part. What does the audience want? And the audience isn't a monolith, so I don't know. Jonathan Cutrell: Right. Well, that's part of the kind of interesting side effect of what we've done, how I've chosen to do the topics is that the audience that it has cultivated, especially the ones that have been around for a long time ... As a quick kind of heuristic example of this, we have a Discord, not especially unique that we have a Discord, but we have one. And the people who are in there, normally if you look at a Slack community or a Discord community, you see messages that are one line long, two lines long. And it's one after the other, when I go to the Developer Tea Discord to get caught up on what the most recent conversations are, the messages are like three paragraphs long. Jonathan Cutrell: We've got these people who are very invested in deeper thought. And I don't know if that is a selection bias possibly, right? Because if they're listening to this podcast, then of course they'd have to be interested at that level. Or if there's something about the way the community is structured. But there's something about that, that I think is valuable, right? That this group of people is a thoughtful group of people. And for me at least, as a host, that means I can edge on that line of abstract and then apply it back without a lot of negative pushback. In fact, it's going to be valuable to somebody in that group. Brian Neville-O'Neill: Do you ever think that if you trend in the direction towards the abstract that like, at what point does the ... we'll call it the product, but does the podcast no longer become for developers explicitly? Is that something you think about? Jonathan Cutrell: Yeah, I've thought about it a good bit, but I think that's something where I've had to hold myself to account. Maybe just as a choice, I don't think it's necessarily there's no implication there of ethical breach or anything like that. Right. It's more of a choice for how does this podcast stay valuable to me and to other people? And this is kind of like a ... it's like, choose a trade and I'm going to apply these ideas to that trade. I just so happened to have found myself in software engineering where a lot of these things actually are useful, right? These concepts tend to be useful, because as software engineering, as a trade lends itself to decision making as kind of like a discipline. Studying decision making is probably going to pay you back. And that is so much about what we talk about on the show. Jonathan Cutrell: And if we were talking about this with another trade, it would probably apply. But because I'm not a part of that trade, I don't have a way of describing the application. So in the way that I have done this, so I know that it applies in this particular ... here's an example, right? And here's how this applies in X situation. That allows me to bring these otherwise abstract concepts into a more concrete picture for listeners. And I think that's a ... to your point, it could be applied. And in fact, we do have a lot of listeners who are not engineers, right? They're engineer adjacent, right? We have designers or product managers, but we also have people who've listened to the show literally to learn English. Jonathan Cutrell: So podcasting is not ... there are no boundaries really, but there's also people who have listened just because they're kind of tangentially interested in software engineering as an external topic to them. So it's there's a lot of people that come to the show, and it's not really exclusive like you might think a book would be, for example. A book might feel like it's not really accessible, but the podcast tends to be pretty accessible. Brian Neville-O'Neill: I would agree. I mean, that makes sense to me though, like your context for abstract thinking, your practical context is software engineering. So if you were a mason, it would be different. A stone mason, not a Free Mason, although I guess you could do have a Free Mason. Do they have Free Mason podcasts? Jonathan Cutrell: Oh, I don't know. Brian Neville-O'Neill: I'm going to take a look at that later. But yeah. I mean, that to me, that does make sense. Because again, I think about it too, like what happens? I mean, PodRocket, we have guests on, we've always had guests on. What happens when we interview everybody? Do we have other folks come back? And the answer to that question is, yeah. We've had repeat visitors and new stuff happens, but could we do seven years of it? I don't know. That's what I wonder about sometimes. Jonathan Cutrell: Yeah. You could do panels where you have two guests that had opposing viewpoints join for the same episode. And I think there's also ... oh, go ahead. Brian Neville-O'Neill: Oh, sorry. No, no. I have been think ... like when you said engineering adjacent, which I like, I just generally speaking, I'm probably going to steal that from you. But I also think that there's one thing is engineering adjacent programming, right? Get a product manager from somewhere, get an engineer from somewhere, have them fight it out. No. Have them sort of talk about what it's like to work together, and that's something I think that, if for no other reason, people might find that like comforting. Like, "Oh, they have the same problems that I have at work," you know? Jonathan Cutrell: Yeah. Yeah. It's curious that we have had a few repeat guests and the conversations are drastically different, especially if there's enough time between visits, I guess. And I would say in some ways there is no way that they could be the same, the conversations are going to be changed by nature the fact that the person is not the same person anymore. And there's always change happening in the industry. There's always change happening to those people. And asking about the change is almost as much of a insightful thing as asking about what that person is interested in. Jonathan Cutrell: If you were to ask me in two years what I've learned about Developer Tea in those two years, there's probably something more interesting that I'm going to say then than I'm saying now. Right? So there's insights, I think, even going back and revisiting some of the topics that I've revisited or that I've talked about for the first time in the past. There's probably stuff that I've said that I don't even agree with. I'm certain that there are plenty of episodes that I would go back and be like, "Man, I really got that one way off." Or at least right now, I think it wouldn't apply to my current scenario. So I do think that there is a lot of opportunity for revisiting and I guess the cycle continues. You kind of come back around, do the same subjects over and over. Brian Neville-O'Neill: I can't listen to myself. And again, you have a much bigger back catalog. So I suspect I'll probably feel similarly, like, "I can't believe I said that." Perhaps this episode, I'm like, "Is he really talking about mason podcasts? Brian, what are you doing?" So, yeah. I mean, there's things like that. Do you have a favorite episode? Do you ever think about it? Jonathan Cutrell: Oh my goodness. There's one episode that stands out to me because it was the first episode that I felt like I produced rather than just talking. It felt like I ... because I actually wrote almost like a script and the episode, I think it was called turbulence and the idea ... so hey, one of my hobbies. Here we go, hobby bingo. I have my private pilot's license and I fly small Cessna aircraft. And in small aircraft you feel turbulence a little bit more readily than you might in a bigger aircraft just because that's the way physics works. And so if you're flying along, when I was ... my father was a pilot as well and when I was a kid, we were flying along out west and there's a lot of turbulence when you fly over mountains. Jonathan Cutrell: And I didn't understand why. Of course, I felt a little sick from it, probably a little bit of fear when I was a kid. And my dad explained that there is this idea that turbulence actually comes from, at least out west a lot of the time, it comes from the shape of the land because however the land is shaped as air flows over that land, the air is going to be disrupted based on the shape of the land. And that was comforting, first of all, because I recognized that it wasn't some mysterious force that was going to rip the airplane apart, but it was also enlightening to me and a model that I could use for a lot of other things. Jonathan Cutrell: I could use it for there's this thing that's happening in my life I'm not really sure what's happening. Maybe there's something underlying that's going on that you could investigate and learn more about. So there's something in my career is not going right. Well, maybe it's something in your personal life that's driving something in your career, for example. So, that episode I felt really connected to and it was the first one that I felt like I got done with it and I published it and it almost felt more performative than previous episodes, not in the negative performative way, but in the sense that I actually created something worth performing. Brian Neville-O'Neill: Yeah. That's I think people who don't, I can't think of a podcaster. People who don't have a podcast and publish regularly, they don't appreciate the amount of work or don't even know it exists, the amount of work that goes in on the producing side. Like I always say, Kate, Kate does all the work. And the people who host these episodes, we just get in front of the mic and this is kind of easy, you know what I mean? Like you're just sort of having a conversation and if that's something you can do, then anyone essentially can podcast, but the actual skill is on the other side coordinating. As you felt probably very well known through Spec, through your own work. It's a lot, it's a lot. So that makes sense. Jonathan Cutrell: It is a lot. Brian Neville-O'Neill: But yeah. Jonathan Cutrell: I will say that after doing so many episodes, at least on something as repetitive as Developer Tea is in terms of production, the template for production for me is pretty straightforward. The hard part for me is coming up with novel ideas. Brian Neville-O'Neill: Yeah, that was my next question. But sorry to interrupt. Jonathan Cutrell: No, go ahead. Please. Brian Neville-O'Neill: So the turbulence episode it came from kind of personal experience, either through hobbies. So these novel ideas are, I assume you're drawing, is it active or passive? Are you drawing from life experience, from books, from whatever, from the internet, from all of the above? And then how do you kind of think about, "All right, this could be a good episode." Because sometimes I think that, like, "This could be a good episode," and then I get 10 minutes into it and I go, "That was not a good idea, Brian. You should not do that." Jonathan Cutrell: Yeah. So another early lesson that I learned for Developer Tea, because even back then is actually doing three episodes a week, which is wild. It was to be careful. Don't lower your standard too much, but be careful in ... I guess maybe the better way to put it is try recording it first. Before you say it's not good enough, try to put it down and see what happens. See if you can make an episode out of that idea, that seed of an idea. Jonathan Cutrell: Worst case scenario, you delete the file and move on, right? But so many episodes that I thought were like, "Ah, that one is like, eh that's okay." But so many times I would get feedback on those episodes. They're like, "This has been so helpful for me," and I never would've expected it. And some of that is because the ideas that I have, I'm seeing through my own lens. There's so many biases that go into this where we think, for example, that everybody else has the same knowledge we have. Jonathan Cutrell: It's this concept that I can't reasonably talk about this idea that's so obvious, right? Why would I ever be able to do that? It's too obvious. Everybody's going to think I'm just wasting their time. And the truth is when people think you're wasting their time, they don't take the time to tell you about it. So a lot of the time they're just going to turn the episode off. If it's valuable to somebody, they're going to listen to it. And for a podcast that has three episodes a week, it was okay for people to turn it off sometimes. Jonathan Cutrell: I actually encouraged people in the early days of the podcast, like, "Listen, not every episode is going to make your career better. Not everything is going to click. Not everything is going to be interesting. And that's fine. This podcast is intentionally designed to not give you the anxiety of not being caught up. You don't have to check every box of episodes of this podcast to feel like you've gotten value out of it. I would rather you not. I'd rather you listen to the things that are interesting to you." Jonathan Cutrell: Okay, so going back to your original question of, how do these ideas come about and how do I determine if it's going to be a good episode or not? I'm not really sure when it clicks. Usually it's the seed, like the seed of a sentence that I'll say in my mind and I'll say, "Okay, that has enough depth to it to talk about it for 10 minutes." I can feel that switch flip. And I'm not really, maybe it's because I've done it so many times or maybe it's an illusion. I don't know. But I usually ... here's how the sausage is made, I suppose. Usually this happens when I'm standing in the shower. I'm trying to come up with an idea and something will click and I'm like, "All right," and I turn the shower off and I go record. So it's like right then is when it has to happen. Jonathan Cutrell: Sometimes I will have an experience. I'll be doing something at work. There'll be a problem that we solved as a team. Or there will be a conversation that I had with somebody else at the company that I'm at, or a friend of mine or some colleague outside of my company, something like that will happen. I'm like, "Oh, this is a principle that hasn't really been talked about. Or maybe it has, but there's more to say, and I want to talk about it." So I try to keep aware of those ideas, as this happens, believe it or not like half the episodes or so are those moments of inspiration from actual work and experience at work that just, they just click. Clicks into an idea. Brian Neville-O'Neill: Yeah. I never thought about the idea of kind of podcast anxiety, where if you are following kind of a story driven or episodic one. If you miss that, oh geez, I'm three or four weeks behind. Now this is like this big commitment. Yeah. I mean, that's true. I can also relate to thinking about something and needing to get it down right away. Because if you think like, "Oh, this is a good idea," and then come back to it, you'll forget that easily. So yeah. And then there's also- Jonathan Cutrell: Oh, go ahead. Brian Neville-O'Neill: No, I didn't have an interesting thing to say. Jonathan Cutrell: I think the driving factor for me from the beginning, and more so about midway to now was establishing those kind of, for me ethical, but for the podcast value driven approach where I don't want people to feel a need to listen to this podcast. That's not my goal. I don't want to do that. There's enough of that. And so much so that even maybe to the frustration of a advertiser or two, which they never expressed to me, but I'm sure it wouldn't be great to say this on air on one of their podcasts. I tell people that if this is not the most important thing for you to be doing right now, please turn it off. I've said that on the show and not to perform that ethic out, but because I have a very strong conviction that if people are wasting time, that's going in direct act opposition to the point of the podcast. Jonathan Cutrell: I feel like if people want to follow through on those values, that it will carry longer than whatever the ... if you're starting a podcast right now and you're like, "Okay, how do I get listeners? How do I get people hooked?" I would say, try to figure out what your long term value is that you're giving to these people that are listening. Because if you're just trying to get them hooked, eventually that's going to fall apart. You're not going to know what to come back to when all of your tricks have been used up. Like, you're done and now what? And I think that's been really important for me to feel like I'm doing something good with the podcast. I'm helping people establish those values themselves. Brian Neville-O'Neill: So how do you measure, or how do you think about success against the backdrop of kind of your ethos versus keeping the lights on? Jonathan Cutrell: Yeah. The first, there's kind of a rule. This is like an accounting rule in our household. We never depend on the income from the podcast. So it's always what I would consider bonus. And so if I want to keep doing it, I can, no matter what. That's at least for now, that's the accounting rule that we have in the house. And we set our budgets completely ignoring sponsor money. And then if it comes in great, we're smart with it, but it's only once it comes in that we do anything meaningful with it. So that sets us up for the next part, which is the success of the show is almost never dependent on, is this bringing in money or not? Jonathan Cutrell: That is kind of a latent signal. It's something that I would say is like, okay, if sponsors are interested, that means that people are interested. That means that listeners are coming to the show. We're able to get sponsors because we're able to get listeners. So that's downstream. The more primary way that I want to measure the success of the show, and this is a very hard thing to measure, are people changing their minds about the things we're talking about? Jonathan Cutrell: So I don't care about reingraining existing beliefs for people. I don't want to build an echo chamber where it's me and my club. And we're just volleying the same ideas back and forth and feeling good about ourselves. Because change is a signal of growth of some kind. And whether they change to what I believe or not is not really the point. Change in some way. I made you think enough that you had a new thought, a novel thought about something that we talked about on the show. That is the signal for me that we're doing something right. Brian Neville-O'Neill: I like that the ... so if I had to condense that, especially if you're listening and you're thinking about starting a podcast, the one piece of good advice on the accounting side is don't rely on the revenue from podcast to right away to support. And the other is creative integrity. Because the second part, you didn't just say listens. That's why I measure success as the number of people who listen to my show. So yeah. And that's kind of remarkable again, because given the backlog, back catalog, but given seven years, and then kind of what is the future like? What is the next year? Is that something that you've given thought to, like, "Oh, I'm going to take it this way," or [crosstalk 00:39:38]- Jonathan Cutrell: Yeah. It's a good question. I think the podcast is not going to stop. The consistency of the show is if, for nothing else very good for me. So I think having that in place, that's probably not going to change anytime soon. The things that I've thought about kind of exploring. Last year, we did some Friday bonus episodes where I would give more opinionated advice, where in the past I'm kind of like, "All right, here's the principles. You decide. And on the Friday episodes, more like, "All right, here's what I'm going to tell you to do, do this exercise, this specific thing and see what happens. From the outside looking in, it probably felt very similar, but for me, it's a total change in the way that I think about the episode and what goes into it. Jonathan Cutrell: So we'll probably do some more of that, but the bigger that I wanted to do last year, and I just didn't make the time, quite frankly, is get into video a little bit more. There's a huge audience that doesn't listen to podcasts that does watch videos. And they're just as hungry for this kind of content. And it's not there. I've looked and it's not there, at least this particular niche still hasn't been covered. So I think it's wide open space for video, especially for podcasters who want to look into getting into the video cast side of things. So I'm considering that pretty strongly. I did a little bit of it last year, but it was mostly kind of like ... I played around with some Reddit live streams and that kind of thing, and that didn't go super well. So I kind of stopped it. It was a little experiment, stopped that experiment. I think I'm going to try something a little bit more intentional this year. Brian Neville-O'Neill: Yeah. I mean, we started putting these episodes up on YouTube with the recordings and it's a completely different audience. It's not like you're canalizing the same. For example, they're on YouTube and they're never ... probably, unless they think the podcast is super interesting, they're never going to like Apple podcast or something like that. Brian Neville-O'Neill: Okay. So this is the end of the episode and it's usually I ask everyone two questions. First is, who comes to mind if anyone who you think is doing a good job out there, but could probably use a little bit more attention? And the second part is just like, anything you want to plug? Jonathan Cutrell: Sure. Okay. So the person that comes to mind most immediately, even though he has a pretty good community, a good following, is Michael Chan. He was, is the host of React podcast, but it's about so much more than React. And I think that there's a lot of people who have kind of maybe encountered Michael in the past that they kind of cataloged him in their mind as the React guy, but he now talks about all kinds of things, has a great community on Discord. So highly recommend Michael. Chantastic pretty much everywhere if you want to find him that way. Definitely recommend it. Brian Neville-O'Neill: Yeah. He was a guest on PodRocket. He and I chatted and had a good time. He had a much nicer up than I have, which I was like, I was jealous about. He's also a good Twitter follow, but yeah, I like Michael. Jonathan Cutrell: Yeah, yeah. I agree. Oh, and if you need any grilling tips, he's very good at grilling tips. Brian Neville-O'Neill: Really? Jonathan Cutrell: Yes. Yeah. Brian Neville-O'Neill: I didn't know that. And somehow it didn't come up, I don't think. Jonathan Cutrell: It's kind of a griddle type grill. He's very, very good at the making me jealous of his grilling skills, so. Brian Neville-O'Neill: I'm going to take you up on that and ask him questions. Okay. So if people want to find out more about you or more about the stuff you're working on, where should they go? Jonathan Cutrell: Sure. You can find me on Twitter at @DeveloperTea. My personal Twitter is @JCutrell. DeveloperTea.com, you can find the podcast. I'm sure there's like 10 other ways you can find the podcast in whatever pod catcher of your choice. And then, yeah, I would say the thing I would like to plug more than that though is probably, oh man, pick a good charity. It's the time of year to do this kind of thing. Jonathan Cutrell: And before you give me a click, I would ask to think about a charity of your choice. Maybe here's a meta charity thing, go to Charity Navigator. If you've never been to this, it's a really useful thing. You can share it with your family and friends as well. Charity Navigator kind of ranks different charity organizations on various dimensions, things like transparency and that kind of stuff. And you can find charities that align with the causes that you care about and give to those charities based on who has the best use of that money essentially. So it'll help your money go a little bit further. Brian Neville-O'Neill: Yeah. Really good advice. It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for coming on. Jonathan Cutrell: Thank you so much for inviting me. I appreciate it. Brian Neville-O'Neill: Thanks for listening to PodRocket. Find us at @PodRocketPod on Twitter, or you could always email me, even though that's not a popular option. It's Brian@LogRocket.