When learning a new skill or indulging a new interest, I like to find out who is podcasting about that thing. I do this early on in the process since it is hard to get a sense of the full landscape of a particular skill or issue without reading widely. The internet, of course, is a great way to find out about all the different nooks and crannies of a particular community. That doesn't help me much when I'm cooking, though, or when I'm walking in town. Podcasts are an opportunity to broaden my exposure to those topics while doing something else, usually something physical.
Here are some of my favourite podcasts relating to data science and programming:
Becoming a Data Science Podcast
Hosted by Renee Teate, this was my first exposure to smart data professionals talking about their work. I think the podcast is meant to be modelled on the book Data Scientists at Work. (I've read the book and thoroughly enjoyed it, for much the same reasons as I enjoyed this podcast). I'd recommend going back to the first episode and listening to them all. You can get a good overview from listening to just these episodes. Renee has recently resumed podcasting for season two and she also runs a data-science resource online empire that is filled with useful materials.
I'm working my way through all of these these, listening through from the very beginning (over 120 of them). At the beginning, I find it's useful to hear from people who started from nothing and who found a way to use code in their life or career. Not all of the guests are equally interesting, but the podcast is well produced and there's still loads of useful information buried in the overall corpus.
This podcast is in its second season. Just like CodeNewbie, the podcasts tend to focus on the journeys of people who have started from nothing. The guests are variable in terms of how interesting I find them, but I enjoy it nonetheless.
This is one of the more popular data science podcasts out there at the moment. Episodes range from discussion panels to interviews to deep-dives on a particular topic. This is great for keeping up with the buzz or gossip in the data science world and they often have pretty senior guests from the world of data science and business.
This podcast also has a Ruby/Rails sidekick podcast. I've just started the Web Development series and am finding it a useful overview. I'm not coming at this all as a complete beginner, so I'm not sure of the extent to which it'd be useful if that's you, but each episode covers a particular area of programming and web development. Episodes end with an assignment or set of tasks to do to practice or learn whatever they were discussing. This is a nice combination of approaches and as a quick revision of some web development fundamentals, this is a really good place to start.
Python is the language that I've studied and coded most with, so this podcast allows me some contact with people who are light-years ahead of me in terms of their skills. It also introduces frameworks and personalities that are important within the Python community, so if Python's your thing, this is probably a useful podcast to listen to.
The contents of this podcast fairly frequently go right over my head, but it's good to be exposed to the ideas being discussed. There are interviews with people about particular issues and mini-dives explaining a particular data science feature or area.
This is less content-rich than some of the other podcasts listed in the list, and there's sometimes too much focus on the marketing/business side of things, but it's nevertheless an enjoyable set of discussions about web development and programming in general. Guests often speak about meta-issues relating to productivity, management and so on.
This is one of my favourites. It's quite a new podcast, with only 14 episodes as of writing, but the hosts take care to bring in a diverse range of guests. In particular, it's a breath of fresh air to have lots of female coders on, since most of the 'successful' coding podcasts tend to be heavily dominated by men and their male guests.
This podcast includes a lot of the latest technologies, big trends and big-name guests. Some episodes are too vague and unspecific, but as a big name in the data science podcast crowd, this is a fairly good place to go for the orthodoxy of many institutions and individuals involved in the space.
Please let me know if I'm missing any good podcasts that would be appropriate for someone at the beginning end of their programming journey.