Looking back on twelve years of podcasting: When the unbelievable became real

I’m old. I’m really old. It hit me while I was getting our milestone 200th episode ready. The recording was a blast in every respect and I felt almost like a star. A district or perhaps regional star, of course. The line of spectators by the elevators in Avast’s ultramodern building was longer than the line at the greengrocer’s when bananas accidentally turned up under communism. A live band playing the Stones’ Paint It Black, and all the food and drink you could want. Not everyone can or wants to record a podcast, but it somehow happened to me and Jiri Fabian ☢ . When we started in 2006 our model, or so Jiri Fabian ☢ claims, was Java Posse. Every band needs an influence, right? I don’t know where he got that idea, because I didn’t have one. I didn’t even know what the hell a podcast was. Today, in 2019, there are plenty of Czech podcasts, often made by professionals. We started out as total amateurs, naive and enthusiastic. This is a look back at twelve years together behind the microphone.

Whenever I say “people often ask me,” Filemon breaks out in hives. That’s the worst case. At best, he makes fun of me. After nearly fifteen years, since we knew each other a few years before recording the first episode, he can get away with it. I hope he’ll forgive me for opening this way one more time.

We put Šimek and Bubílková to shame

People often ask me what it’s like putting up with him. They add that he makes dumb jokes at my expense, cracks childish jokes or wants to show he knows the subject. I’ve never seen it that way. Everyone wants to show off what they know now and then. Plenty of times I’ve wanted to look smart at Filemon’s or a guest’s expense. I get it. Sometimes you just don’t want to play the microphone stand. Jokes that don’t land? Hezucký and Mareš have those too. We’re lucky the podcast covers such a wide range that both of us get to stroke our egos. We’ve been pulling this cart together for ages, so there’s no reason to get hung up on petty things. Besides, I really look forward to every time it’s just the two of us behind the mic.

Why do we work so well together? At least I hope we do. We’re completely different, we know it and we use it. I’ve always said we’re like the Czech comedy duo Šimek and Bubílková. Bubílková (me) gives Šimek (Filemon) the setup and he comments on it. It would never work the other way around. I’m good at situational humor as a sparring partner, but Filemon has a gift for commenting on absolutely anything, usually quite funnily. I’m either thinking about something else, about to interrupt him, or coming up with the funny comeback an hour later.

It’s hard to get on the same wavelength if one of us knows more about the subject, especially with a guest. One thinks the other is asking obvious questions, while the other thinks the discussion is so detailed listeners will get lost. I can count on one hand the recordings where we actually had an agenda. So we jump from topic to topic, but at least it doesn’t sound stiff. It’s pure improvisation, including recording in one take without editing, which is why the podcast is out within 24 hours. We’ve never overthought it.

We have no website of our own. Postproduction consists of pasting on the theme tune. It’s at a different volume, so either it bursts your eardrums or you can’t hear what we say. That’s how you know it’s us. It’s our trademark. We’ve moved the podcast between hosting services several times, so tracking down all the episodes would be hard today. I wouldn’t bother if I were you.

We’ve had our share of fuckups. In the early days we hosted the podcast on java.cz. If listener demand didn’t knock it over, we could always count on burning through its data allowance. We thoroughly screwed up the podcast with Michal Illich and the one with the Zoom guys. I don’t want to say I told you so, but I really did tell Filemon. He would always show up with a cool toy, probably recommended by Google ads for eBay, and we’d be set for sound problems. Either you couldn’t hear the guests, the tracks were out of sync, or GarageBand (Filemon had owned a MacBook for about a week) cut off recording at about 45 minutes when we went for 60.

My biggest worry to this day is forgetting or mangling a guest’s name or swapping their first names. Filemon worries about that too, but he remembers names much better than I do. That’s why he usually introduces guests. Whenever we keep it neutral and say “Go ahead and introduce yourselves, guys and girls,” we’ve forgotten their names. Not every episode works out. Sometimes you can’t get a guest talking, sometimes they’ve come just for PR, and sometimes you think it’s going to be dull and end up having a blast.

How time went by

We definitely have listeners who were still in elementary school in 2006. So I’ll try to place the podcast’s history alongside the technologies and events that passed us by.

For example, Git and Selenium are only a year older than our podcast. While we were serving our second year of recording, we saw the birth of GitHub and the build tool Gradle. Jenkins was called Hudson back then, and the popular continuous integration server was CruiseControl. Who even remembers what CruiseControl was? Rhetorical question. Apache Tomcat was at version 6.0 and included, brace yourself, the reference implementation of JSP 2.1. JSP, can you believe it? A web app worked by having the browser send a request and the server generate the entire response. More experienced developers knew that GET shouldn’t have side effects, assuming they knew there was such a thing as GET.

Today’s React fanboys must think of that as prehistory or the Dark Ages, at least until it comes back into fashion. Technologies and approaches go round in circles. We’ve seen it several times on the podcast, and it gives us the luxury of perspective.

Two years before our first episode, the first releases appeared of Ruby on Rails and Apache Maven. We originally started recording with Roman Štrobl too. He fed us inside information from the world of Java. He worked for Sun and was the evangelist for NetBeans, so he traveled to conferences all over the world and partied with everybody. The fourth member of the gang was Milan Boruvka, at the time probably the only user, at least as far as I could tell, of the JBuilder development environment.

JBuilder (last released in 2009) and NetBeans are already dead projects. Looking back, we met plenty of technologies on the podcast that now lie in the technology graveyard. JBoss Seam, Adobe Flex and JavaFX come to mind. Don’t look for them. Most were evolutionary dead ends, and their journey was short.

How did the years go for Java? Version 6 in 2006, 7 2011, 8 2014, 9 2017, 10 2018, 11 2018. Spring framework was at version 2.0. I still remember talking about it at the Czech Java User Group. Node.js was introduced in 2009. We were already serving our third year by then. We had lots of successful tech entrepreneurs at the mic with us, including Jakub Nešetřil, Šimon Vostrý, Roman Staněk… Our guests came from companies that shaped and changed the digital world around us, like Google, Facebook , or pioneered their fields, like SpaceX in private space exploration.

2006 saw the execution of Saddam Hussein, Borat hit theaters, and Google bought YouTube. Filemon lived in Düsseldorf and worked for Nokia. On the podcast we had Java 6, Sun Tech Days and JBuilder 2007.

2007 saw Steve Jobs introduce the first iPhone and Netflix move from renting VHS tapes into the digital age. Facebook reached 20 million users and its archrival Myspace was valued at $65 billion. Twitter was doing about 20,000 tweets a day. Amazon introduced the Kindle e-reader, and Microsoft Windows Vista arrived. On the podcast we had IntelliJ IDEA, REST, Maven, Ruby on Rails, Java on the desktop, ORM and development methodologies.

2008 was the year of the first Android phone and the spread of GPS. Apple launched the App Store with great fanfare. I no longer remember if that meant the iPhone had only had apps from Apple until then. Google decided to shake the dominance of Internet Explorer by releasing the first version of Google Chrome. The age of the sharing economy began with Airbnb , and the age of music piracy saw its first crack in the form of Spotify. Oh, and the W3C, the organization that standardizes the web, published the HTML5 specification. The podcast saw a glimpse of the programming language Groovy and the first jOpenSpace, where we filed a report under the influence of fermented grapes.

2009 was the year of crowdsourcing, popularized by Kickstarter. A startup appeared that wanted to disrupt the traditional passenger transport business. If you guessed Uber, award yourself two points. A guy failed his interview at Facebook and went on to found WhatsApp. The crypto age began with the publication of the proposal for the digital currency Bitcoin. On the podcast we talked about things like Google Wave and, for a bit of the bizarre, OpenSolaris.

2010 saw the guy in jeans and a turtleneck introduce the iPad. A new photo-based social network appeared called Instagram. You could look at the photos over 4G data networks. Foursquare, a service I never understood, had five million users and was still growing. Microsoft introduced its gaming add-on Kinect. That year I started working for GoodData and we talked on the podcast about DevOps and NoSQL databases.

2011 The guy in jeans and a turtleneck died, but that didn’t stop Apple from becoming the most valuable company in the world. Some guys hacked Sony and, thanks to the leaked emails, the world learned that someone thought Angelina Jolie was completely clueless. Google launched the social network Google+ and put the final seal on its lack of a product vision. On the podcast we covered automation and configuration management, AWS, code retreat and the legendary Franta Fuka.

2012 saw a new innovation genius take the pedestal: Elon Musk. Tesla started delivering the Model S. Facebook went public. Kim Dotcom, king of services that let people share content, especially illegal content, was arrested in New Zealand. Filemon didn’t buy one of his giant cars at the court auction. I hope I can disclose that they have similar taste. In cars. Yahoo hired Marissa Mayer. She made her entrance by banning work from home, because the VPN logs made it look as though everyone was slacking at home. Maybe they were playing on the Wii just released by Nintendo. The podcast had its first appearance from Tomáš Rosa. I had the most punk vacation of my life, driving around Greece and sleeping under the stars. I went up a hill to take a shit, where you’d step on either a snake or a turd. I don’t know which was worse.

2013 saw the start of crypto fever. Bitcoin jumped from $13 to $266. Good old IRC was followed by Slack. Defector Edward Snowden exposed the NSA, and as if that wasn’t enough, people started printing firearms on 3D printers. Snapchat appeared. On the podcast we got into heavier stuff: writing low-latency applications, Clojure, building a data center and the language Ceylon, which doesn’t ring a bell for me anymore.

2014 The guy in jeans with the charisma of an accountant introduced the Apple Watch. The guy whom Facebook turned down in 2009 sold it WhatsApp for $16 billion. Zuckerberg kept shopping, buying Oculus Rift for $2 billion. The serious security flaw Heartbleed turned up in OpenSSL. We went full blast on the podcast: Adent talked about 8-bit computers, and we had IoT, indie game development, Erlang and empowerment in the form of Czechitas. Jakub Nešetřil introduced Apiary.

2015 Sundar Pichai became CEO of Google. Apple dropped USB 2.0 and moved to USB-C. I probably noted this because I had to get a new backpack for all the adapters I needed from then on to connect peripherals to my MacBook. Then came Dieselgate and I realized graphics card developers weren’t alone in cheating when they detected that their hardware was being tested. A lie has a short exhaust, after all. On the podcast we helped inflate the crypto bubble, discovered a robotic car and recorded our first episode in Brno. My life changed and we recorded with Zonky.

2016 saw every audio peripheral with a jack go out of fashion because Apple stopped supporting it. For the second year in a row, I thanked the guy in jeans. Misfortune struck Android users too. To Filemon’s and my wicked delight, batteries began exploding in the pockets of some Samsung Galaxy Note 7 users. Twitter was reportedly stagnating. Uber was worth about $60 billion. The first death in a Tesla driving on autopilot. In the US , the new president was Donald Trump. No causal link between those two items has been confirmed. So far, anyway. We recorded our most listened-to podcast ever about hacking the brain, with cyborgs and implanting chips in people coming up. We learned how a CDN speeds up the internet.

2017 Uber had a sexual harassment problem. Me Too. One Bitcoin cost $20,000. I became a crypto sucker myself. I noted that augmented reality was coming to the fore. No idea what the poet meant by that. iPhone X. On the podcast for the first time, Lojza Holub! Michal Bláha on e-government and, look out, Šimon Vostrý introduced Ytica. We recorded an episode about kernels in the historic part of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics building on Malostranské náměstí. Oracle bought Apiary.

2018 saw my crypto portfolio fall to a tenth of its value. Cryptocurrency analysts using modern methods, which to my mind amounted to predicting prices from the grounds of instant coffee, predicted a rapid return to its former value. SpaceX sent a Tesla into space playing songs by the late David Bowie. We talked about SpaceX on the podcast, and the mention of Iron Maiden caught my attention. I also remember the story of transporting VHS tapes during the Arab Spring with Tonda Král from ShowMax. Oh, and Šimon Vostrý sold Ytica.

What’s next?

Reading this back, I hope you weren’t bored with our podcast. We had a royal good time and intend to keep going. I originally meant to recommend three episodes. Then five. Now I have a top ten because I couldn’t bear to leave some of them out. Even then I couldn’t fit them all. The order is completely random.

• CZ Podcast 152 — Hacking geolocation services
• CZ Podcast 197 — Lukáš Kroc, from SpaceX to CreativeDock
• CZ Podcast 105 — 8-bit computers
• CZ Podcast 138 — Artificial general intelligence with Marek Rosa and GoodAI
• CZ Podcast 139 — NFC and chip implants, or the first step toward cyborgs
• CZ Podcast 114 — Human-computer interaction and adaptive music
• CZ Podcast 51 — An interview with František Fuka
• CZ Podcast 86 — The NSA and the Snowden affair
• CZ Podcast 162 — Hacking the brain
• CZ Podcast 153 — The extraordinary journey of Chameleon Run