Our Podcast's Stack
One thing that surprised us when creating this podcast about developer tools is how many tools it takes to make a podcast!
This page will contain a list of a (mostly) up to date list of things we use to create, publish and distribute our podcast.
Hardware
One things that's a must for any podcast is a whole lot of hardware! You don't necessarily need to own all of these things to make a quality podcast but they're the things we've found help us produce a better product.
Andrew's Gear
Justin's Gear
Software
Design
While we are developers by trade, we also like to flex our design skills when we can! All of the graphics for our podcast (cover, logos, video visuals) were made in Figma. Our 3D logo was made in Spline.
Scheduling
Our podcast is mainly about the guests we feature. So we need a good easy tool that lets our potential guests find a spot where we are all available to record and episode. We went through a few different tools before settling on SavvyCal to schedule recordings.
With SavvyCal all we need to do is send a link to the person we're trying to schedule. They get a calendar view were they can select a time where both the hosts are free. The meeting invite contains a link to our virtual recording studio (see below) so all we have to do is add the event to our calendar
Recording
devtools.fm is a remote podcast we need a way to record our podcasts that's easy for guests to join and gets us the best video and audio quality available. A zoom recording just won't do!
Luckily there are a lot of solutions for this already. We went with a tool called Riverside. It enables use to record at the highest quality while still being easy to use and share with our guests.
Fun Fact: Almost every guest on devtools.fm has asked us how Riverside works. Makes sense given they all also make tools!
Editing
Once a podcast has been recorded we edit it using Descript. Descript is a video editing tool where you first transcribe everything, then edit the transcript to edit the video. Editing this way is faster than traditional methods and it produces a transcript for all of our content. This makes our podcast much more accessible, searchable, and easier to share.
Fun Fact: Andrew works at Descript and the creation of this podcast was in large part an exercise in dogfooding.
Publishing
Podcasts can be published to a bunch of places and rely on creating and hosting an RSS feed of the podcast's episodes. We want the podcast everywhere it can be and that's a lot of work!
To save us a bunch of time we use a tool called Buzzsprout. It hosts and creates the RSS feed for our podcast and also deals with listing our podcast on all major podcast directories. It also provide an aggregate view of our podcasts stats across all those directories making it easy to see how much our podcast is being downloaded day to day.
We also publish our podcast to our YouTube channel.
Website
If you're not a developer you can use something to build your podcast's website for you. Buzzsprout will even do this for you. But since we're developers literally the first thing we did when we had the idea for devtools.fm was create this website.
Each episode has an MDX which is used to statically generate this website every time we add a new episode.
For tracking website analytics we use Plausible.
Marketing
Getting you podcast in front of people is one of the hardest parts! We have experimented with some paid advertising but have found that good old fashioned viral interesting content is what works best to promote our podcast.
To capture those viral moments we have social media accounts that we post 90-120s clips to throughout the week. To schedule these posts we use a tool called Buffer. With Buffer we can post to all of the platforms at the same time and customize the message that goes along with the video.
While we are editing the podcast we are constantly on the look out for clips that might make good social videos. As we edit the podcast using Descript anything that could make a good video gets clipped into it's own "Composition" and then highlighted so that we know a clip already covers that content.s
Phew, that's it! Hopefully this helps you start your podcasting journey. If you have any questions feel free to tweet at us. And if you got any value out of this follow use wherever you consume podcasts!
