So you want to make a podcast

On my drive home from DjangoCon 2023 I came up with a wild idea.

I should make a podcast about Django.

But, I didn't want to make a podcast by myself! However, I had just worked with my coworker and friend, Sangeeta, to create quirky stickers to give out at DjangoCon, and she would be the perfect co-host.

There are already a few podcasts about Django available, but I thought we could do a fun spin on it. And similar to when we decided, spur of the moment, to sign up to give a Lightning Talk at DjangoCon, the idea was half-exciting and half-terrifying.

We both listen to a lot of podcasts so we already had some ideas about what makes good content and what doesn't. And between the Django stickers and an internal work presentation we co-created in the past, Sangeeta and I know how to work well together on a creative project.

We talked about a few other topics we could make a podcast about, but we kept coming back to Django -- we both use it daily, have lots of production experience with it, have opinions about it, and it seemed like a nice way to give something back to the Django community.

From inception (October 2023) to the first episode launch (March 2024) of Django Brew, it has been a huge learning curve. We knew what we wanted the podcast to be like, but we didn't know how to create it. We still aren't professional podcasters or anything, but we are three episodes in, so we know more now than we did at the beginning!

Decisions, decisions

First, decide on what sort of content you are uniquely qualified to talk about. Lean into your "unfair advantage" because that will resonate best with the audience. For us, we are passionate about Django and the community. I think all of those qualities come through in the podcast. If we didn't care as much the audience would instinctively know.

Then, decide on what kind of podcast you want to make. There are interviews, news, tutorials, long-winded opinion shows, and lots of things in-between. We knew of a few interview shows for Django, but fewer where developers talked about their experience building with Django.

And decide why your podcast will be different than all the others. Our goal was to make the podcast like two friends talking about Django -- we wanted it to be funny, full of excitement, and a little bit goofy. We try to capture our personalities while talking about a framework that we love. I couldn't (and wouldn't!) want to make a podcast by myself. My favorite podcasts have 2 hosts because the dynamic completely changes with a second person -- I'm definitely not engaging enough to host a podcast by myself. 😂

Equipment

Originally, we tried iPhone Bluetooth mics, laptop mics, and a few other corded and cordless mics. But, the sound quality wasn't great and we kept reading that a better mic would help, so we decided to splurge and each got a dedicated microphone.

Microphone

The Samson Q2U came highly recommended from Reddit and Transistor's podcast equipment guide. We've been pretty happy with the sound quality -- they aren't super high-end (we can't all be Wes Bos!), but for $100 for a mic, boom, shock mount, and pop filter it seemed reasonable.

Software

We tried a few different software setups before settling on our current setup. I am sure there are less time-intensive ways to record a podcast, but this is the software and process we currently use. For other types of podcasts (or more seasoned professionals!), it might be completely different.

Notion

Sangeeta and I use the free tier of Notion to brainstorm episode topics, write scripts, and keep a rough outline for each episode.

Riverside

We use the free tier of Riverside to record the actual podcast audio. One benefit over Zoom is that there is no time limit for the "meeting". It also has the ability to export each person's audio separately which makes the editing of the final audio easier. We don't use any other features in Riverside other than recording audio, but might look into it more in the future.

There is a limit in Riverside for how much recorded content can be stored every month, but we don't currently hit that limit.

Audacity

After recording each session, I export each audio track as a WAV and import it into Audacity. There is a little bit of a learning curve with Audacity, but it is free and rock-solid. For the limited things I want to do (i.e. cut/copy/paste, silence, limit, fade-in, and fade-out) it works great.

For a 20-30 minute episode, we tend to record 2-3 hours of audio over multiple sessions (that includes lots of re-takes, general chatting, and some planning of what to talk about next)!

I do rough cuts of all of the audio together and then I send drafts to Sangeeta for her to listen to and give me notes. We'll go back and forth over multiple drafts, making notes for each other, and deciding on different parts we want to change or re-record. It probably takes at least a few hours to do all of the editing.

As part of the editing process, I also grab anything particularly goofy and keep another project with all of our episode bloopers.

Ableton

Once we get close to a finished product, I send the episode and bloopers to Sangeeta who uses Ableton for the final edits. Ableton is not free, but Sangeeta had used it before for other projects and had already paid for it.

She adds the intro and outro music (from Pixabay) and goes through the episode one more time to tweak audio levels and do a general clean up.

Then, she edits all of the bloopers together (side note: this is my favorite part of every episode). Most episodes have 5+ minutes of unedited bloopers, but she grabs only the best ones and stitches them together.

After that's all done, Sangeeta exports the final cut and uploads it to Buzzsprout.

Buzzsprout

Buzzsprout is where we host the podcast episodes. It pushes new episodes to all of the podcast aggregators, stores the podcasts, provides a handy embeddable player, and podcast analytics. Personally, I am not sure how accurate the podcast analytics are, but it is nice to get a sense if people are listening to the episodes.

Coltrane

We used the built-in Buzzspout hosted website for a little while, but eventually wanted more control over the styles and content. I grabbed all of the HTML and CSS from the hosted site and used my own mini web framework, Coltrane, to build a static site. We have a few ideas about potential further enhancements for the site in the future, but for now it's good enough for our purposes.

Process

For most of our episodes it's taken around a month to decide what to talk about, record, and edit. That's a long time! However, we only work on it nights and weekends because we have day jobs and other life priorities also tend to get in the way!

For some episodes we have written out a basic script for what we wanted to talk about. For others, we had an outline, but it was recorded more "off the cuff". I don't think we have nailed down a perfect process yet, but we are still working through it. I think we'll also get better at talking "on-mic" over time, but like with most things practice makes perfect better.

Publishing

After we upload the new episode to Buzzsprout, we write custom show notes with links to everything we talked about. The new episode will automatically show up on the website once it's published, but we also write a post for Twitter and Mastodon to notify people on those platforms.

Conclusion

That's our current process to record the Django Brew podcast! I'm sure we'll learn new techniques and the process will change over time, but we've been pleasantly surprised by the community engagement and we look forward to creating more podcasts in the future!

If you are interested in Django at all, please check out Django Brew and let us know what you think. Or just listen to our bloopers and see how often we mess up while recording. 😉

Thanks to Sangeeta Jadoonanan for reading the first draft and giving some helpful feedback. And also being my podcast co-host.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash