I made a podcast!

More specifically, over the last 18 months - pretty much since I started working there - I have been developing a podcast for Diamond Light Source about the amazing research which takes place, how it gets done, and the people who make it happen! In this venture I have been lucky to have the support of our web content manager, Molly Pekarik-Fry.

So I present to you:

Shining a Diamond Light

We actually have quite a few episodes up now, there will be seven total for the first series! Please give them all a listen as I really think we produced something of value!

Some lessons

As I mentioned, this has been a long project and I have learnt some lessons about both podcasts and getting things done.

Editing is hard

This might appear obvious, but taking a conversation you really enjoyed and recorded for about an hour and reducing it to approximately 15 minutes is HARD! And from what I understand, this is actually quite an easy task compared to most things which get aired on a reasonably large network. Many hours of footage or recording can be reduced to less than a minute.

As most people like podcasts to last longer than a minute, I had to work hard to extract the best parts of the conversation, and also to try and link them together with a common thread. Molly and I are both novice interviewers and we probably let people talk for a bit too long without interruption. This sometimes led to a situation where something really interesting or profound was said, but only after two minutes of an initial answer to our question. Just cutting out the good part wouldn’t have made much sense in the flow of conversation, so a bit of juggling was necessary. You can rearrange things “in the edit”, or even record a new question to put in place - which we did - but it would be much better to capture things in the moment.

In terms of logistics, I used Audacity as it’s free and did what I needed. I listened through once to add comments and then made notes on which parts I wanted to include. Once the cuts had been mostly finalised we recorded voiceover introductions, outros and any remaining questions or explanations we wanted to include. Finally those, along with the theme tune and sound effects were added in.

Lesson

In the future I would strongly consider paying a professional to do the editing. I think for little things like matching up background music to the intro, getting the right level of noise cancellation/balancing and a few other things, this would be money well spent.

Things take time

All good things take time, and with this project, it often seemed like there were more important things to do. I’m an engineer, so podcasts aren’t really in my job description, which sometimes meant I felt a bit apologetic for taking time to work on this. As people, we are often also prone to optimism in our estimates, and several times we agreed timelines which sounded thoroughly reasonable but which ended up slipping - mostly for other sensible reasons!

Having said that, some things shouldn’t be rushed. Among those, I would count getting the right logo and the editing! We did use the extra time well, to plan ahead and set things up and I think we were able to give ourselves better estimates as we concluded the first series!

Lesson

It’s okay when things take time to get done and there are often good reasons. Try to under-sell and over-deliver - especially when the conversation and deadlines are mostly being handled by yourselves!

It’s OK to be keen!

Maybe this is a British thing, amybe it’s an engineering thing, but there have been times when it felt like Molly and I were really the only people who believed this was a good idea! I spoke at our software engineering away day last year in an attempt to get people to volunteer as guests. Perhaps this was ambitious; despite some positive comments we didn’t get any volunteers, although we did end up talking to two people from this group - I am very thankful to them!

This sort of response can be a bit demoralising but if I had a good engineering idea which was different than what had been done before, I certainly wouldn’t let the initial response stop me! So it is alright to be your own cheerleader! And I hope that by thinking a bit outside the box and being unapologetically enthusiastic about this project, others might do the same in the future.

Lesson

Just go for it!