Once, I had tried to listen to an audiobook about Python. Shortly into the audiobook when the narrator began to vocalize long strands of code, I realized that I couldn’t listen to programming audiobooks. I needed to read it with my own eyes.

But what if I wanted to just…hear stuff…about programming and learn anyway? Sometimes, that’s fun. And that’s exactly when podcasts come in handy.

I was nervous to search on for a programming podcast because of my previous audiobook experience, but the I stumbled upon a show called Programming Throwdown.

I love this podcast for so many reasons, but specifically, as a self-learner, it is so valuable and enormously helpful to simply listen to highly experienced people in this field speak. I missed out on what students who study this in school gain from the community of school–people to talk to about programming.

Patrick Wheeler and Jason Gauci are so intelligent and fun. There’s plenty to learn in each episode. Just this week alone, I’ve been able to have my mind exposed to a lot of theories and concepts in programming that I hadn’t learned about before. For example, whereas I’ve taken a course in how to build a chat bot with AI, I hadn’t really had a formal, programming-based theory class on AI. But there was an episode on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the conversation was very helpful in explaining the theory behind neural networks. It was nice to compare this to the experience I had building a neural network for a chatbot.

Another valuable aspect about this podcast is that it is not language specific. Meaning, I can listen to episodes about a specific language, or about concepts that are not language specific. Hearing the conversations about different languages in a casual yet informative way helps me to approach the subject matter differently. I’m able to gather little nuggets of information that I can then use to springboard into research and projects of my own.

This week alone, I learned that I will need to look into matrix math, C#, and read up some more documentation on some python libraries. The freeform nature of the podcast allows me to learn little bits of information that would be hard to find in a course, like that “Python is slower than C based languages.” A comparison like that would have been hard to learn from the more rigid learning tracks.

If you’re looking for a programming podcast and want to learn more about concepts, I definitely recommend Programming Throwdown! I’ve definitely come to appreciate podcasts even more after finding this one!