A very useful idea was hidden in the last line of Henrik Warne’s book recession at Amazon on the book “Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior”. He mentioned: “Also, if you’re interested in this book, check out episode 131 at Software Engineering Radio. That podcast is an interview with Tom DeMarco and Peter Hruschka about this book, and it is well worth listening to.”

Oh – I thought, what is that? Software Engineering Radio? The answer to this was in Wikipedia – so it is a radio on podcast founded in Jan 2006 by the German Markus Völter, who is an independant Software Engineer. The podcasts are about 40-60 minutes long and are published every fortnight. Find more in their page: http://www.se-radio.net/about-software-engineering-radio: “ Software Engineering Radio is a podcast targeted at the professional software developer. The goal is to be a lasting educational resource, not a newscast. Every ten days, a new episode is published that covers all topics software engineering. Episodes are either tutorials on a specific topic, or an interview with a well-known character from the software engineering world.”

Have a try and listen to the writers of the book:  Tom De Marco und Peter Hruschka an interview with  Marcus Völter.  You have no time? No problem, free download of the MP3 version  for your next trip.

Why I like that? I do training on this topic for the past 7 years and I am facilitating the process of “get out your experience and tell us about it” with senior and junior engineers from construction business. We use a dialogue simulation for that and if I ask the right questions and do not give up on the subjects why … we sometimes get very good results in thinking about: What happened? Why did it happen?  and Can I use my old experience to make decisions in this context? …

My question: Can we use podcasts to keep this stories and make our experience available to other people? Is a 46 minute podcast about the book better than order it and never read it? Can we use the podcast idea to work in other fields than IT? Maybe I will do some interviews with experts and publish it on my blog – we will see if I find an IT friend to help me 