Heya Folks,

We wanted to let you know what we’ve been up to with the Fragmented podcast lately. Don’t worry, all things below are good for you as the listener.

You may or may not have noticed that the episode length has been getting gradually shorter. We’re trying to get it under 40 minutes.

Why under 40 minutes?

Well, simply because we’ve heard nothing but good things about all of our shorter episodes. Plus, research shows that the optimal length of a podcast is somewhere in the realm of 22 minutes.

Ha. 22 minutes. That’s funny.

Have you ever tried explaining a complex topic like dependency injection in 22 minutes, with an intro and outro? Yeah, probably not going to happen … and if we did try to do it … well … the show would be as dry as scarfing down an entire bag of saltines without a gulp of water … #knowwhatwemean? For us, we’re finding that an action packed episode comes somewhere between 30-40 minutes (sometimes over – it is what it is).

Secondly, the shorter fragment episodes are coming back. We’ve taken a short break from fragments to re-identify our strategy with them. We’re still going to cover the Effective Java series, but we’re going to sprinkle those in with other Fragments we want to do. We learned that the listeners really loved the super actionable content like we had in episode 12 (Continuous Integration and Collective Code Ownership). Therefore we’re going to do more of those kind of fragment episodes with Effective Java fragments episodes sprinkled in here and there – think of them like cute little surprise Android cupcakes that you occasionally run into <– See what we did there? Cupcake, Android, get it? .. Ok, stop throwing tomatoes – we get it, we admit … it was a bad joke… :)

Lastly, we’ve decided to join the Spec.FM network. This is the same network that is the home to many other great podcasts, such as – Developer Tea, Design Details, Immutable, Does Not Compute and more.

Why are we joining a network? Simply put – they help us get content out faster and handle a bunch of the administrative workload that we have to deal with. With this extra help we can focus more on the show, the content and getting more episodes out to you folks much faster and efficiently.

What does that mean for you as a listener?

More awesome of course! Hopefully, you notice anything but better content and more frequent releases. That said, we’ve already started moving our feeds over to our new podcast media host at Spec.FM. Hopefully, your podcatcher realizes this and does not double up episodes for you. If it does, let us know so we can try to remedy the situation for others.

Joining a network also helps us out on the admin side too, especially in an area we’re not too versed in … let us explain. There’s an old saying that we’re all familiar with – Time is money. This is also the case with the podcast.

We LOVE doing the podcast, so much in fact that we’d probably both do it full time if we could.

Unfortunately, that’s not possible as we don’t make anything off of the show. It’s actually the opposite – it costs us a bit of cash to keep this thing going. Not that we’re going broke, but it definitely does make the “time is money” adage ring true. That said, we have had quite a bit of interest from companies who have offered to sponsored the show. We tried to figure out how that would look and how it would work and how to set that up. Long story short – we’re not good ad salesmen. We’re good developers (we think … err … we hope we are … Kaushik … we’re good dev’s right ?? … man … I hope so … anyway …).

Spec.FM will help us with some advertising spots on the show. Here’s the thing though, we will only be advertising things we feel our listeners can get value out of. Therefore, you won’t see us advertising used cars, enhancement pills or mortgage deals (wow, that combo of keywords should put us on some spam lists….). The only time an ad will be on our show is when we approve it and feel that listeners could possibly benefit from the product in the ad.

We hope these small, incremental changes help improve the podcast in the long run. <– See what we did there again? Small. Incremental. Just like software! Iterative … releases … Ugh… yeah … bad joke again. Hey, we tried. :)

As always, if you have any questions, let us know, we’d love to hear from you.

Hugs and bunnies and robots and stuff, your Android ear-bud buddies (say that 10 times fast) –

Donn & Kaushik