Herein you’ll find articles on a very wide variety of topics about technology in the consumer space (mostly) and items of personal interest to me. I have also participated in and created several podcasts most notably Pragmatic and Causality and all of my podcasts can be found at The Engineered Network.
Setting The Bar High
All things come to an end.
Over a year ago, fan of the show and future regular guest-host Marco Arment said to me that I’d probably last another 20 episodes before I burned out. Well, he was wrong about the duration but…
It’s time to end Pragmatic.
There are so many reasons why it’s hard to know where to start. Let’s be clear though: it isn’t for the want of topics to dive into. There are plenty of things left to discuss.
Ultimately though I’m a professional engineer - that’s what my job is - not podcasting and not teaching. I did this because I thought it would be fun and for vast majority of the time it was. Truth is though, I’m burning through my personal time doing something that’s more and more of a chore each week.
Fundamentally in order to be a show I’m proud of I need to put a lot of time into prep and it just wasn’t happening due to site development/improvements, family and increasing work pressures and in recent months I think it’s showed. I’d set the bar high for myself and that wasn’t hard to maintain for a few months, but it became harder with every subsequent month to continue and I won’t persist in creating something I believe is sub-standard under the same banner just to go through the motions.
I also wanted to create something that wasn’t just a bunch of guys offering their opinions about technology, games, movies, TV Shows or comic books. I wanted to add value, to make a difference, to help other people to make pragmatic choices that fitted the real-world use cases, not emotionally and opinion-driven choices, picking to pieces the more ridiculous conjectures and speculative rumours that seem to prevail elsewhere in this bubble.
I’m not convinced I succeeded all or even most of the time but at least I tried rather than just blindly copying the tired and tedious podcast formulae in this tech-bubble of ours. I resisted the urge to make it “more normal” just to get more or higher-paying sponsors, be on a big network etc and rather, I chose to do it my way.
Those choices have cost me listeners (believe me, I heard from them) and whilst some lament that in this podcast space “we all sound the same” I was determined NOT to be one of those shows, consequences be damned.
I honestly believe that splitting out show follow-up into separate episodes, minimising chat-room disruption by having a Q&A after the live show and not tackling “news of the week” topics made Pragmatic a far better podcast than most in the Tech Sphere. Certainly one of the most focussed you’ll find.
But here’s the rub: It’s not about what I believe and the truth is that the vast majority of listeners aren’t interested in a show structured like Pragmatic.
I’m not an entertainer. I’m an engineer. I make things work. I fix broken things. I solve problems.
It’s high time I got back to focussing on that.
The last episode will be posted at the end of March, 2015 and I will keep the feed up for a few months after that. At the end there will have been 63 episodes in total not including follow-up spread over a year and a half.
To the shows sponsors I am truly grateful for your support but I’d like to specifically call out James Smith of LIFX, Rob Griffiths of Many Tricks and Matthew Philips of Sapient-Pair for your continued, unflinching support of both the podcast and myself.
To my two primary co-hosts during the course of the show, Ben Alexander (thank you for giving me a chance even though I know you considered it a long shot at the pitch) and more recently to Vic Hudson (thank you for putting up with my neuroses).
To my guest-hosts thank you all but especially to Marco Arment, Russell Ivanovic, Joel Housman, Seth Clifford and Guy English for your friendships beyond just recording the episodes you appeared on.
To my super fans who would write every week, tweet at me all the time and basically were the high-point of making the show: My most heartfelt thanks you. Though a special mention to Russ Newcomer, Tristan Lostroch, Nicholas Radcliffe, Kyre Lahtinen, Clinton Philips, Ali Marton, Dave Liggat, Scott Willsey and Jarrod Whaley, though to be fair there were too many to list: You know who you are.
Whilst Pragmatic will soon be over that doesn’t mean I’m giving up podcasting completely as I intend to reboot Tangential in coming months. I’ll also be writing more on the site and spending more time on Enginerd and a new coffee-specific site section in coming months.
To my loyal listeners thank you for sticking with me, and thank you for trying something different.
Pragmatic and TechDistortion Stickers
At the request of many listeners and readers and with the help of StickerMule I’ve put up four official stickers to choose from (prices in USD):
| Pragmatic | TechDistortion | Qty1 | Qty5/ea | Qty10/ea |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small | Small | $3 | $2.08 | $1.77 |
| Large | Large | $5 | $3.52 | $3.02 |
Shipping within the USA is free however International is $6 via USPS and shipping for small sizes only increases beyond a quantity of 25 so why not grab a few since the average price drops considerably as quantity increases.
This would not be possible without the StickerMule Marketplace as they basically handle everything for me so I am grateful for their service.
Enjoy :)
A Fresher Look
The last site redesign was about a year ago when I moved from WordPress to Statamic and was based on the Statamic Denali Theme which was the only one available at the time. Over the past year I’ve hacked and twisted that theme beyond all recognition and looking back, it had become bloated. Hence I’ve decided it’s time to revamp the site and strip out the cruft.
The new site layout no longer includes voting since, with many thanks to fans of Pragmatic I now have more than enough topic suggestions to keep the show going beyond 100 episodes. I’ll be gradually covering them off over the course of the next year or so.
Also the membership portion and newsletter are on hold for a little while due to a busy time at work and they were slowing the site down considerably the way I needed to implement them due to Statamic restrictions at the time. Now Statamic have finally added a bunch of new membership features I will eventually roll them back in as time permits provided they don’t hinder performance.
In its new, leaner and meaner layout, despite now being hosted on a VPS with 1/4 the memory using spinning platters and not SSDs and 1/3rd the HDD space, the site is running 2-3x faster overall.
Digital Ocean has been great but now I’m trying out CloudShards and so far it’s handled peak load of a new episode of the podcast going up and standard week of other site traffic: So far so good.
I’ll be tweaking little details over the coming weeks but as always if you have any feedback please let me know via the feedback form.
Enjoy.
Pragmatic T-Shirts
Like so many before me and with some prompting from fans of the show as of today the first ever Pragmatic T-Shirt is available for sale through TeeSpring.
There is a choice of mens and womens and for those unfamiliar with the way TeeSpring works, it’s a bit like a Kickstarter for shirts - if we don’t make the minimum sales goal: no-one gets charged and we all move on shirtless (though we hope you still have other shirts laying around the house).
That said I’ve set a low sales goal to avoid disappointment for those that really do want one. I didn’t pick the crummiest shirts available, I picked nicer ones in the middle-range that I’ve heard good things about.
The campaign will end on the 11th of February, 2015 so grab them while you can.