Koodikahvit is a Finnish podcast, in which we gather around a cup of coffee to discuss IT, programming and everything related. I host the podcast with a friend of mine, Pauliina Solanne.
How the idea was born
I met with Pauliina for the first time when Pauliina became a leader of the community for women and people in gender minorities (which I mentioned in my earlier blogpost). In autumn 2019, we started talking about tech podcasts, and how there are not that many in Finnish. That's when we got the idea of our own podcast.
The idea for the podcast was to provide information also for beginners. One of our favorite podcasts in English is Ladybug podcast and we felt like there was room for a similar podcast in Finnish: technical subjects, but also episodes about recruitment and career, studying and working in IT.
Colleagues to the rescue
I knew that we had a meeting room at my workplace which doubles as a recording studio for other podcasts, so we had all equipment we needed there. I have taken a studio recording course in high school, but basically, we had zero experience in recording and especially editing audio. I'm sure you'd like to know about the equipment, but unfortunately I have no idea what they are and I cannot check because we're not supposed to visit the office.
Lucky me, I have amazing colleagues and one of them, Aki Kiminki (producer of multiple podcasts), promised to help to get started with both recording and editing. I also found another colleague of mine, Henry Jalonen who was willing to help. They showed me how to connect everything, how to do a soundcheck, and how to do basic editing after recording. Aki made our theme jingle, too!
We also needed help with the visuals. I could draw a box plot with python, but when it comes to designing a logo, I'm no use there. Pauliina also felt that it's not her area of expertise, but luckily we got help again. This time Pauliina's colleague Niko Salkola, lead designer was more than happy to help us.
In the podcast episodes we have emphasized the importance of a community, and I think the help we got proves it.
Further planning
I and Pauliina have very different backgrounds when it comes to the career. I studied computer science at a university in Finland, Pauliina participated in a bootcamp in Australia. Pauliina has also worked in a different industry before, and I haven't. Despite that, we knew the podcast would provide the most value and insights to the listeners if we had guests. We wanted to have guests with diverse backgrounds and different areas of expertise in IT. We started gathering a list of potential guests.
Another thing we had to decide was the name of the podcast. For me personally, titles are very hard to come up with. It's like naming variables! We finally came up with a name we were very happy with: Koodikahvit. The origin of name Koodikahvit is something I always want to explain since it was not originated by me. Koodikahvit is originally from my workplace, Solita, and it means a get-together, where some technical presentation is given and then the subject is discussed. It's a knowledge sharing session amongst the employees at Solita. That sounds like a perfect name for a tech podcast, amirite?
Current situation
The first episode of Koodikahvit was published in March 2020. We have now published four episodes and have about 3850 listens. Unfortunately, we underestimated how long we're going to have COVID-19 around, and haven't published an episode since July. In the latest episode, we had our first guest, when we were talking about studying computer science at university. We hope to get back to recording soon, but meanwhile, feel free to share tips for remote recording. As I told before, we are not very experienced with recording equipment, so nothing too fancy would be great! We feel that we only got started, and super eager to get new episodes recorded!
And finally, if you speak Finnish, here are links to our current episodes:
- Jakso 0: Mistä kooditaipaleemme alkoi?
- Jakso 1: Koodauksen opiskelu - miten oppia oppimaan?
- Jakso 2: Jatkuva koodarina kehittyminen
- Jakso 3: Alan opiskelu korkeakouluissa
In addition to audioboom, you can listen to the podcast for example on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, but also on many other platforms. Check the one you use when you listen to podcasts!
Also: would you be interested in seeing how it looks like when I edit an episode?
I have written this same blog post published in Finnish, you can find it here.
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