With heavy heart 💔, I must officially announce that I’m sunsetting
JavaScript Air. If you haven’t heard of JavaScript
Air (I’m surprised you’re even reading this), it’s the live broadcast
podcast all about JavaScript and the web platform. Learn more about the
background
here.
On November 2nd, we’ll have our last show with
Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript. It’s
poetic because he was on our very first show as well.
If you haven’t watched that one, I definitely recommend it!
A lot of people are asking me why I’m sunsetting the show. Why don’t I just hand
it off (like I did with AngularAir)? Why don’t I just
reduce the frequency to every other week or once a month? Why change anything at
all? Things are going so well!
I’ve been podcasting for about two years now. It’s been a ton of fun. I’ve been
able to talk to a lot of really interesting people about a lot of really
interesting things. And I’ve been able to share those conversations with the
community which makes it that much more awesome! I’ve learned a lot from these
chats with people. And the process of building a show (the website, the
community building, the automation for production) has been an awesome learning
experience as well.
So why am I sunsetting the show? Well, the other day, my wife took the kids to a
concert and all I had to do was clean the kitchen really quick so I could start
working on a project I am really excited about. Then, I realized that I had to
do some planning for the upcoming JavaScript Air show. That was the moment I
realized that there are some other things that I’m more interested in doing with
my time. This isn’t an isolated incident. I’ve actually been feeling this way
for months. I’ve been neglecting my contributing to Open Source, egghead.io,
etc. because I had to do the leg work of preparing for and producing JavaScript
Air shows.
Since I announced the sunset, I’ve had several people offer to do everything for
me, just so I can continue hosting the show. While I’m super grateful to these
people, it’s just not something that I’m interested in doing right now. I have a
very high attention to detail and worry that I’d end up micro-managing anyone I
hired to do the behind-the-scenes stuff for the show, which would end up taking
more time. I’m just not in a place right now to do that.
I wouldn’t say that I’m totally killing the show. Everything’s just going to
stop going for a while. It is definitely possible that I’ll start it up again in
the future. This is one of the reasons that I’m not handing it off to someone
else to do for me. So keep following
@JavaScriptAir on Twitter and you may see
some tweets coming from the account eventually.
If you’re interested in what I’m doing next, I plan on doing more stuff for
egghead.io,
Frontend Masters, and I have
a project
that I’m working on and I’m really excited about.
Follow me on twitter to keep up with that 🙂
P.S.
The show actually was a bit of a financial burden and it turns out that I didn’t
charge sponsors enough to cover the costs for wrapping things up for the show.
Poor planning on my part. It was never my goal to make money from the show:
If JavaScript Air helped you at all, and you feel so inclined, a small donation
would be appreciated:
P.P.S
If you’re looking for other good podcasts,
here’s a list
on my AMA of the podcasts that I listen to.
