Optimizing your Daily Commute [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicates:
Road trip listening material
What are the best podcasts

I'm going to be moving soon to a job that, in a first for me, contains a serious commute. I'm going to have about 40 min to myself every morning and every evening in the car. I've heard stories of people who have put that time to very good use; a cousin of mine taught herself German, for example. The question is:

What is the best way to make use of approximately 80 minutes a day to grow your skills as a software developer? It must be something suited to the commute; that means no looking and hands-free. Be as specific as possible; if its listening to podcasts, WHICH podcasts? Why? Lecture series? From where? Audiobooks? What are good sources? etc.

Answer 1

@GWL: Relax mate, you dont have to force every waking moment of your life to improve yourself as a programmer. Listen to music that can be relaxing :-) If you insist you might download a audio version of Google Tech Talks from youtube or Videos on Yahoo.developer to hear along the way.

Answer 2

Any activity which would anyhow improve your programming skills, would require some of your mental processing power. And this will result in your loss of attention on the road. The best you don't try anything.

Ah yes, and hands-free are forbidden in some countries.

But! You can find a coworker that drives the same way. You'll be able to cut your costs double and one of you will be completely free to do whatever he wants (almost).

SAP employees in Germany for instance take active use of this option to save on costs and car wear.

Answer 3

I used to commute 2.5-3 hours a day in a car, often in stop-and-go traffic, to a stressful job.

Podcasts saved my sanity.

I needed something I could tune out when traffic got bad, but that was engaging enough that I could focus on it and not fret about work. Music was certainly the former, but not the latter. Since I was also working 60-70 hour weeks, this was my down time, and I didn't want to listen to more stuff about programming or technology.

So I grabbed a bunch of free podcasts that sounded fun off iTunes. Here's some of what I listened to:

• The History of Rome is both solidly factual and gossipy. Did you know the greatest naval loss of life in history occurred during the Second Punic War? 400,000 soldiers and sailors in one storm because the generals ignored the old salts ("Eh, general, thar's a nor-easter a-fixin' ta blow." "That's very nice. Now go away.") That's a fun one to bring up when you want to make a point about a dumb programming decision.

• Dr. Isabelle Pafford's The Roman Empire, which is recordings of a class she taught at UC Berkeley. A nice complement to the other, more academic but also quite lively, and is less of a march through the years, with some special-topics lectures.

• A couple of language podcasts: Annik Rubens' Slow German, to brush up my conversation skills, and an Italian course, which was new to me.

• A couple of lecture series from Oxford on philosophy. They helped me realize I believe in "virtue ethics", which has led me to start reading Aristotle.

Best of luck!

Answer 4

If you are in an active commute, which is that you are behind the steering wheel, then podcasts and audiobooks are your friends.

Generic Programming/ Tech: http://thisdeveloperslife.com/

DotNet
Dotnetrocks

Answer 5

I have a subscription to audible.com. I usually am listening to one book in my car, and another book when walking over a 2-mile route. I vary between non-fiction books and fiction. There are around 400 books and magazine articles listed at audible.com under the keyword computer.

One that I enjoyed a while back was ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer.

Answer 6

This question lists some good podcasts, but be warned they're something of a crapshoot in the car. Some are made with strong enough production values that they can compete with the road noise (engine, wind, etc.), and others really aren't.

I tried listening to Software Engineering Radio during a lengthy road trip last month, and ... gyah. One of the recent episodes (the JUnit one?) featured a guest who started every answer LEANING VERY CLOSE TO THE MICROPHONE and then leaning away from it as he kept speaking. If the volume was high enough for me to hear the bulk of his answer, it was literally painful WHEN HE INEVITABLY LEANED BACK IN; if it was low enough for him to not hurt me, I couldn't hear what the hell he was saying.

I don't know what precisely you do in post-production to fix problems like that, but these guys need to start doing it. In the meantime, I went with Choice C: dumping the episode and listening to the Savage Love podcast instead.

So, yeah. Podcasts are potentially good. But you may need to experiment to find ones that work for you.

Answer 7

I like to listen to CBC's Spark podcast.

The topics are probably not new to anyone reading this forum. The things I find interesting is how the topics are presented. The show is intended for a general audience without extensive technical skills so the topics are usually pretty basic. The thing that interests me about the show is how to present technical topics to non-technical people. Whenever I need to explain something to a business major or my girlfriend I borrow metaphors from the show.

As an added bonus the host, Nora Young is actually quite pleasant and entertaining.

Last week they were talking about IPv6 and why we need it. They used an extended but entertaining telephone metaphor during the show. Now whenever I explain what an IP address is (to business majors) I just say: "it is like a telephone number that computers use to call each other". Easy one sentence description.

Why do we need IPv6? We are running out of telephone numbers.

Answer 8

If you can find a public transport route - you can then safely have your hands free and read a book. While there are many great coder podcasts, none of it really compares with reading. Or take the co-worker car-sharing idea - take it in turns...

I do most of my reading on the tube (London Underground)...

Answer 9

Try to carpool with a smart coworker

I started my current job with a really long commute: Cupertino to Emeryville, which was 103.7 miles round trip through two of Silicon Valley's biggest traffic jams.

It turned out to be a positive thing, since I found one of my experienced co-workers was close to my house, and I was his ticket onto the diamond lane if we carpooled.

So, I spend about 2-3 hours a day being tutored by a really smart guy with lots of experience in our work, which really helped me get started.