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:
This email I just sent to one of the #JavaScriptAir sponsors embodies my feelings about sponsors for the show well.
If JavaScript Air helped you at all, and you feel so inclined, a small donation would be appreciated:
💛 If you'd like to help with this (👆) as @marcusnielsen suggested, go here: jsair.io/donate @kentcdodds will really appreciate it! 💛
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.
