Contents
For about a year, starting in early 2019, we made a weekly podcast. The SwiftCase Productivity Podcast ran past episode ninety before it stopped in 2020.
It has been finished for a while, and the site has been quietly pretending otherwise. Dozens of episode pages sat in the blog, each one a couple of paragraphs of summary wrapped around an embedded video, none of them any use to somebody who arrived from a search engine. This note replaces them.
What it was
Two or three of us, once a week, arguing about whatever had come up that fortnight in the business or in the news. Topics ranged wider than the name suggests:
Whether printers in the workplace serve any remaining purpose. Whether Google's search engine was quietly sabotaging small businesses. What happens to work as the retirement age climbs. Whether email is finished. Starting a side business. The four-day week. An interview with an investor and mentor about building companies.
Some of it holds up. Some of it is very obviously a conversation recorded before 2020 happened.
Where the episodes are
Every episode was published as video, so the recordings live on our YouTube channel rather than here. Nothing has been deleted. If you came looking for a specific episode, that is where to find it.
What has gone is the set of thin summary pages on this site. Each was fifty to two hundred words of description around a video embed, which is a page that helps nobody. Search engines could not index the actual content, because the content was audio. Readers arriving on one got a paragraph and a player.
Those URLs now point at this page.
Why we stopped, and why we are not restarting it
A weekly podcast is a weekly commitment, and ours competed with building the platform. When the two collided, the podcast lost, which was the correct call and also the reason it ended without an announcement.
There was an argument for reviving the archive instead of retiring it: transcribe every episode, and thirty hours of conversation becomes thirty pages of indexable text. We considered it seriously. The reason we decided against it is that most of what we said in 2019 about productivity software has been overtaken, and transcripts of superseded opinions are worse than no transcripts at all. Publishing them would have added ninety pages of content we no longer entirely agree with.
What we publish now
The writing took its place, and it goes deeper than a conversation can. If you liked the podcast, the closest equivalents are:
- Engineering posts, which are the technical arguments we would have had on air
- The changelog, for what actually shipped each month
- Documentation, for how the platform is put together
- Industry insights, for the wider argument about where operations software is going
If you want the podcast back, tell us. Nobody has asked in a while, which is most of the answer.