State of the podcasts

Kristin Stephens-Martinez
2 min readDec 24, 2021

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Given that I have a podcast (The CS-Ed podcast), it should come as no surprise that I listen to many podcasts. So I thought I’d try something that I will call “State of the Podcasts.” This post will announce how to learn about all of the podcasts I listen to, and maybe I’ll write future posts on how my listening evolves. I hope that sharing this can serve as a resource for potential podcasts that others find helpful or interesting.

[This article is also posted on my personal blog, so it is freely accessible.]

For a proper citation, I got this idea from the Cortex podcast that does a yearly “State of the Apps” episode discussing the apps they often use. I like that podcast for discovering potential apps that I might find helpful to include in my workflow. CGP Grey does a lot of research for his work, and I feel like our brains are wired similarly. So while much of what they use does not apply (I’m not a YouTuber nor multi-podcaster creator like they are), it is still a valuable episode for me. For example, I learned about https://obsidian.md/ from them, and I love it for taking notes and dumping as much of my brain into it as I want.

However, I don’t think a long laundry list of podcasts makes a good experience. So I created a Trello board of the podcasts I listen to! Those that have read my blogs posts on how I use it to track my personal to-do list and teaching to-do list know how much I love Trello. Each card on the board is a podcast and includes a title, website, a short description of what I think of the podcast, and tags describing what the podcast is about.

I organized the Trello board in two primary ways. First, each list is a category in terms of how often I listen to the podcast. Second, tags about the podcast are Trello labels. A third layer of organization on top is whether the podcast is still ongoing or complete. I spun out into a different list of the completed podcasts, which I really liked. Otherwise, I added a label called “ongoing” or “complete” in black to represent that podcast’s status.

To explore the board, I recommend going through a list or going to the top right and using the filter. The filter will let you reduce the cards down to that label(s), so if you are only interested in the education or computer science podcasts I listen to, you aren’t distracted by the economics or parenting ones (yes, I listen to a lot of different stuff).

I hope you find the Trello board helpful!

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Kristin Stephens-Martinez

Creator and host of The CS-Ed Podcast https://csedpodcast.org/ Associate Professor of the Practice in Computer Science at Duke University.