008: Pocket Casts Amazingness with Philip Simpson

In this episode, we talk to Philip Simpson, one of the rockstar developers of the amazing Pocket Casts Android Application. We learn about how Philip and his partner, Russell, started Shifty Jelly and how they grew their team from a two-person shop to a small staff all while creating one of top apps on Google Play, Pocket Casts. We also talk about some of the tools, tips and tricks that they’ve used to help them scale, grow and become more effective as indie app developers. We eventually hop into some deep talk about audio software and all kinds of tech in general. If you’ve always wondered what it takes to be an indie app developer then this is the episode for you – Philip does not let us down.

Show Notes

• Pocket Casts
• Pocket Weather (for Australia) [play.google.com]
• Phil’s stuff
  • LG 34” Ultrawide curved monitor (that Phil uses) [amazon.com]
  • device test lab [twitter.com]
  • Android cheatsheet [gist.github.com]
  • Audio effects and features in Pocket Casts [blog.shiftyjelly.com]
• Marco Arment
  • Accidental Tech Podcast [minute 1:10 he talks of using Go for podcast feed parsing] [atp.fm]
  • Build and Analyze podcast (now retired) [5by5.tv]
• Pocket Cast Web client [play.pocketcasts.com]
• Pocket cast gets sync [lifehacker.com]
• Pocket Casts supporting service:
  • Pingdom (monitoring uptime)[pingdom.com]
  • MySql
  • Mongo
  • MariaDb
  • HockeyApp
• Android latency:
  • Android latency problem [superpowered.com]
• The Tonight show starring Jimmy Fallon (with Billy Joel) [youtube.com]
  • Looper app (iOS only 🙁 )
• Pocket Casts 3rd party libs
  • Butter Knife
  • Android Universal Image Loader >  Picasso
  • Material Dialog library [github.com]
  • SnackBar [github.com]
  • Mr.Vector (now deprecated) [github.com]
    • Victor by Trello [github.com] (Friend of the show – Dan’s library that we also talked about)
• StartUp podcast (by Gimlet media) [gimletmedia.com]
• Android Device Dashboard (showing OS breakup)

Awesome picks:

Philip:

• Android tool for mac [github.com]
  • Makes it easy to take screenshots, videos, run scripts, bug reports..
• 37 Signals – Getting Real [37signals.com]
  • A book Phil read when we were starting Shifty Jelly

Donn:

• Sidekick By HubSpot [getsidekick.com]
  • Allows you to see when someone has opened your email etc.
• Tim Ferriss Show with Noah Kagan [fourhourworkweek.com]
  • Great productivity hacks for everything and overall great show
• Grammarly Chrome Extension [chrome.google.com]
  • Fix your grammatical errors before the internet fixes them for you.
• 10 Lessons from 4 Years Working Remotely [whenihavetime.com]

Kaushik:

• Custom View Groups– engineer at Facebook [wordpress.com]
• LeakCanary by Square

Contact

Philip Simpson

• @geekygecko [twitter.com]
• shiftyjelly.com
• pocketcasts.com

Donn Felker

• @donnfelker [twitter.com]
• donnfelker.com

Kaushik Gopal

 

• @kaushikgopal [twitter.com]
• kaush.co