#6 How we produce our Data Science Podcast - Holiday Special - DODS

Welcome to the Holiday Special ❄️🎄!

In this festive episode, we're unwrapping the secrets behind the making of "Diaries of a Data Scientist." Join us as we share our journey, the tools we use, and some holiday cheer!

We share our motivation, why we chose the Podcast format and more details about our target audience. This episode is especially interesting if you are working full-time and want to hear how Kate and Jasmin are organizing producing this workshop next to their full-time Data Science employments.

In the following we share all our software and hardware being used to produce our Podcast. All are our personal recommendations and are unpaid-advertisements. For all paid services we pay ourselves 😬

👩🏼‍💻 Software Savvy: The digital tools we use for creating the initial vision of the podcast, recording and editing. From Figma to Riverside, we cover it all.

• Figma for visuals, e.g. Logo, Podcast Cover and Youtube thumbnails.
• ChatGPT with Plus Subscription (roughly 23 € a month) to help us with writing show notes, LinkedIn Posts & Co.
• SMASHINGLOGO for initial inspiration regarding Logos. We did not like them very much and in the end designed a very minimalistic ones ourselves from scratch.
• License Free Font for commercial use to design our logo found here
• Pixabay for a license-free intro and outdo jingle, that plays with every episode. We also checked out the Youtube Audio Library but it was hard to find something that we had in mind.
• Adobe Voice Enhancer, e.g. if you don’t have good mics yet. Free trial.
• Google Account for Storage, Mail, accessing Youtube …
• Notion for our remote-organization, documentation, collecting ideas …
• Riverside.fm for remote audio & video recording of our podcast. This will make it easy to also include guests at a later stage. We also love the AI features. Paid tier (between 15-19 euro a month). We compared this with Zencastrand Squadcast, but liked the very intuitive handling of Riverside and their functionality best.
• GarageBand for editing audio, iMovie for editing video (both are Apple solutions and come out-of-the box with the Macbook)
• Inshot for additional visual editing for socials. We used this only for the trailer and did not see any further need since then.
• Carrd for our Website https://diariesods.carrd.co. It was built within 30 minutes. Absolutely love this for simple business-card like websites!
• LinkedIn for engagement.
• We are publishing our podcast
• Otherwise, we have just created
• BI or Die - the Podcast which was mentioned, where Jasmin was a guest in summer 2023.

🎙️Hardware Heaven: A look at the microphones, headphones & other hardware that brings our podcast to life.

• Condenser USB mic suitable for voice & podcast: Rode NT-USB + . Check out reviews, e.g. on YouTube to find the best mic for you & your budget. Costs between 150 and 170€
• Any Laptop will work: we use MacBook Pro since this is what we had at home. So no need to buy any new devices!
• Headphones for hearing each other without risking echo: Any headphones will work, we use AirPods from Apple, because they are nice & small.
• Any Ring Light or LED Video Light will work. We use: Ring Lights from Amazon (between 80 - 100 €). We are considering switching to square lights to avoid circular reflection in the eyes.

Equipment can really influence the sound quality:

If you want to hear the difference yourself, check out our first episode vs. the current one. In the first episode, we did not have professional mics and used the inbuilt mics of Apple AirPods and Apple AirPods Max respectively. Lastly, we used Adobe Speech Enhancer to improve on the quality. Nevertheless, you can clearly hear the added richness with better mics and not needing post-sound enhancing.

📈 Status 25th December we have 21 Subscribers and 280 clicks on our channel on Youtube.

We use the analytics functions from Spotify for Podcasters and Apple Podcasts to monitor engagement.