I wasn’t going to say anything until we had another show or two under our belt (for your sake, poor innocent reader!) but Mike let the cat out of the bag. He’s much crueler than I am.

I recently heard a reading of an essay where the author said that the reason children create so much art is that they don’t know that they’re bad at it. That’s so true. And yet I love walking through my 4-year old daughter’s pre-school looking at the dozens and dozens of masterpieces posted on the walls.

There is something about society, peer pressure, fear of failure, etc. that keeps us from trying things because we’re not good at it. “I wish I was good at that,” we tell ourselves. But we get into a race condition where we demand excellence from ourselves before we can start, yet we need to start to achieve that excellence.

Enough psychobabble – what am I getting at, anyway? It’s the Aaron and Mike Show. My friend and coworker Mike and I decided we’d take no more than 15 minutes on a Thursday afternoon (4PM EST) and broadcast a “show” LIVE right from my office. We’ll talk about software and the craft of building software. Imagine it like an even shorter Hanselminutes. Not the Hanselminutes of late, which are just interviews, nay, it’s more like the old-school Hanselminutes from way back yonder when Scott was building products for Corillian and talked about the real development challenges he faced every day. (Both styles of Hanselminutes are good, but each serves/served a different purpose.)

Mike and I will be talking about the development challenges we run across every day, as well as the kinds of things we are continually doing to improve our skill at the craft of software. It’ll be hard to fit it into 15 minutes but we will do our best. Each show will be recorded, so if you can’t make it to the live show, you can still see the recorded version later, and I’ll put up a blog post for each show with notes, follow-ups, etc.

Our first show (view it here) was SPECTACULAR! Just look at the kind of feedback we received:

I expect this to be spectacularly lame (getting popcorn)
- subdigital

thanks for your first show! Looks nice, a bit flaky though. But the effort is much appreciated. We all should start doing this!
The deep insights you guys raised OTOH completely made up for the flakiness
- azuidhof (2nd tweet)

Okay, so it was a little rough. But we’re new at this, we had fun doing it, and I’m looking forward to getting better as we go along.

View the video here 

Please leave us feedback with ideas of what you’d like us to talk about. You can leave a comment on this post if you like. We’ll be having the occasional guest on the show (our co-workers) to share something going on in their world of software.

My main question for you is, will you still respect me in the morning?

1. Mike Hall Says:
   October 24th, 2008 at 10:56 pm

   No.

2. Dew Drop - October 25, 2008 | Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew Says:
   October 25th, 2008 at 8:42 am

   [...] The Aaron and Mike Show (Aaron Lerch) [...]

3. Aaron King Says:
   October 29th, 2008 at 9:36 am

   Nice first show. I don’t get to catch your show live. I think a good topic for .NET would be a PIP app or other webcam api’s out there. It seems like guys are having reall fun with webcams today. like at http://www.codeplex.com/touchless