I said I wanted to make this podcast in the open, so in the open I shall be.
I did a major screw up last week. Like, near catastrophic as far as podcasts go. About as bad as you could get, really.
Now, I’m taking full responsibility for this screw up, but it has been pointed out to me that this is due, at least in part, to poor interface design. And, as a show about the humans behind the code, well, I think this is an opportunity to learn. Probably.
Last week, I happened to notice that Streamyard (the service I use to record the podcast) was telling me I was low on storage space. If I’m remembering correctly, it was actually warning me that it wouldn’t record new episodes because…storage. Since the podcast started, I’ve been keeping recordings on Streamyard so I could go back to them, download the files, generate the AI clips (Streamyard does an okay job of these), and generally have a log. So, I wasn’t paying attention to how much space it was taking up (in these days of cloud storage, who does, even?), so it seemed reasonable that maybe it was getting out of hand and I should clean things up. And there was an option to delete all saved recordings. And this seemed okay at the time.
Likely, I was operating on fewer brain cells than normal. It’s been busy in the leadup and aftermath of WordCamp US and my thought process went something like, they’re already recorded and done, so we should be fine. I completely forgot about the fact that there were multiple (four, to be precise) episodes that were recorded that I had not yet downloaded and prepared for release.
When I realized that — today, in fact — my blood drained from my face. This is a classic “I didn’t have a backup” problem. And Streamyard’s support pages helpfully told me that when you delete a recording, it’s gone for good. (As a technical person, I realize this is unlikely to actually be the case…it’s probably cached somewhere, but if their docs say it’s gone, attempting to push that and get the recordings back is unlikely to get very far.) Thanks, Streamyard.
The featured image in this post isn’t the exact expression I made, but it might be close.
So, I’ve reached out to those four guests. It’s going to be very interesting having another hangout sesh with them after already doing it once. It’s probably helpful that I probably don’t remember precisely what we talked about. 😅 But I’m looking forward to chatting with them again, and sharing their stories with you. And I’m going to make a plan to download things early so I don’t run into this again.
In the end, while deleting unpublished recorded episodes of a podcast is probably about as catastrophic a failure for a podcast as you can get, I’m optimistic and I’m going to take this one on the chin. Yeah, I screwed up, but I still have at least a couple things lined up, including a re-recording of one of those lost four, and I know things could be far worse.
When’s the last time you screwed up, you knew you screwed up, and you had to figure out a way to climb out of the hole you dug yourself?
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