CodeChefs

Inspiration

Last year I had the inspiration with my close friend to create a coding podcast site. We had been invited to many talks before, and figured why not just make our own?

We both come from the restaurant industry

Hence CodeChefs

What it does

It's a custom made podcast site, built from scratch. The audio player, hosted assets, the website, etc.

How I built it

It's built using GatsbyJS. Here's an overview of how it's built:

https://www.vincentntang.com/custom-podcast-site-gatsby-react/

Challenges I ran into

We ran into getting support on some Podcasting services. I wrote a blog on this too

Some sites didn't subscribe to our RSS format for whatever reason. ITunes required the most amount of work

https://www.vincentntang.com/writing-custom-rss-gatsby/

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I wrote the site with some help on the audio player

(It wouldn't let us play mp3's between different routes, we ended up using attaching functions to the window to fix it)

Here's what I worked on

Wrote the GatsbyJS infrastructure
Handled the Amazon S3 asset pipeline
Built a custom audio player, with 2x playback speed, record keeper, and audio controls
Distributed this on every major platform

What I learned

I learned how difficult it is to create an intro / outro sound bite for a podcast. We hired 2-3 sound designers, some working on each other files, for generating a 5 second timeclip.

We played around with many ideas with this, to recreate the experience of dining at a restaurant

The audio intro alone probably took several months. We had to pick out what type of sound bed to use, SFX noises etc from various sources. Sometimes we produced assets from youtube instead of freecommons assets