Commuting to work is something inevitable for me. I’ve been spending nearly three hours a day on my way between home and work. It is almost one fifth of my awake life. Or in other words 40 days in a year. That’s a lot of time to waste.

Aside from reading books and playing games on my phone, I listen to podcasts and watch YouTube videos while commuting to work. In this post I like to share the podcasts I listen and how I watch YouTube videos offline (in the subway).

Podcasts I Like

I am using Pocketcast android app to listen to podcast. It’s a feature-rich, powerful app that makes subscribing to podcasts and setting up automatic downloads a snap. It also syncs across devices and platforms (IOS, Android and web), making it ideal if you move between an Android phone and an iPad.

List of Podcasts I like to listen:

	Android Backstage, a podcast by and for Android developers. Hosted by developers from the Android engineering team, this show covers topics of interest to Android programmers, with in-depth discussions and interviews with engineers on the Android team at Google. http://androidbackstage.blogspot.com
	A panel of Go experts and special guests discuss the Go programming language, the community, and everything in between. Topics include Golang, DevOps, web development, infrastructure, Kubernetes, and more. https://changelog.com/gotime
	Turkish developer podcast where they talk about mostly web technologies and writing good software. http://devpod.org/
	A podcast that covers the Kotlin programming language, as well as related technologies. http://talkingkotlin.com/
	Fragmented is the Android developer podcast where Donn Felker and Kaushik Gopal talk about building good software and becoming better Android developers. http://fragmentedpodcast.com/
	Interviews with people who are making tremendous strides in tech, yet whose stories are seldom heard. Listen to this podcast if you want to know the people behind the technology you use every day. http://mappingthejourney.com/
	Discussions on intentional corporate culture and software management approaches. https://www.infoq.com/culture-methods/podcasts/
	Hanselminutes - Fresh Air for Developers is a weekly talk show that brings interesting people together to talk about the web, culture, education, technology and more. Hosted by Scott Hanselman, this show promises fresh ideas and great people. http://www.hanselminutes.com/
	A Turkish podcast about everything related to life and relations. Two old friends are talking about psychology and everyday life (in a funny way)http://kacikprens.blogspot.com.tr/
	The Java Pub House Off-Heap Podcast brings together the latest tech news for the java professions. Speakers go over the news and current issues and discuss them in depth, bringing the knowledge of a top circle of professionals from Chicago.http://www.javaoffheap.com/
	Software Engineering Radio is a podcast targeted at the professional software developer. The goal is to be a lasting educational resource, not a newscast. Every 10 days, a new episode is published that covers all topics software engineering. Episodes are either tutorials on a specific topic, or an interview with a well-known character from the software engineering world. http://www.se-radio.net/
	This is a video feed of popular and recent TED conferences and TEDx events. http://www.ted.com/talks/list
	A weekly Turkish podcast that talks about all kind of technology news. https://teknoseyir.com/
	A podcast by Thoughtworkers. They usually talk about software development and software development processes. https://www.thoughtworks.com/
	A Turkish podcast about science and skepticism. http://www.acikbilim.com
	The official podcast of the Yalansavar team. They talk about skepticism and critical thinking.

Download Youtube Videos And Watch Them Offline

In the subway I usually watch YouTube videos. Since YouTube does not have an offline video support I have to download videos and copy them to my phone or tablet. There are applications to download YouTube content but as a programmer I prefer this python library to download YouTube content and retrieve metadata.

You can install Pafy with pip installer.

sudo pip install pafy

Here is a simple shell script to download YouTube videos by their urls. Save this file as youtube_download.py.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys
import pafy

url = sys.argv[1]
video = pafy.new(url)
best = video.getbest()
best.download(quiet=False)

For example to download this inspiring talk from Scott Hanselman just type:

youtube_download.py https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS1mnISoG7U

Hope these tips make your commute bearable!