I've learned a lot in 6.5 years building Awesound. Contact me to pick my brain on any of the tech details. I learned a lot of this the hard/slow way (staring at logs, etc.), so I would love to save you time.
Here's a quick high-level list of topics:
Technical
RSS feeds and private RSS feeds and podcast apps
- Persistent cookies in podcast apps (or not)
- Uniquely identifying listeners
- IAB certified stats, de-duplicating listeners
- Quantifying downloads vs. listens
- Spotify confusing track enclosure url with guid, and downloading files repeatedly (major CloudFront bill)
- One-click links to open in podcast apps
- Differences between podcast apps under the hood (e.g., which apps treat 301 redirects as 302, or don't respect the <itunes:private> RSS feed tag)
- Full stack development. Django, Node, serverless.com. jQuery, Bootstrap, Tailwind.css, React, Next.js.
- Transcription
- Text-to-speech
- Heroku (first 12 months, then too expensive!)
AWS
- Services like RDS (Postgres), SQS, AWS Lambda, API Gateway, S3 and CloudFront (incl. authenticated access, signed URLs), Elastic Beanstalk (app and worker environments), CloudWatch
- Reducing monthly spend, setting auto-scaling rules, monitoring health, setting alerts, parsing logs, ensuring uptime (RSS and media back-end receives a LOT of traffic, and spiky traffic at that!)
CloudFlare (security + DNS)
- Firewall security rules, rate-limiting, custom rules
- DNS
- Workers
- Workers KV
- Migrating a live site from Django (AWS) to Next.js (Vercel)
- Deployment, buildbacks (like ffmpeg, on AWS and Heroku), CI, staging / dev environments,
- Security: defending your site from hackers, dealing with bots testing stolen credit cards (especially easy with the old stripe checkout.js v1), dealing with DDOS style scripted downloading of audio files
- Databases, upgrading/migrating databases, indices, caching
- APIs (Mandrill / Mailchimp, Sendgrid, Twilio, FullContact, Stripe, Bannerbear, SoundCloud, Google text-to-speech API, Apple Podcasts / iTunes)
- Webhooks and API integrations with third-party platforms: WooCommerce, Shopify, ClickFunnels, Kartra, Kajabi, Zapier, and others
- Combining no-code tools with code (e.g., automated messages, pre-populated fields, or custom bots) – Crisp.chat, Intercom, collect.chat, TypeForm, Webflow, Zapier
- Subdomains, DNS, cross-site considerations, embedded Awesound audio player on other websites, etc.
Business
- This list is even longer 🤣, will add later…