Daily Source Code

» see dailysourcecode.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Episode 1 exists for a boring reason. In August 2004 a handful of people were writing software that would check an RSS feed and pull down whatever MP3 it had attached, and none of them had a feed that reliably published audio to test against. Adam Curry made one. The first edition went out on 13 August 2004, and the show was named after the thing it was for: a daily source of code to run against.

What it became was an hour of Curry talking. He played tracks from the Podsafe Music Network, read out voicemails from other podcasters, promoted shows nobody had heard of yet, and occasionally handed the microphone to his daughter. The opening was a line an airline pilot had sent him in March 2005, about flying into the future with sixteen million dollars' worth of airplane strapped to a part of his anatomy, which a listener cut into a jingle and mailed back. Curry kept it for the next eight years.

A 40 MB audio file was not something you downloaded for fun in 2004. I was a student then, and an hour of this show cost the better part of an evening on the line, for a man in another country talking about software I was not writing. What I pulled down that year was music, mostly from an internet cafe, and spending that same bandwidth on somebody talking took years to reach me.

~ the record ~

~ the sirius years ~

The audience was real enough that satellite radio bought it. From 1 May 2005 Sirius carried Adam Curry's PodShow, with the Daily Source Code at the center of it, and the contract ran until May 2007. In the same stretch Curry co-founded Podshow Inc. in San Francisco with Ron Bloom and raised $8.85 million from Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia, which was serious money for a format most people could not yet define.

The show's single best moment was not his. At All Things D3 in May 2005, Steve Jobs previewed podcasting support in iTunes and played episode 180 to the room, with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg beside him. Curry, unaware he was about to be demonstrated, had spent part of that episode swearing about Apple products. More than 500,000 people were subscribed by the peak, and the Financial Times was writing about him three years later.

~ the crypto episode ~

Episode 863 went out on 13 May 2011 under the title "FUBAR Friday BitCoin Blast Off." Bitcoin was eighteen months old and worth a few dollars, and Curry spent part of a music show talking about it. The episode got a second life years later among people who collect early Bitcoin mentions, which is how a throwaway Friday broadcast became the most circulated recording in the archive.

~ the wrong date ~

By February 2009 Curry had started No Agenda with John Dvorak and the Daily Source Code went intermittent, then stopped. He brought it back on 19 March 2010 at episode 822 as a music show, then announced on No Agenda that he would not keep it up, worried about copyright exposure on the tracks. Episode 866 came out in August 2012. Episode 867 was published on 30 November 2013 and nothing followed it.

The databases disagree. Wikidata records the show's end as 21 November 2019, which is the date somebody called iamtruckertwotimes uploaded a copy of episode 863 to TalkShoe, where Apple's directory indexed it as a one-track podcast. The real episode 863 is dated 13 May 2011 in the restoration project that a listener has been assembling from scattered files since Curry started asking publicly for the archive to be made listenable again. A podcast that invented the format got its death certificate written by a re-upload.

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