About Lastcast

Meet the small team behind Lastcast

Why?

We both love podcasts, and we both love tracking our own data. We use Last.fm to track what music we listen to and Trakt.fm to track what movies and TV shows we watch. We are devoted fans of both services ever since they launched, and we often jokingly complained that someone should build "Trakt for podcasts". It only took us a few years and doing another fun little project together before we realized that we're both software engineers and could just fill that niche ourselves.

We love doing things with our data – one of Philipp's many weekend projects is PasteMyTaste, which gives you an easily sharable snippet of what you listened to recently. Our passion for tracking the data in our lives goes beyond music, tv and podcasts, though. Manuel go into greater detail about what and how he's tracking himself in his talk about it.

Lastcast is nowhere near as refined, polished and feature-complete as either Last.fm or Trakt.tv are. It's our little passion project, currently in a state where we both can use it productively. Besides building it simply because we wanted to have something like it, we also used it as an opportunity to build something together and as a learning experience. The site is built with Ruby on Rails, which is not the natural habitat for either of us. It's a fun experience, but it also means that bringing our A game can take us a little longer than we're used to. Please be forgiving of kinks we didn't get to iron out yet – and let us know about them! We're always trying to improve.

Finally, there's no hidden business model, exit strategy, creepy tracking (see our privacy policy) or piles of VC cash behind any of this. Just two people building something they want to exist. Nothing would make us happier than Lastcast being useful to anyone else as well.

The Team

Philipp's profile picture'

Philipp Defner

Backend Engineer, currenty located in Berlin, Germany. You can find me on Twitter, Lastcast and other places.

Manuel's profile picture'

Manuel Grabowski

DevOps Lead, currently located in Passau, Germany. I'm on Twitter, Trakt, my blog and elsewhere on the interwebs. And here on Lastcast, of course.