“I don’t need it. I don’t need it. I definitely don’t need it. I NEED IT.” — SpongeBob SquarePants

Nobody asked for a magazine.

There was no brief, no deadline, no client. Just me, a Canva account, and a feeling I couldn’t quite shake: season 1 of JCast was wrapping up, and I didn’t want it to just… disappear.

Podcasts are strange like that. They live in Spotify playlists and YouTube thumbnails, in the memories of people who maybe listened once on a Monday morning commute. They don’t sit on a shelf. They don’t gather dust. They just float somewhere in the cloud, and sometimes you wonder if they were ever really real.

I wanted something I could hold.

So I made a magazine. Thirty-two pages, A5 format, three copies. One for Viktor. One for Maarten. One for me. Ordered on March 28, 2026. €76.14. Best money I’ve ever spent.

Het verhaal: where it actually started

It started at a coffee machine.

Not in a meeting room, not in a Confluence doc with a proper project plan. At a koffieapparaat, the way most good ideas at work start. Someone asked a question. The question became a conversation. The conversation became: “should we actually make a podcast?”

And Maarten, without hesitating for even a second, said: “Morgen starten we.”

Tomorrow we start.

That was the moment. Not a brainstorm session, not a planning week. Just Maarten, who by the way is the kind of person who would rather spend three hours truly understanding a problem than thirty minutes hacking a solution, deciding in one breath that yes, this was happening.

Here’s the actual timeline of how JCast went from a coffee machine comment to a real thing people actually listened to:

September 30, 2024. The first real brainstorm. What would we talk about? Who would we be? What even is JCast? The answer that stuck: “Java als startpunt, alles daarrond als speelveld.” Java as a starting point, everything around it as a playground. That tagline ended up on the cover of the magazine.

November 4, 2024. The first recording attempt. I say “attempt” because the audio was, generously speaking, not ideal. Euhs everywhere. Microphones that fell off the table. The kind of session that you look back on and think: good that we didn’t publish this one. We didn’t.

December 16, 2024. Take two. The real take. The one we could actually work with.

April 30, 2025. S01E01 goes live. Wat is een professionele ontwikkelaar? What is a professional developer? Uncle Bob, Clean Code, TDD. The big questions. First episode, no guests, just the three of us figuring out how to have a podcast conversation instead of a regular one.

In the first 30 days: 97 downloads. By the time I sat down to write the magazine: 159. And by the time I ordered the print: 925 total, 796 plays, 158 hours of consumption time, +57 followers. A #1 First Episode badge from Spotify. A Global Listeners badge.

For a podcast about Java made by three developers in Diegem with no marketing budget and a recording setup they built themselves, I’m going to say: not bad.

De JCrew: who we actually are

The magazine has a whole chapter on this, which I wrote and then edited approximately seven thousand times because how do you describe people you work with and also genuinely like without it sounding either too corporate or too much like a wedding toast?

Here’s what I landed on for each of us:

Oumaima, that’s me. Someone who loves clarity, challenge, and the “why” behind systems and people. Backend mostly, but frontend too when it needs to happen. CoderDojo volunteer. JTires lead who somehow ended up collecting Pokémon cards alongside the rest of this job. When I wrote my own profile for the magazine I added: “Vijf jaar later: Wat een random cool ding om mee te maken.” Five years later: what a randomly cool thing to be part of.

Viktor Van Steenweghen is what the magazine calls “een brok chaos”, a lump of chaos, but always in on learning something new. He handles the montage, which means he’s the one who sits with the raw recordings and turns three people stumbling over their words into something you’d actually want to listen to. The thing that surprised him most this season? Claude Code. He also plays snooker offline, which I feel like is important context about who Viktor is as a person.

Maarten Casteels is the one who would rather echt understand the problem than quickly get something working. He’s the tech lead energy without the ego about it. In the magazine I wrote: “De beste gesprekken zijn niet altijd de meest voorbereide.” The best conversations aren’t always the most prepared ones. Which is true of JCast in general, but especially of Maarten. Some of our best episodes happened when the plan fell apart and we just talked.

Together, the magazine says, we work “niet ondanks de chaos, maar dankzij.” Not despite the chaos, but because of it. That felt right when I wrote it and it still feels right now.

Een seizoen vol gesprekken: all 12 episodes

Twelve episodes. Twelve weeks of recording, editing, publishing, promoting, and doing it again. Here’s the full season one, because I spent time putting it in the magazine and I want to put it here too.

S01E01 — Wat is een professionele ontwikkelaar? The debut. No guests, just the three of us. Uncle Bob, Clean Code, TDD, the eternal debates about what it even means to be professional at this job. High stakes for a first episode. We went for it anyway.

S01E02 — Clean Architecture Guest: Jeroen Bastijns. The theory got more concrete. What does architecture actually look like in practice, not just in books?

S01E03 — Life as a dev No guest. Just us, talking about what it’s actually like: the day-to-day, the context switching, the things that don’t make it into LinkedIn posts.

S01E04 — Pixel Perfect? UX/UI met Risa Guest: Risa Somers. This was one of my favorites because we genuinely do not talk about design enough as developers and Risa made us think differently about it.

S01E05 — (Audio)Books vs Podcasts No guest. Very meta, given what we were doing. We talked about how we actually learn outside of work.

S01E06 — Java, Soft Skills & Mensenkennis Guest: Björn De Craemer. Soft skills are not soft. We had this conversation properly.

S01E07 — Meetings, stand-ups & agile drama No guest. Cathartic. Everyone who has sat in one too many stand-ups will understand.

S01E08 — Java, AI & de menselijke kant Guest: Jan Van Wassenhove, Devoxx speaker. AI in our field, what it means for the people doing the work. This one felt important.

S01E09 — New year, new dev January energy. Goede voornemens, slechte gewoontes, fresh start vibes.

S01E10 — Meer dan planning Guest: Barbara Cleeren, Capacity Manager. Getting out of the strictly technical zone and into the human side of how teams actually function.

S01E11 — Passie na de werkuren: Sigriet Guest: Sigriet Van Breusegem. Talking about what developers do when they’re not developing. This episode meant a lot to me for reasons that go beyond the podcast.

S01E12 — Seizoensfinale End of season. Wrap-up. The episode where we reflected on what we’d made before the magazine even existed to hold it.

Eight guests across twelve episodes. Topics ranging from clean code to capacity planning to what people do on weekends. A range I’m proud of.

JCast in het wild: the physical stuff

Here’s the part that people who don’t know me might not expect: I care a lot about the physical version of things.

The podcast exists as audio. Fine. That’s the product. But around the product there’s a whole world I built in Canva with absolutely zero design experience, and I will not apologize for enjoying that part of it enormously.

The merch. JCast stickers. A JCast T-shirt. A banner that we actually brought to events. All checked off the bucketlist by the end of season one. I made all of it in Canva, which felt appropriate since Canva is also how I made the magazine, and the episode covers, and basically every visual thing JCast has ever had. You learn by doing. Sometimes the thing you make is good. Sometimes it’s not. The stickers were good.

The website. jcast.dev. This one deserves its own paragraph. Maarten and I built it with no CMS, no plugins, no themes, nothing pre-made. Hugo, pure CSS, hosted on AWS via Terraform. The logic was: if you make a podcast about clean code, you can’t exactly have a messy codebase behind it. Viktor handled the montage while we built the site, and then at some point the blog showed up too. Not right away. First there had to be stories to tell. Then we wrote about them.

Super trots op het resultaat. Very proud.

The Instagram. @jcast_crew. The social presence. The place where we put clips and updates and tried to remember to post consistently, which is hard when you’re also doing an actual job.

All of this: the merch, the site, the social, the physical banners we carried to actual places. That’s what I put in the “JCast in het wild” chapter. Because JCast didn’t just exist in a DAW and on Spotify. It existed in the world.

Terugblikken & vooruitkijken: the numbers and what they mean

Cijfers van 28/03/2026. Numbers as of the day I ordered the print.

12 episodes published. 925 downloads. 8 guests. 796 plays all time. 158 hours of consumption. +57 followers.

Those numbers are real, and they’re not nothing. But they’re also not what the magazine is actually about.

The magazine includes this paragraph in the stats section, and I think it’s the most honest thing I wrote in the whole thing:

“Een jaar geleden was JCast een idee bij het koffieapparaat. Vandaag is het een podcast met een website, een Instagram, een t-shirt, een banner en 12 afleveringen die er écht staan. Niet alles ging vlekkeloos. De eerste opname moest opnieuw. De audio was in het begin niet ideaal. Er waren euhs, blunders en microfoons die van tafel vielen. Maar dat is precies wat JCast is: echt, ongepolijst en eerlijk over het vak.”

A year ago JCast was an idea at a coffee machine. Today it’s a podcast with a website, an Instagram, a t-shirt, a banner, and 12 episodes that genuinely stand up. Not everything went smoothly. The first recording had to be redone. The audio wasn’t great at the start. There were euhs and blunders and microphones falling off the table.

But that’s exactly what JCast is: real, unpolished, and honest about the job.

I don’t want to clean that up. The imperfection is the point.

The bucketlist

The magazine also has a JCast bucketlist. I love this page. Handwritten-style font, checkboxes, very much “ooit. misschien. waarschijnlijk wel.”

Already checked off: JCast stickers ✓, JCast T-shirt ✓, Banner ✓, 500 downloads ✓.

Still to go: nog meer merch, posters, een internationale gast hosten, naar een podcast event gaan, een podcast award krijgen, op tv komen voor de podcast, 1 miljoen downloads, het nog steeds superleuk vinden.

The last one is my favorite. Het nog steeds superleuk vinden. Still finding it genuinely fun. That one’s not a nice-to-have. That one’s the whole thing. If that box ever gets unchecked, the rest of the list doesn’t matter.

Season 2: what’s coming

“Maar we zijn nog niet klaar. Seizoen 2 staat voor de deur en als seizoen 1 bewees dat we het konden, dan belooft seizoen 2 te bewijzen dat we het beter kunnen.”

We’re not done. Season 2 is at the door. If season 1 proved we could do it, season 2 promises to prove we can do it better.

The theme: “Mens, software en systemen in een steeds slimmer wordende wereld.” Humans, software, and systems in an increasingly smarter world. Broader than season 1. More guests, sharper conversations, topics that go further than Java alone. AI as a colleague. Accessibility. Security. The human side of the job.

Starting May 2026.

And we have three specials planned: proper long-form episodes with guests who’ve been on our list for a while. Mensen met een verhaal dat verder gaat dan één aflevering aankan.

Tom Cools on Developer Relations & community impact. Kevin Dubois on cloud native, AI and the future of Java. Nick Boucart, topic still to be determined. Which honestly I think is the most exciting one.

Aflevering 1 is al een banger. We have a photo to prove it.

Aan Maarten en Viktor

The last content page of the magazine, before the blank Notities pages where you’re supposed to write your own thoughts, is a letter. I wrote it to Maarten and Viktor directly. I’m going to quote most of it here because it says what this whole thing is about better than anything else I’ve written:

“Deze magazine is voor jullie. Niet omdat het moest, maar omdat ik wou dat jullie weten hoeveel dit voor mij betekent. Mijn manier om dank u te zeggen voor een gek idee dat ergens toch heel serieus geworden is. Iets wat ik graag doe, heel graag zelfs. En waar ik nu met zekerheid kan zeggen: ik zou het met niemand anders willen doen.

Ik hoop dat ik alles heb kunnen omvatten. Alles wat we gemaakt hebben, alles wat we geleerd hebben, alles wat we samen zijn. En ik hoop vooral dat jullie dit dichtslaan met een glimlach.”

This magazine is for you. Not because it had to be, but because I wanted you to know how much this means to me. My way of saying thank you for a crazy idea that somehow became something very real. Something I love doing, genuinely love. And something I can now say with certainty: I wouldn’t want to do it with anyone else.

I hope I managed to capture everything. Everything we made, everything we learned, everything we are together. And I mostly hope you close this with a smile.

I wrote the welcome text last. It said:

“Als je dit leest, houd je iets vast wat een jaar geleden nog een idee was. Een groepschat, een gedeelde nieuwsgierigheid en de vraag: zouden we eigenlijk een podcast moeten maken?”

If you’re reading this, you’re holding something that a year ago was just an idea. A group chat. A shared curiosity. A question: should we actually make a podcast?

We did it.

That’s when I realized I wasn’t just making a magazine. I was making proof. Proof that we showed up. That we hit record, even when the script wasn’t polished and the sentences didn’t flow and there were enough “euh”s to fill an entire season. Proof that somewhere between the cut fragments and the laughter and the real conversations, about Java, about tools, about what it actually means to be a developer, JCast became something bigger than the sum of three microphones.

People sometimes ask why I do these things. The merch. The podcast. Now a magazine. Three copies. For three people.

I do it because I’m terrified of the things that matter most being invisible. The episodes will age. The Spotify numbers will stop moving. But this magazine sits on a desk. It’s physical. It happened.

“Dit magazine is geen eindpunt. Het is een snapshot.”

This magazine is not an ending. It’s a snapshot of who we are, what we made, and where we’re going.

Season 2 is already happening. New episodes, new guests, new chaos. And at the end of it, I’ll probably make another magazine. Because apparently I need it.