NPR Digital Media Tech Team's Favorite Tiny Desk Concerts

Published in

Technology at NPR

3 min readDec 22, 2016

I hope you've enjoyed our series of rotating profiles on the developers, sysadmins, managers, QA engineers, and other technical roles in NPR's Digital Media department! The series has mostly come to an end — we've had one new team member join a few weeks ago, but we'd like to give him another month or so to experience life at NPR before we put him on the spot and ask him to fill out a profile, and a few of our other teammates declined to participate (which is entirely their right, and we respect that). In the coming weeks, we'll be handing over the reins to a different NPR department to feature profiles on their developers, but we're still working out those details, so stay tuned for that.

The Tiny Desk Concerts logo, courtesy of NPR Music.

In the meantime, my own favorite part of the profile series has been seeing everyone's favorite Tiny Desk Concerts. One of the biggest perks of working in Digital Media is that our department is physically located next to NPR Music, and most of our workspaces are within earshot of the tiny desk. Walking over to watch one of the live recordings, whether we're familiar with the artist who's performing that day or not (some of the best music is that which you discover serendipitously!), is a big part of our team culture.

Anyway, with DMTech's profiles mostly wrapped up, I started wondering whether there were any patterns to our recommendations — how many artists were named more than once? How much variety was there? Well, it didn't take much effort to put everyone's recommendations into a single spreadsheet and crunch the numbers.

Before I get into the results, I want to take a second to clarify our process. When we asked everyone to name their personal favorite Tiny Desk Concerts, the instructions we gave them were relatively straightforward:

You must have attended the concert in person (not just watched the video online after-the-fact).
You can name more than one, but no more than three.

That's it! Thankfully, despite rule #1, everyone was able to participate because even our full-time remote teammates have spent time at NPR's Washington, DC headquarters. It is worth noting, though, that some of the most famous Tiny Desk Concerts, such as Adele's, predate most of the current team — which is why (spoiler alert!) she only received two mentions.

While not everyone took advantage of the opportunity to name more than just a single favorite, most did, and as a result we have roughly twice as many recommendations as we have team members, spanning a wide variety of musical genres. It is worth noting, however, that most of our team filled out their profiles in June, though some of them weren't posted until recently. As a result, our recommendations don't feature many of the Tiny Desk Concerts that took place in the latter half of 2016.

Without further ado, here are all of the Tiny Desk Concerts recommended by the members of DMTech, in order of the number of times they were mentioned (and then sorted alphabetically):

So, we did have a clear, undisputed winner. But all in all, there's a nice variety here — 35 videos in all — so if you've ever felt like binge-watching Tiny Desk Concerts but weren't sure where to start, you've now got a whole playlist's worth of recommendations, courtesy of The NPR Tech Team. 😄 Enjoy!

T-Pain's Tiny Desk Concert was the undisputed favorite among DMTech team members. Photograph by NPR Staff.

Happy Holidays from npr.codes!

NPR Digital Media Tech Team's Favorite Tiny Desk Concerts

Written by Nara Kasbergen