About

Making our podcast findable

Metal Magic FTC Team #23362 runs the first FTC interview podcast in the Chesapeake region. We sit down with other teams and pull out the real, practical advice: how they designed a mechanism, how they organized their season, and what they’d do differently. Great stuff, but it was trapped inside videos. This site sets it free.

What this site does

• Full transcripts for every episode, so the advice is readable and searchable, which is good for accessibility and for search engines.
• Ask the Podcast: type a question in plain English and get an answer stitched together from what teams actually said, with links to the exact moment.
• Show notes: a summary, chapter markers, and pull quotes for each episode.
• Clip finder: the most shareable moments, ready for Reels and Shorts.

How we keep it honest

We care a lot about not putting words in anyone’s mouth. So we built in guardrails:

• Answers come only from the transcripts. If the archive doesn’t cover your question, the site says so plainly instead of guessing.
• Every answer shows its sources (the episode name and a timestamp link) so you can watch it yourself and verify.
• We quote or clearly paraphrase. We never invent a quote or attribute something a guest didn’t say.
• It’s written for students. The whole archive is kept appropriate for a school audience.

How it’s built

All the heavy lifting (transcription, summaries, chapter markers, clip picks, and the search index) happens ahead of time in an offline script and is saved as plain files. That keeps the live site fast and inexpensive to run. The only thing that happens live is answering your question, and that request goes through a small secure service so our API key is never exposed. If you’re curious about the details, our team documented the whole pipeline in ARCHITECTURE.md.