Mikeal Rogers passed away yesterday. We hadn't kept in touch nearly enough, but he had a profound impact on my life and was always very kind to me. One of my favorite tweets of all time was from him, when I gave a talk as a young kid about how cool Chrome DevTools were and the Chrome DevTools team showed up unexpectedly to watch.

Watching @paul_irish watch a talk at @wafflejs about Chrome Dev Tools. pic.twitter.com/nXNAIUIn8f

— Mikeal Rogers (@mikeal) January 7, 2016

I was reading Jenn Schiffer's Bluesky post about him when I realized I had also recorded a podcast with Mikeal, way back in the day.

a collaborator and friend has moved on this week, and in memoriam i wanted to share my train of thought in grief.

[image or embed]

— jenn schiffer 🕷️🕯️ (@jennschiffer.com) June 10, 2025 at 6:19 PM

# The Web Behind

I had started this podcast called The Web Behind in 2015 (I know...) to interview developers I knew (mostly in SF) and ask them about how they got their start. It was really fun for me getting to know people and hearing their diverse stories. I went to go to my old website to listen to the episode with Mikeal but there was a problem.

That's annoying, but then I figured I could use the way back machine to find it!

I found a snapshot of the old site, and found the link for the episode! But there was no audio embed!

That's ok, I opened the Chrome Devtools and found the embed link! It's for a Soundcloud file. But when I clicked on it, it just redirected to the Soundcloud home page. At least I had a lead...

I searched Soundcloud for "web behind" and I found the page! But strangely, there were only 4 episodes on there and Mikeal's wasn't one of them. Even stranger, the right sidebar said "8 tracks" but I could only see 4. I wondered if I could still get into that account.

I went to soundcloud and logged in with my email address. Had to reset it multiple times since I had missed multiple security breaches while I'd been gone. I finally got in only to find that email address did not own the Web Behind account.

I searched a few times to see if there was any way to figure out what email address a channel belonged to but obviously that would be a terrible thing for Soundcloud to do so I was stuck.

# A lucky break

I was clicking all around, trying old email addresses, looking at my web hosting to see all the email accounts I've ever created but having no luck. I kept trying things like [email protected] or [email protected]. One nice thing is that Soundcloud lets you know after you enter just an email address whether it's associated with an account or not. No luck.

I was playing around with Postman to see if I could scrape any information when I caught a break! It turns out that I had linked my Soundcloud account to iTunes and the iTunes email address is listed in the RSS feed!

I couldn't guess the gmail password but as luck would have it, I did set up my real email address as the backup for the account, so I was able to reset it!

With that, I was able to reset my Soundcloud password and log in! At first I had no luck, I was still only able to see the 4 public episodes. But then I noticed on the Insights page if I zoomed out I could see traffic to Mikeal's episode from years ago. Eventually I figured out what had happened!

It turns out Soundcloud had changed their free plan, and my account was way over the limit of upload minutes. So they must have removed my oldest episdoes so that I was in line with the free plan.

# A bargain at any price

All I needed to do was give Soundcloud $10 for whatever Soundcloud Artist is and download the episode!

# It's nice to hear your voice

Thanks for the puzzle, Mikeal. It's nice to hear your voice again.

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