And when that desire to communicate is larger than the fear, then you do it. Having courage isn't the absence of fear. It's feeling scared as heck to do it, doing it anyway. Hello, and welcome to the Pie Bytes podcast, where we talk about Python career and mindset. We're your hosts. I'm Julian Sequeira. And I am Bob Baldebos. If you're looking to improve your python, your career, and learn the mindset for success, this is the podcast for you. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back, everybody, to the Pibytes podcast. This is Bob Aldebos, and I'm here with Julian. How's it going, man? Yeah, good, man. How are you? I'm good. This is the first time we're recording in a few weeks. It's kind of weird. Who are you? I don't know who you are anymore. It's funny. I want to. We already made some edits. I know. We're so rusty. Yeah, this is. This is weird. But I did want to say I want to kick it off with a win quickly, which will help us introduce our guest, actually, so, which I'm very rudely and politely making. Sit there in silence. So just a quick thing for everyone that we're. Bob and I are very excited about. So, combined win, the PDM program, our coaching program that you all know so much about, I would hope by now it's growing, and it's growing very quickly, and we're getting more and more people into it. It's super exciting. But what it's also shown us is that we actually need more coaches. You know, we're at capacity. We need more people coaching the people that come in and seek it. And what's very exciting, very, very exciting to me today is we've brought in our latest coach to come and chat with us. So without further ado, I'm going to introduce Hugh tipping. Hugh, how's it going? Welcome to the podcast. It's going great. Thank you for having me on the podcast today. I'm really happy to be here. We're super excited to have you here, and congratulations. Yeah, thanks. It's really been an honor to be asked to coach. I've been a fan of the PDM program. I got a lot out of it, and to be in a position to help others get through it is an honor. Ever so slightly intimidating at the same time, but super excited to do it. I'm really glad to help the program advance. That's awesome. Obviously, we're super grateful that you agreed to take this on. And we were so excited to ask you when we said we need Hugh to do this. But one thing I'll just point out to everyone that's super special about not just Hugh. I mean, you are special, Hugh, but most of our other coaches as well, they've all been through the PDM program, and that's something that's very special to Bob and I that makes us very proud is that Hugh, he's been through the program. You know, the ins and outs, you know, exactly what people going through it are feeling. And so you've gone from student to coach in many ways, which is just. It's just incredible to me, and it means the world to me. So, Hugh, before we dive in, did you want to introduce yourself to the audience as someone other than just a PDM coach? Great. Yeah. Thank you. I've been working in technology for 20 plus years. I won't say exactly how many years. I've worked with all sorts of systems, operating systems. I've worked with technologies that people don't even remember anymore. It's been an interesting journey from being a Unix sysadmin to Perl coder to cloud engineer to now Python coder, and it's been an exciting trip for me. That's amazing. It's like learning so many different languages. You're like the coding version of Bob, because Bob knows like 10,000 real languages for. What are they? Yes. Not really. No. That's cool. And how this whole journey from. I mean, you're so technically inclined and everything, and yet you still came through the PDM program, which is just awesome that you would keep investing in that growth. Right. You could have just said, I've learned Perl. I've learned this, I've learned that these nameless languages now, but I could have just kept going. Right. And figured it out myself. But you came into the program and now have exceeded so much, excelled so much that you now a coach. Like, what's that experience been like going from student to coach and with that growth mindset? Well, it's. It's. I like to challenge myself. I like to learn new things. There are. There are people who like to learn something, get good at it and stay with it. I think that's tough to do in our industry. It's constantly changing. So part of it is wanting to keep up with the industry and keep myself relevant. But part of it is the challenge for my brain feeling that I am growing, feeling that I am making a better version of myself. When I saw the PDM program, when someone mentioned it to me, I said, this is just the right way to do that. This is a way for me to have some new accomplishments in my life. There are people who like to have accomplishments because it feeds the self esteem, it feeds the ego, which certainly it does for me. It's always about, how can I just be better, not only for myself, how can I be better for other people? How can I be better to help people make it through some of those difficult spots I've had to do, sometimes alone, sometimes without help, with a lot of struggle, taking a lot of time. If I can help streamline that for someone else, as someone who's worked a lot in automating things in my career, if I can help to a little automation for that process for someone else, I'm very happy to do so. And I think that that can help other people make better versions of themselves without as much stress and anxiety over it. So going from, and that's not to say that I had a lot of stress and anxiety in the PDM program. I didn't. In fact, the two of you were fantastic. Bob was a great guide. I want to sort of spread that love a little bit. Thank you. I love that. Makes our day. Yeah, now we had a great working relation and yeah, it was really great working together and seeing the apps you built coming out of the ground and going into deep discussions about. Remember we spoke a lot about TDD and design patterns and yeah, it was great. So that brings me on to the next question, the importance of having a portfolio as a developer. Because as people know, right, PDM is all about app building. You build two or three apps with us and that's stuff you can show on your GitHub. Right. And what's the importance of that? And yeah, what do you have to say about that? Sure, I think that it is important. Well, let me think about how when I'm on the job, I want to show something to a manager or suggest a solution. I'm frequently asked, show me the data, show me the information. Show me a PoC where you've compared different products to each other. It's a matter of demonstrating what something can do, and that includes yourself. When you are interviewing, you can talk a lot about your accomplishments. You can describe them in detail. A job can give you a coding interview and have you do some live coding or a take home project. And that might not always show what you're capable of doing. A portfolio where you've built things, not only built things, but perhaps documented along the way how you got to build it. Why you made the choices you did in building a project in a certain way can demonstrate not only your technical and coding skills, but in addition, your problem solving skills. How do you make decisions? How do you really delve into a problem? And having a portfolio of a variety of projects, whether it's data or front end or whatever else, can also show the breadth of the work that you can bring to the table. Awesome. And where does having a blog or website comes into this? Having a blog or a website can demonstrate the things that I just spoke about, but it can also show your ability to communicate and your willingness to communicate. You are not just getting information for yourself, but you're willing to share it with other people in a job. You can do it for your team and be part of sort of a larger whole, rather than just someone who works by themselves. So putting information out there shows a willingness to be part of something larger than yourself. No, that's great. And so on that point with this sharing and even having a portfolio to show employees and potential employees and all of that, perfect example came up today with another gentleman in the program, Bernie. So shout out to Bernie, because this was awesome. He shared on LinkedIn today, this post on Snowflake, or maybe it's yesterday time zone wise, whatever, but fantastic write up. It was wonderful, the blog post that he wrote, but it took guts. We're so used to doing these things. Like you think of your portfolio, how many of us code private repos in GitHub, right? How many of us write these blog posts, like on a local host type server, as opposed to putting it out there on the Internet? So when it comes to that level of bridging that gap from, okay, I'm doing it locally for myself, perhaps some local docs, maybe for my team, whatever, to actually pushing it out there and sharing it out there, given you've done it too, how do you overcome that? I'll say it. How do you overcome the imposter syndrome that some of us feel fear, the potential worry about being ridiculed and so on and so forth. What's your experience with that? Yeah, I don't think you actually ever overcome it. It's when the enthusiasm and the desire to share and show overcomes the fear that you have. It's a balance between the fear and the desire to communicate. And when that desire to communicate is larger than the fear, then you do it. Having courage isn't the absence of fear. It's feeling scared as heck to do it and doing it anyway. And it's the first time you do it, that's always the hardest. So props to Bernie for doing that. I laid a lot of praise on him on LinkedIn because I thought that took a lot of courage. And you do worry about ridicule or people being overly critical of what it is that you're doing. We've all seen comments on the Internet for years, and we know how toxic it can be. It's a matter of understanding what opinions are important and what are not. People who come on to troll you, you have to see why it is they're doing it, what's their motivation for doing it, and it's not really positive, and those types of comments are safe for you to ignore. It's funny, I do remember when, in the early days of the Internet, when people were asking, how do I get help? How do I encourage people to help me? I put questions out there, and I don't always get the help that I need. A piece of advice I was given was, if you want help from people on the Internet, you don't post a question, you post a wrong answer, and you'll get all the help you can get and then submit. Oh, man. As long as you can wade through all the bad stuff, you can find the tidbits that you need. So you have to have the I know. It's funny and sad at the same time. It's a matter of really filtering what it is that you're looking at when you get the feedback. If you're getting constructive feedback, someone says, this, this post might be better if you included these things. I think that's useful feedback. Someone's saying, it doesn't work for me. I hate it. You're just wrong. That's not really good feedback, and that's not the type of person I would be for giving feedback. I actually like to help support people and help them grow because I understand what that fear is like to put stuff out there. No, I agree. Sorry, Bob, you go. No, the more you. And the more you start posting and doing it, you start to become a bit more resilient as well, and being able to distinguish what is toxic versus constructive feedback. And I remember at the start, everything hits you in the face, right? Did I share with you that hacker News post from 2011 when I was having this atrocious pearl movie scrapes script and the whole Internet turned against me. And it was very painful. I think I shared it in PDM. And from there on, you know, you kind of learn to disregard the people that are just toxic and only embrace the people that have constructive feedback and it's a process you have to go through. Right. And I think that's important to think. And the more you do it, the more a lot of that stuff becomes background noise. And it's also a matter of putting perspective on it. When if you see the first three or four comments on a post be very negative. Really do keep it in perspective. Don't think that everybody's against you. Or like you just said, the whole Internet is against you. It's just those particular voices happen to be loud and they might drown out 20 other positive bits of feedback. Or people want to give positive feedback, they just don't want to get involved in a negative conversation. So they'll hold back from saying something. So that's important to keep in mind as well. Gosh, I know there are some positive things out there. They're just stepping back because there's a lot of people just sort of yapping and saying some bad stuff. Yeah. And human nature. Right. When things are working and we find the information we need, kind of doesn't occur to all of us to just take a few minutes to say thank you or leave that comment that it did work. So you have to be intentional with that. Whereas if it doesn't work, it's very easy to go, hey mate, that, that didn't work, you know, and then that can be kind of lead to some toxic conversations. So, yeah, one does not open up an issue or a pull request in GitHub to say, this is terrific, it works. Maybe we should start that as a movement, though. I'd be happy to receive that. I think that would be good. Showing gratitude for something that someone has spent their time on that makes your life easier, I think would be helpful and I would encourage people to do more of it. Yeah, we need more of that. We often only hear it's not working. But going back to the commands and what you can control versus not control. You're big on the stoics, right? I think you study them, you read a lot about that and it talks a lot about only focusing on things you can control. So can you share a bit, like your relation with the stoics and how that philosophy helps you with all this? Yeah, sure. I have been studying stoic philosophy for a little while now and it's. And one thing I want to clarify about stoicism, it's capital s stoic as opposed to a lowercase s stoic. It doesn't mean not having emotions. It's a matter of really understanding what it is that you react to and why and being able to manage that by understanding what you said. The basis for a lot of stoic philosophy is understanding what you can and cannot control. The things that you cannot control are other people's attitudes, other people's reactions to you. What you can control is your reaction to how they behave. And understanding that you have the ability not to react to something. You have the ability to look at something on the Internet that you disagree with and move on with your life. Right. Right. That's important. Right. There's always the thing and your reaction to the thing. Right. And your reaction to the thing. That second part is what you can control. Right. That's where the choice comes in. Yeah, indeed. And I endeavor to make healthier choices because I don't need to get myself worked up over something that I think is horrendous because there will be 15 people ahead of me to do that. And I don't need to add my voice in saying lol as a reply to something, to a way somebody responded. It just doesn't help. So I will add my opinion. I will contribute if I feel like I can add some information or some facts to it if I feel like it can help somebody. But I like the virtues of stoicism, which is courage is one of them. And we talked about courage earlier, and temperance, which is not. People frequently think of temperance as not drinking a lot. For me, it's about not reacting as much. It's not having all these emotions. And then the other two tenets are wisdom, which is not just having knowledge, learning how to apply it. And then there's justice, which is for me. For me, it's about helping people. It's about making sure that people who need the help, people who are struggling, people who might be hurting, if I can help them get past that, I'll do it. That's not the full definition of justice in the stoic philosophy, but that's how I apply it. Yeah, no, that's great, Hugh. Thank you for sharing that especially. That's quite personal, what you just shared. So I really do appreciate that. And what's really nice about this is that I see so many trends between you and almost everyone that comes through PDM, client and coach is that everyone has this desire and value to sort of make the world a better place. Right. That justice point that you just touched on, help people that otherwise can't help themselves or wouldn't have the opportunity, and so on and so forth. And likewise, many of the people that I'm sure you listening to this podcast right now, whether you're, as I always say, driving a car or walking your dog or something like that, I'm sure many of the points that we've touched on today resonate with you. Whether it be that desire to lift people up, that, whether it be having the fear of pushing your code out there. And it's, I guess one of my calls right now to you is to understand that, you know, as cheesy as this might sound, you know, you're not alone. We all feel that we're all in that same boat. And to that end, one of the things that I often hear on the calls, Hugh, when we talk to a lot of people about the PDM program, a lot of them, by the way, shout out our listeners to this podcast, which is awesome. They. They talk about that, wanting to connect with people that are just like them. You know, people who have the same fears, who are on that same journey. So there's that desire for community. Right. And so did you find community to be a big piece of your journey with, with coding, with PDM, with everything? Yeah. Oh, sure. Sure. Absolutely. Coding. Coding can be such a solitary thing. And when we hit problems, when we have challenges, when we're blocked by something, it can feel a little alone. When you're coding, to be able to have a group of people you can talk to, ask questions to, people who are part of the same program you're in, who you know that are willing to help you, that you don't have to tiptoe around wording something so you're not going to get a bunch of trolls. That sense of community is a big help because you feel like you've got a backup plan for your own lack of knowledge and for your own anxiety over what it is that you're doing. Plus the fact it's people who have been through it who can talk to you where you can say, oh, and this goes into the mindset part of PDM. Oh, I had this problem on the job. Has someone else had this problem? And how did you deal with it? Beyond getting stuck on a coding problem? It's being able to talk to someone about your career and the process you've been through and the people you've had to deal with. And how do I talk to a manager about blah, blah, this blah person at work is constantly interrupting me. How do I deal with it? So having that kind of community, I think, just makes day to day life a lot less anxiety ridden. And it takes away some of that loneliness and that solitary feeling about that can frequently come up in our industry. William, were you surprised to find that the people in PDM and the community had pretty similar issues? Yeah, in many cases. When I brought up questions on the mindset calls, I was surprised to hear almost identical situations. And it was great to hear the advice, how people were willing to open up about how they felt about situations and talk about how they dealt with it and being vulnerable on some of these calls. I was grateful to that. So I was surprised to hear. I knew there were people out there that had similar problems to my own. I just didn't know how to reach them and define so many of them with so many of the same, a lot of overlap in the event diagrams, for sure. And I was pleasantly surprised. It for sure. That's great. No, and I'm happy. The community is always the unexpected hero. You know, everyone's like, ah, came in for all this. But geez, I love the community aspect of all of this. So I think that's just our nature, right? We want to be around people, we want to be around like minded people. When we find that almost comfort zone, I'll say we just want to stick to that, you know? So I definitely love that. So, but before we wrap it up, I think, Bob, you have one more thing you want to ask Hugh, and then we're going to jump into a book, I hope. Yeah. Enough mindset for now. No kidding. Never enough. We need to go back to the coding for a little bit. Absolutely. Especially because you, I can ask about the creative side of coding because you also are a writer and amateur stage actor and yeah, those are very creative professions. So is there a link with what you do there that you see with the coding? Especially that creative part? I definitely think there's some, there's a lot of creativity when it comes to coding, because it's just when you're coding up something, when you're trying to create an application, solve a problem, it's not as simple as just solving something with a math formula. It's about taking the bits of technology you have, or libraries that you have, or algorithms that you've heard, and applying them in a new way. That's where the creativity comes in. That's where you find wisdom. It's not just memorizing the syntax of a particular library function. It's a matter of, well, where do I use it? And as someone who's, who's enjoyed writing, working on fiction and poetry in the past, I've wanted to say something, and I've wanted to create something that meant something, not only to myself, but to others the same way with the code. Am I solving a problem for myself? Can someone take this and use it to solve the problem for themselves? But it's a matter of. And I'm just thinking, with code refactoring, you look at something that exists, how can I retool it? How can I rejigger it? And that requires taking leaps outside of the simple and banal. With coding, it's a matter of. I mean, you've seen people refactor code and you said, wow, I didn't think you could use that for that in that particular script. So it's that changing the way you think about something and the way you apply something, that's where the creativity comes in. Awesome. Yeah. We're both big fans of refactoring, right? Indeed. Indeed. Yeah. I never think my code is finished or done. Is it working? Is it shipped? Is it doing what it's supposed to do? Yeah. Is it doing so without crashing? Yeah, but I'm always looking at ways of making it better. It's a challenge to myself. I get a thrill out of shaving a half a nanosecond off of a particular loop that I wrote. Yeah. Well, you know, I was just going to say on this creative thing, I have noticed a trend with a lot of people that come into PDM that they're musicians or they love music and they love playing an instrument of some sort. And I actually had a chat with a guy, Daniel, this week on the phone. So shout out to you, Daniel, if you're listening, if you hear this one. And we talked, we almost went down the rabbit hole of talking about how music is very much like coding and hearing you talk about that just now. Hugh, with the creativity, it's almost like writing music. You know, you have all these pieces that may work together, and the people who write the music and make it just seem to seemingly slap it together and just experiment and try and wind up with these beautiful pieces. So I'm obviously simplifying it because I'm ignorant on the topic. But, you know, I just find a nice connection between music and coding for some reason. It's funny you should mention about how you have music students who come into the program. I studied music a while back. I actually used to study japanese flute as part of a group. We used to go on tour through Japan. It was always a lot of fun, but my teacher told me that some of his best students were students who were in the computer industry. He had a lot of programmers who we felt really picked up a lot of the musical techniques pretty quickly. So it's interesting that you should mention that. I'd be keen to hear anyone listening. If you know of some scientific connection here, I'd love to hear it. Please. You can email us, ping me, or tweet at me or something like that. I'd love to know more. Look, Hugh, we're going to wrap it up because we're at time, but thank you so much for being here. Before we go, we need to hear about what you're reading. What you got? Oh, right now I am reading deep work by Cal Newport. When I came into the PDM program, I had started reading so good, they can't ignore you. And I've become a big Cal Newport fan. And I think his philosophies on dedicated time to and avoiding distractions and multitasking to really get good at what it is that you're doing. I think it's very important in our field. And I'm very much enjoying his work. So I'm almost finished with that book. I'm really excited about applying a lot of his principles. That's cool. Awesome book. I feel like you just made because I asked today in the chat, has anyone read digital minimalism? The other book that he's written, is that a new book? It's not too new. It's recent. I have that book. I haven't started it yet. I'm looking forward to finding a way to refactor my day to day habits to minimize it and spend more time doing things that are fun. Yeah, me too. Me too. I'm keen to see what's in there that might be new. So, Bob, there you go. There's the book I'm reading. Have you read that book, Bob? No, I just go on airplane mode. Smart. I'm going to call B's on that, buddy. You respond to every message of mine unless you're asleep straight away. I have a special filter for those. But yeah, no, Cal Newport's work is awesome. Every time, going back to deep work, I'm like, I should be focusing better, letting distractions catch up. And that book is very similar but more tailored to the social media and the online distractions. So pretty important book. Yeah. That actually leads to a nice. I was going to say that's another podcast episode that I've written in our list of ideas. I wanted to talk about these habits and how you can slip and things like that. So stay tuned. That might be next week or the week after. So what are you reading, Bob? Anything interesting? Putting on the spot all of a sudden. I'm going to reread the passionate programmer, Chad powder. Yeah, cool. Yeah. Why? Okay, you know, I'm going to ask you, why reread why now? Putting you on the spot. Well, it's always because of Mirella. She meant, she mentioned that she was reading a book and so she implanted that idea in my head. No. Good old Marilla. We love you, Marilla. That's cool. Hey, speaking of community, this is it. This is what I love about it. So many people we've mentioned today on this podcast, and it's just, that's what I love about it all. Community. So, Hugh, welcome to Pie Bytes. We are so honored to have you on the team and thank you for joining us tonight to share a little bit about you and what you believe in and the things that you love and enjoy. Is there anything you wanted to share before we. We end the call? How can people find you? Any thoughts course for listeners? Yeah, I'll give you a link to throw into the podcast. Notes that has more information about me and some of the stuff that I've written online, both for pie bytes, some of the stuff I've written for my writing coach. I wrote a couple of blog posts ways back about writing itself. And yeah, no, I'm really just happy. I'm honored to be here. I know I'm laying on the gratitude pretty thick, but it's exciting for me. I like to teach, I like to mentor. To be able to do so for PDM, from which I've gotten so much is an honor. And it's kind of cool. You bring people in, you train them up, you turn them into coaches. You're sort of growing your own teachers yourselves. That's the. Thank you for putting it that way because that was our devious plan all along. I fell for it. Rats. And before we go, I just want to say, I think this is a great opportunity to say it. Everyone, please humor me as you listen to me speak again. Just thank you to everyone who does help us make pie bytes a success. Whether you're a listener to the podcast, whether you respond to our emails or even just read them and don't reply, that's fine. But special thanks to everyone who works with us. So all of our coaches, we've got, I'm going to actually call them out by name, but Christo, Eric, Hugh, Mike, Robin and Ryan, you know, we're grateful for each one of you, for each of you. And also a very special thanks to Georgia, our eA, who helps keep the lights on and keep us organized and in line. So we couldn't do this without any of you. And we appreciate everything you bring to the team. So there's a very public thank you from Bob and I. You want to add to that, Bob, anything, or did I cover it? No. Lovely. Thank you. Beautiful. All right, well, thank you, everyone, for being here. Hugh, thank you again for joining us. And we will see you, well, probably in like five minutes on our internal chat and everything. But everyone else, we'll see you next week, back next week. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To hear more from us, go to Byebytes Live, that is Pibit es France, and receive a free gift just for being a friend of the show and to join our thriving slack community of Python programmers, go to Pibytes community, that's Pibit es community. We hope to see you there and catch you in the next episode.