Could you create like a sort of beginner coaching program, almost like a bridging program to get people into PDM, to get them ready? And that was a fantastic idea. It's already something we'd been thinking about, but seeing that feedback from multiple people was a really nice way of confirming that that's something we should spend time on. So that's something we're going to start soon. Hello, and welcome to the Pibytes podcast, where we talk about Python career and mindset. We're your hosts. I'm Julian Sequeira. And I am Bob Valdebos. 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. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Pibytes podcast. This is Julian. I'm here with Bob. How you going, man? Hey, man, all good. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm in a rush, but I'm good. No, I'm kidding, as always. So, everyone, this week we're going to dive straight in to keep it to the point. We got a bit to talk about. So we ran the first official pie Bytes survey. It's going to be an annual survey we started with this year, 2023. And it's a survey that we've put out to our entire community and audience, whether it be people in this podcast who listen to it, people on our friends list, that's the people that we email in our slack community, you name it. And we put this call out to try and understand how people engage with pie bytes, what you'd like to see from us. And we thought, excuse me. We thought, as a bit of an accountability check, we'd share with you the good, the bad, and the ugly. So you kind of know what it is that we got from you all and. Yeah. You ready to go, Bob? Yeah, let's. Let's keep it tight. I'm excited to dive into this. Yeah, so there's a slight differentiation from our normal podcast. So just. Just roll with us here. So the first thing. No books. No books. No time for books. All right. How many people filled it out? 56. 56 people filled it out. So next year we want to at least double that. That was a very small amount, but it was the first time we did it, so we'll see how we go. And we had three people win t shirts. Yeah. Was it? Yeah, they were very process. Yeah, yeah, they're very happy, so we're glad we could do that. Get some pie bytes merchandise out there. So that was good. Now, the first thing that I wanted to share, which I think would be interesting for many people, is that the majority of people who filled this out, and when I say majority, I mean over 50%, actually found pie bytes through the humble bundle. So if you've been around with us for a little bit, we've had a couple of humble bundles over the years and that's where the majority of people found us. Very interesting and a reminder that that's a great place for us to be sharing things. And while we do make a difference, it's actually got a lot of reach and has brought a lot of people to pibytes so they can learn with us and grow with us. What's the next thing, Bob? Yeah, thank you. Thank you. The majority of the users visit our website monthly. Yeah. So that was an interesting data point. Right? How often do people use our website? But yeah, website is also kind of relative because we've lately been growing the YouTube channel as well, so hopefully that becomes the first entry point. Yeah, yeah. So it depends what the website's for. And while the website used to be just a blog, it has grown over time to be our business page. So I don't expect people to be visiting every day, but, yeah, good to know. So people learn from us in many different ways. So there you go. An interesting one is that of the people who did respond to the survey, half of them hadn't joined the slack community yet. So, you know, if you haven't, whether you filled out the survey or not, if you haven't joined it, totally join it. There's a lot of good conversation happening and that was surprising. I thought more people had joined Slack, but why should people join our slack? What's awesome about it? For me personally, I think the networking piece is one of the best things there is that you meet. I mean, you have to share. So if you are sharing what you're working on and the things you're doing and the problems you're having with Python and sharing your code and repos and stuff, if you actually get involved, it's a fantastic place to network and meet other developers in a friendly, relaxed environment. Yeah. So many nice people and very helpful. And people ask questions there. People chime in or some great discussions. So we're definitely going to keep that up. Yep. And you know, we're not saying it's the greatest place on earth and we know exactly what we're doing with it, but, you know, people have just made it this beautiful, safe space and that's what I love about it. Yeah. Now one of the questions we asked was where, other than PI Bytes, where do people go to learn about Python and Mindset and everything? Big surprise. The majority of people, their main sources of learning are real Python, the real Python website, the Talk Python to me podcast and material and stack overflow. So no surprises there. What was the really interesting answer, Bob? Well, chat GPT is showing there as well. We spoke about this in the last episode. You interviewed me how I use chat GPT. And yeah, it's definitely becoming for me kind of the de facto of searching information because you have to back and forth. It's interesting how that's becoming another resource people use for Python and developer stuff. Yeah, no, exactly right. Yeah. And chat GPT wasn't the other, it wasn't the only interesting thing. We actually had some recommendations from people in this open text field saying we should go and get on the Django chat and Django riffs podcast. So that'll be some advice that we take from people. Given how much we work with Django in the PDM program. That's. We do use Django a lot, so we'll be happy to go on Django chat. I have not heard about Django riffs, so I need to check that out. Yeah, we've got to look into those. That's cool. The next one actually made me kind of sad reading it, but we asked about coaching because obviously we do a lot of pie bytes coaching, PDM coaching. With the exception of one person, not a single person has sought out python coaching in their careers or their lives, which is, I guess it just hasn't been a big thing that's existed in a former way. So that's why I'm very proud of what we've built. It definitely blows my mind. Uh, but what was really nice is that the person who did seek it out, uh, didn't get coached by us. This was a completely different coaching program they used, yet they saw the same value in coaching that our clients get through PDM. So they said, uh, it really boosted their learning and their confidence with building, which is amazing. So, um, I'm just happy that people are. That someone sought out coaching and seen that result as well. That's pretty cool. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I wonder if. Yeah, the coaching, right. It's, it's pretty common for businesses and fitness, but it also works for Python, works for anything, you know, nothing. I mean. So you're learning an instrument. Yeah, learning instrument. I'd rather get one to one coached on guitar than take an online course. Cool. So what's the next one? Satisfaction. You go, what's this I can't get? No. I never thought I'd see the day. Oh my God. I keep surprising you. Thank you. 76% is satisfied 24 niner satisfied dissatisfied 0% is satisfied. So the song was actually misplaced then, right? Yeah. You were wrong completely. People do get satisfaction from thy. So we were really happy. Honored to hear. Yeah. Blew our minds actually, that 0% stated that they were dissatisfied because in surveys people can be pretty honest and they should. Right. So it's good. Confirms that what we're doing brings a lot of value to the table and they just need to keep doing that. Yeah. And that was a three point question, right? It was, you're either satisfied, on the fence, or dissatisfied, you know. So there was no sort of mildly satisfied sort of thing? No. Um, so, yeah, I was really, um, really proud of that. Makes me very happy. Um, do we keep the song in? Keep the song in. Okay. Keep the in the edit product. Love it. Okay. So what we then did was we asked people why they were satisfied, or actually, you know, we asked them why they answered that way, what was interesting. So this is where we get some critical feedback, which is really nice. People noticed the mix of technical and non technical content that we put out on articles, blog posts, the podcast, whatever, which is really cool. We had a few people say that they wanted to see more technical content from us, which is awesome. We're taking that feedback and we're accommodating that. Already with your YouTube series, Bob. Yeah, indeed. Even that technical eye trouble. Yeah. So what's that currently? Like two, three videos a week? Completely technical. Aiming for five. Really? Yeah. Aiming for five, yeah, yeah. Some weeks at three. But it's definitely very likely that there'll be five because as you're coding and doing so much with our clients and open source and building things, there's just always more to talk about. Right. Like we have a whole list of topics and I think that will only increase. So, good news. Yeah, yeah, I love it. There's this nonstop idea list of things to put out there, which is awesome. So, spec, I do want to reemphasize that videos are going to be short two to 5810 minutes max. And we try always to loop in real world stuff we see in our own projects and with people. So no tutorial. Hell, we keep it super practical and bite size so you can watch it for a few minutes and then ideally you just start implementing yourself. Yeah, I do appreciate that. Within 5 seconds of the video starting you've jumped straight into the screen. Share with the code, which is pretty cool. Yeah, don't waste any time. Yeah, I don't want to. Don't want to see your face that long on the thing anyway. No, that's fine. Yeah, that's for. That's for the podcast. It's for the podcast. I'm joking, man. Joking. Okay, so for your face to go on YouTube, man, I'm challenging now. Need some mindset videos here. Mix of technical, non technical. And then he says, like, yeah, but YouTube is 100% python. No way. All right, well, how about this? I was thinking about a series of YouTube shorts with my mindset tips that I've written. So, yeah, for example, a bunch of them. We'll see how that goes. Always with the compound. Then I do shorts. Yeah, get me some shorts in there. I can just walk down the street doing it. That's the way anything works. Yeah, this is the way. Okay, so any of the feedback you wanted to highlight more? Yeah, I wanted to say thank you because people said our personalities and enthusiasm kept them coming back, which is great. So I appreciate that. Um, yeah, this podcast was mentioned a few times as what people appreciate the coding platform as well. And, yeah, just overall, I'm. I'm just very pleased with the feedback, even if with the constructive stuff. So that's pretty good. All right, what's the next one? Bob? This is second last. Second last. 61% of people have recommended highlights. That made me happy. So thank you. Thanks. Thank you, everyone who's recommended us to other people and developers. And just so you know, it actually makes a difference. Right? The people who come to us through recommendations are generally super happy and ready to chat with us and learn with us. And it's just there's that trust that you get from recommending something to someone else. So we really appreciate all of you that share the pie bytes word out there and bring people our way, because it's one of the best things you can do to support us. So thank you. We appreciate it. I'm holding up my coffee mug. Cheers. Yeah. All right. And the last thing I wanted to share was we had an open question, which was, how can we improve? And this is where we got some critical feedback, which I wanted to share for everyone so that, you know, that it wasn't all just sunshine rainbows. We had a bunch of feature requests for the platform, which was pretty cool. Things that we had perhaps overlooked or just things that people want to see now based on the way times have changed, which is good, they want us to keep more focus on this podcast and the video content on YouTube, which is really cool. So that feedback actually helps us direct our time because we do a lot of writing for the blog, for email and things like that. So hearing that people want to see more of us on video and on the podcast is pretty cool. That's really good news because that's also what we enjoy, the podcast and the YouTube videos. So, yeah, I was a bit scared at the start, but I think we got our routine down that we can just sit down and do it. YouTube might take a little bit more preparation, but as we mentioned before, we keep it pretty raw. We keep the stakes in. So, yeah, that's what we also. It's nice that that aligns with what the things that we enjoy the most. Yeah. What was an interesting balance to that is that there were, I think, at least three people that said they want more how to guides from us and, you know, they even compared it to the level of detail in real python. And, you know, we appreciate that and we'll definitely take that into consideration, especially with the feedback that there should be more technical content. But, you know, the other thing from us is that we also don't want you sitting there and reading an article for 15 minutes. Right. Or an hour. Or an hour. Right. We want you working and building. So we need to find that balance between tutorial paralysis and actually implementing something. So we'll think on that, how we can, you know, do that while maintaining that sort of. Well, we don't want you sitting there reading a blog post for or a guide for half an hour to an hour. The other thing I'll mention here is that regarding our PDM program, a really interesting bit of feedback was, could you create like a sort of beginner coaching program, almost like a bridging program to get people into PDM to get them ready. And that was a fantastic idea. It's already something we'd been thinking about, but seeing that feedback from multiple people was a really nice way of confirming that that's something we should spend time on. So that's something we're going to start soon. Yeah. It's kind of sad when we have to send away people that are not at the PDM required level of end, beginner starting intermediate kind of while they can still usually benefit from a coaching mentorship approach. Right. And we usually send people to the platform and that's fine. But yeah, we're definitely going to see how we can wrap this in a short program, relatively, where there's already some coaching from the start, and I think it'll get people from here to there in really fast, really short amount of time. It's a great idea and I've already run it by a couple of our coaches who said, sign me up. I want to help people at that stage, that beginner stage, and get them ready for PDM. So this is something that's already starting to take shape. We've already put a brief synopsis together of what it would look like. So we're pretty excited. That should be coming sooner than later. The other thing I wanted to really take a second to talk about was diversity. So a few people mentioned that they wanted to hear more diverse voices on the podcast. They specifically mentioned female and non binary representation. And that's. That's interesting. Right. We honestly just went with the flow to date with people who came to us, who were recommended to us, and we do want to make that effort to make sure that we represent all manner of, you know, voices. And, you know, I did go through and look, and we do have quite a few episodes of the podcast specifically where we've had interviews with women. And that's, you know, been incredible. We've really thoroughly enjoyed those. But, you know, there's always more you can do in this space, so we'll definitely take that on. And that's also a great segue to share that. We're bringing in a new coach to the PDM program in data science. So we have, we're going to have an actual data scientist machine learning coach joining our rank soon, and she is very excited to be working with us. And so that's going to be happening over the next coming couple of weeks. So I'm very, very excited about that. That's amazing. Yeah. And it's really closing an important gap we had with PDM ML. Yeah. Not sure we can help you, but I mean, we can help you, but maybe not on the super technical ML deep learning side. And now we have that covered as well. So I feel like we have the full scope now. Yeah. In the package. So it's really cool. Yeah, I'm just like, we met with her the other night and just her level of expertise and experience is super exciting. She was finishing your sentences, Bob, and just calling out the problems that she sees in this space with people trying to get into ML and stuff that we were like, yes, that's exactly it. That's what we keep seeing. And she obviously worded it a lot better than us, so that was pretty cool as well. All right, and just to wrap it up. The last thing that we, that was recommended was that we have an ask me anything session like on Reddit. Have an AMA. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to plan that in, and at some point in the near future, maybe in the coming month, we're going to do an ask me anything session. I don't know how we're going to do it. Might be over YouTube or something, but we're definitely going to do that for all of you. Yeah. Because we did our lives a couple of times and those were great people, got a lot of value out of them. But we always enjoyed the interactive part the most. Right. So what if you just ditch the slides and can do it like fully, almost like, what's the term for that? Buyer chat? Fireside chat. Fireside chat, yes. Come together, have a coffee, and just informally talk and just ask us stuff. Yeah. And given while we record this Pycon, us is happening. I think of it more like those open spaces that they have at Pycon where we just say, open up a room. We just be sitting there with a laptop and coffee and anyone's welcome to join and just come and talk to us and ask us questions and, you know, pick our brains on things. I think that'd be really cool. Just don't ask me what my credit card number is and we'll be fine. So that's it. So I'll ask you later. I need to. Expensive book, but, yeah, you already have my credit card number. So one, before we wrap up, there were feature requests for the platform. What was that again? There was some feature, specifically the one I remember off the top of my head. Hang on, let me bring this in. So, one we had people asking for. Where is it? Oh, here we go. So on the dashboard page of the platform, being able to have a quick reference of bytes, like a to do list of next bites that they want to do. So better organization of some of the exercises and bytes so that, you know, because the current bytes are not in any particular order. Right. They're in the order that they were added. And aside from the learning parts, people want a bit more flow through that. So it was much better worded than I did, but I don't have that feedback here on my screen. Okay. It's good to know. And we're currently upgrading our lambda functions on Amazon from three a to 310. So most of the bytes should be 310 pretty soon. So it's not 311, but it's still a lot better than how it was. So perfect. Thank you for doing that, by the way. There's my public recognition for you. Thank you for doing that. I know that was kind of a boatload of work. Yeah. It's not like toggling a switch. We have many lambdas and many exercises and many dependencies, and I'm going granularly with this meaning exercise by exercise. I know that's painful. Yeah. But zero downtime, right? And, yeah, it's nice. I noticed that the bytes are super fast. I think that little performance gain or little 310 is just faster. So I think it just. That also ripples through. So I also use Docker this time, so containerize the whole thing, and maybe it just works better. I don't know. But I like how responsive it is now, and it was pretty responsive before, so. Oh, yeah, that's. That's pretty cool. I'm happy to hear it. Nice. All right, well, with that, I think we're done. Do you want to quickly do a book? Now we're at it. I'm only on fiction. You go first. Oh, crap. I didn't even think about this. Oh, okay. I borrowed a book from the library. I haven't started it yet, but this is the accountability to get into it before it's due back. That comic book series or whatever graphic novel from when we were kids called Tintin by. I'm going to butcher his name. I don't know how to pronounce it. It's, like, French, isn't it? I don't know how to say. Who's the other? Sorry. H e r g e, with a. An accent over the top. I sound so ignorant right now. I apologize, everyone. But anyway, the Tintin books, graphic novels, whatever. That author, there's a biography about him and how Tintin came about and all that sort of thing. So I borrowed that book, and I'm ready to read it. So sometimes somebody will call me out. If it's French, then Harriss, I think. Okay. There you go. All right. What are you reading? I'm in. 100% fiction. Almost brothers, Kamarav, Dostoevsky. Now, that's kind of heavy and thick. My God. Dark sided. But, you know, it's a masterpiece. It's one of the masterpieces in world literature. Right. And I do enjoy reading that. It sounded really forced, so I. Well, I'm glad you're enjoying it. You can give me the cliff notes, because. How many pages was it? 600. It's 900 or something. 900? Oh, that'll take a while. Yeah. Audiobooks, probably, like, 300 hours long. I'm not listening to that or reading that. Yeah. I don't know how you do audiobooks. I would completely derail. Yeah, in the shower. There you go. All right. That's giving away too much, so I think we should end it on that note. But thank you, everyone, for listening. And from me and from Bob, thank you so much for all the feedback in that survey. For those of you who took the time, for those of you who didn't, next year is coming around sooner than we like. So when we send it out next March or whatever it was, April, May, that was March, we will please go ahead and give us that feedback and we'll go from there. So thank you for listening. As always, I to appreciate it. Thanks for listening. Thanks for filling it out. Yeah, we often say, like, the best content comes from your feedback. So the more feedback you give us, we really want to serve you and provide the content that's, that's most relevant for you. So there we go. Beautiful. Thanks, everyone. We'll see you next week. Yeah. Bye. See you next week. Bye. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To hear more from us, go to Pibyte friends, that is Pibit es friends, 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 forward slash community. We hope to see you there and catch you in the next episode.