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 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. Welcome back to the Piewytes podcast, episode 130. This is Bob, and I'm here with Julian. How's it going, man? What's happening? Good Monday recording day. I'm excited. What about you? Yeah, I'm very excited. I'm drinking out of my Star wars mug because the Ahsoka show is out on Disney. I'm very excited and happy about that. Awesome. Yeah, I forgot my water, so I have to wait for a little bit. All right, well, let's. Let's see. We're going to keep this one pretty quick. Well, we always say that, and it's super quick, but let's kick it off with some wins. Talk to me. Yeah, no, I was reading deep work again. I'm still reading them. Just because I'm reading many books, I just take it in small chunks. But one thing that really stuck with me was, like, batching similar things. So I put all my coaching check ins, for example, on Tuesday and Friday, and I do most of the content creation on Monday. Hence, we're recording now under the email. So blocking things like that makes me more productive and gives you more peace of mind. So I think that's a productivity win. Oh, awesome, man. Yeah, I love it. You see, you're definitely way more on top of your chunking, which is. Chunking. Very, very cool. That's the word. Yeah. What about you? Personal one this, uh, this time? Well, it's always a personal one with me, but a mindset win. So yesterday was Father's day. So happy Father's day to you. Australian Father's day. Happy father. Thanks. Thanks, man. Thanks. And, uh, we got in March now, so I got two. You got two? Yeah. You better wish me in March. Uh, so we. We had a fantastic day. My wife planned a massive surprise, um, where we just followed these random instructions to drive around like it was. It's one. One of the cards said, just drive whichever way the wind is blowing. And we ended up at a beautiful beach, and we had a picnic, and it was lovely. Uh, so that was a win in itself. Just a beautiful day. Uh, but I have to share it because it's kind of. In hindsight, it's kind of a funny story. But, um, while we were sitting there. We're almost done. The picnic, you know, the food's kind of little bits of food left in the plastic containers. And these two maltese terrier dogs ran up the beach. Their owner had taken them off the leash and they ran up. Um, we couldn't stop them. They just dove straight into the middle of the picnic. Sand all over everything. All over the food, their faces and their feet in the food. It was, oh, look, we were mortified in the moment. I was like, my wife was definitely thinking, it's ruined. And I'm sitting there going, woosa. Calm, calm blue ocean. Just, there's no point getting angry. It's, it's done. You can't salvage the food. It's done. So anyway, it all worked out. We had a fantastic day after that as well, with lots more exploring and, and, uh, just discovering things and, uh, it was, it was just lovely. It was a fantastic day. But that was, that was definitely a highlight slash low light. But no, it's a funny story. So we had a good day. It's good father's day. That's my win. Yeah. I like how it went from the mindset of when it happened to now you're actually laughing about it, but in the moment it's pretty terrible, right? Yeah. The, the message I left you yesterday telling you about it had a slightly different tone to it, I'm pretty sure. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. So good mindset training. Yeah, exactly. So look, with today, everyone, thank you for being here, as always. Thank you for listening to our inane ramblings sometimes. But today we wanted to talk a little bit about just what's happening with python and that it really is time, I think, and this is a nice way of framing it, if I do say so myself. I think this is a good time for us to start changing our opinions as developers and people and non tech people and everything. That Python is something that's only for the technically literate. And Bob, you can carry on from here. What's driving this thought process with us? Well, it's being used now everywhere and also maybe in areas where you would less so expect it. So we had that big news about Microsoft Excel adopting Python. Super exciting. I wanted to try it out right away, but then turned out it was for Windows and had to go on a waiting list. So I will be notified and I probably will need a Windows machine, but that's super exciting because Excel, as far as I know, was always like VBA and a different programming language language, basically. And now we can use Python there as well. So although Python was already huge, it's still finding new areas and being expanded to areas where non Python developers, where it might be interesting for them to pick it up. Right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's what gets me excited if you really think about the magnitude of it. Right? I mean, it's now going to be native to the application. You don't need to have plugins, you don't need to do all these other things on the outside. You don't need to use open Py, Excel or whatever other languages like Java and what have you might be using. It's in the app. And it took a little while for me to, even as I was reflecting on it, to think just how big that is. Of every language out there, this is the one that Microsoft has chosen to put into the application that essentially runs the world. If you were to think cloud runs all the infrastructure, the application that runs the planet is Excel. Every company on the planet uses it. And whether you're technically literate or not, you would be using it in your workplace at some point. To me, that's very exciting, because this is along the same thought process as AI. If you learn it and you learn to use it in conjunction with your day job, it can give you a leg up over everyone else. So the way I'm thinking is non tech, people say, people who enroll such a, and I'm generalizing here, right, not everyone's non tech, but the traditional non technologically based roles such as recruiting, sales, marketing, you know, the ones that you wouldn't necessarily bring up the command line and SSH into a host, right? Those roles are suddenly being exposed to programming interfaces, languages and such. So if you as someone in one of these roles and you're dealing with oodles of data, whether it's human resources, data metrics, recruiting data, whatever it happens to be, even sales data, you don't have to just stick to the basic Excel graphs, you don't have to just stick to getting someone else to build pipelines outside of excel to feed your excel document with data. You can actually learn to do this yourself with Python. It's such an engaging language that can draw you in very easily, and you can learn it and just have this leg up, you can be self sufficient. And that's super exciting. That's very exciting to me, which is why I wanted to just mention it today. Indeed. Yeah, super exciting. And full circle for me as well as I started in finance, started to learn to program VBA, and now went to Python, and Python is in excel. So yeah, we're mind blown. But yeah, good point. So how can we help people that are completely new and in other sectors to start Python? So this worked out to be the perfect plug for our PDI program, the Py Bytes developer initialization program, or init program that we launched in July, I think it was. And we've had our first round of people that have gone through the six weeks, they've now completed it. And we wanted to mention it. It was the perfect tie in with this announcement from Microsoft that, hey, this is a great time for people who are traditionally non tech to be learning Python. So Bob, what were the kinds of backgrounds of the people that have gone through the program? And can you just share quickly what are some of the sort of takeaways, results, wins that you have? Top of mind? Yeah, sure. So most people we worked with didn't have any or very slim programming experience. So for example, our own Georgia went through the program. She didn't know anything about programming. After a few weeks she was doing git from the command line. She built her to do app, which is one of the Capstone projects we have. And I'm really impressed with how well she has done and how she picked it up. And I think it's all because of the deliberate practice. Right. People have to do a small round of bridging gaps and then they have to work on projects as soon as possible. Of course, with our coaching and guidance, we had somebody that's in sales and he knew already a bit of programming, but he also incorporated flask. So that's the nice thing as well about PDI is that although we have a curriculum and it's pretty structured and guided, if people want to bring in more advanced stuff, more advanced than a typical beginner program, then they can, we can make it as advanced as they want. So he did some flask, some SQL model as well for Georgia as well, by the way, for database persistence. Yeah. Way more confident in his skills, more autonomous, not only building apps, but also, and that's another example of more sophisticated tooling brought in. He was also using chat GPT. So a bit hesitant at the start, but then with my guidance, because I was coaching him, he's now using that a lot for his coding day to day. So those couple of examples. Yeah, that's amazing, man. And just with Georgia, if you're listening to this, you should be. I'm kidding. Georgia is our EA, by the way, our executive assistant. And she, when I got back from Canada, was telling me, oh yeah, yeah, I just opened a branch for this feature request. I'm like, wait, what did you just say to me? You, what happened? What happened while I was going? It's been a huge turnaround on that level, and I'm very excited. And then coming in the next two weeks, I think we've got a recruiter, our very own Emily, going through the program as well. And Emily doesn't have. She was on the podcast, by the way, for all of you listening a couple of weeks ago, but she doesn't have a tech background with regards to command line shell prompts. Get anything like that, she has no idea about those things. So it's going to be very exciting for her to go through it. So she's got a recruiting background. So for me, it's very, very exciting to see people that aren't traditionally tech nuts like us, going through and skilling up on Python. And to some extent, it's arguably even more exciting than helping people with the existing skillset, because we're showing people who never would have believed in a million years that they could code, that actually it is possible and they can develop whatever the heck they want. So that's very exciting to me. Yeah, no, it's super exciting. And a lot of people also use this approach to the PDM program, so they see the PDM program as something advanced they're not ready for. So they go through PDI first to bridge all the gaps and then be ready to, when they join PDM to go extra fast. And do you have any, were there any wins that they shared throughout their time that you can remember? Certainly. And as PDM, that's part of our process to every week, list out the wins, as we also call it successful. All of you will. We can link an article about why that's important below. So yeah, a couple of wins. So complete a project on my own and got incredibly useful feedback with how to refactor my code. I noticed, although it's a beginner program, we're already going into refactoring. Week two, I'm getting more and more comfortable using git in the command line. So it's not just git and versus code. We endorse the command line, learned about pip tools and pre commit, which is a huge win. Discussed the Django project. So apart from the Capstone project, this person is doing other projects on the site, right? So really committed to awesome coaching sessions, which always leaves me excited and encouraged to learn more python, because not only about the technical stuff in those sessions, also like the persistence and accountability and keeping people on track and then another thing I wanted to share with an overall win after somebody completed the program were two big takeaways. And that was I learned how to write code efficiently in a real world environment. And I learned basic software development, thinking and tooling. I think that's the important thing about that, is we really simulate that real world experience, which is really hard to get from tutorials and guides. And in regards to software development, it's not only the coding, it's also the tooling, as per the other wins, pre commit and pip compile and all these things, but also the thinking. We don't have you just code. We always guide you with that design, with thinking about how to write efficient and maintainable software. Yeah, exactly. And it's kind of funny, you just reminded me, one of my mates was reaching out and actually said to me, you know, how do I learn Python, man, I need to learn it all these jobs that I'm applying for, say, python on it in some way, shape or form. And I said, look, man, you got to sign up for our coaching. And that's the thing. Sometimes your instinct is to just be a bit sheepish with the people, let you know about this stuff. But I believe in this so much. I said, you could take months to take some online courses and maybe mess around with a book and do the same little gimmicky projects of hello World and all that sort of stuff, right? You can, you can do that if you really want. I said, but, man, I know your situation. I know what you're trying to do. Six weeks PDI, join it. You're going to come out exactly where you need to be. It's very exciting to me what people are achieving through this program. One last thing for me before we move on and wrap this up, because clearly we want to talk about just Python now being such a big thing for everyone. It's not just for developers and people who want coding jobs. It's like learning a new language, like English in the workplace or whatever. So what I'm asking from everyone listening to this is to please, please do not just us a favor, but do your network a favor. Do the people in your lives a favor. Your family, your friends, your people, you know, in university, people, you know, in these, I'll say it again, traditional non tech roles, right? Reach out to them and let them know that python is something they need to learn, right? Recommend our coaching program. You know, support them. Support us. That would be awesome. I would. I would love that. I'd appreciate it. But more importantly, I want to see people believing in themselves and not being left behind. I don't want to see people losing their jobs and becoming obsolete because, you know, programming starting to become a central theme across the world through. And I want to say this excel thing is a massive driver of that and will be a driver of that that sets people apart, you know? So please do everyone a favor. I would really appreciate. I know you would too, Bob, but please share this out. Let them know that this is something that's coming and it's something they can actually learn and that we can help them learn it. I'd appreciate that. Nice. Thanks. Yeah, I was going, I was going to mention the same thing, and then you did. The other thing I want to call out is the AI tools, right? Chat, GPT, and friends becoming more widespread, not only in programming, but in all fields. Working with us, you really develop that mindset to embrace those tools and become more effective. So it's not only about the python developer skills, it's also about the productivity mindset and career stuff that people really get out of working with us. Yep, perfect. All right, well, that's, that's, that got that off my chest. Yeah. We'll do a quick book. You go first because. You go first because I need to go to Parabytes books.com. That was the most obvious plug of this entire episode, so thank you. I really don't know what I read, so I actually haven't read anything new because I'm still reading that. The climate change book that I mentioned on the last episode, I was on whatever that was called. I can't remember. Carbon book. The Carbon almanac. That's the one. So you can tell from the word almanac that's going to be a big book. So I'm still working my way through that. And in between, I'm not ashamed. I'm proud of it. I'm reading my Marvel Unlimited subscription, making my way through a bunch of doctor strange comics at the moment. There you go. Love it. All right, what are you reading? Tell me. Well, first of all, you got me on audible, so thank you. Yes, you're welcome. The spanish collection is much, much better now. So you have this Netflix model of consume whatever you want. So it's nice for walks and stuff. It even incentivizes moving more, doing more steps. But on the reading side, I want to recommend the four agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. And it's really a mindset book, right. It's about self limiting beliefs, creating needless suffering. So it has some really good tips around that. And yeah, it's a pretty short read. You can probably read it in the day or weekend. And. Yeah, it was pretty inspiring. Nice. That's cool, man. Yeah. Make sure we have links for those in the show notes. All right. Well, before we wrap it up, everyone, thank you, as always. One thing I'll ask you to do as well. Go check out the pie bytes website and the PDM page and the PDI page. Bob and I have done a lot of work over the past week and we have rewritten everything, so it's much more lean to the point and very, very factual. So head in there and check it out. We're definitely proud of the work that's been put into that. So. Yeah, yeah, the pages are really 2.0 now, so pibit es way more concise, way more informative. We spent some good time on that. And you should now in a couple of minutes, just get all the relevant information, have nice looking faqs as well, and it's. Yeah, put a lot of effort in that. Yep. Yeah. Cool. We'll even have a video on the homepage soon, won't we? Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, he is constantly iterating. All right, well, thanks, everyone, for listening. This is Bob. Thanks. What's up next week? Oh, what's up? Coding, I think it's coding related. I think everyone needs a nice shot of code of Python. Yeah, I think we're going to, well, us or me and to talk about coat smells. So stay tuned for that. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that one. That'll be good. Beautiful. That will be. Thanks for listening, everyone. Bob, thanks for listening. I enjoyed it. Yeah, as always. And thanks, everybody, for tuning in, and we'll be back next week. Ciao. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To hear more from us, go to Pibyte friends, that is Pybit es, 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.