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Because that, to me, is amazing, because it's almost like we eating our own dog food, right? We're not just writing this stuff down. We're playing with it and learning from it, experimenting and coming up with cool stuff. 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. Welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Pie Bytes podcast. Bob, happy new year. Happy new year, everyone. Who's listening. So what's up? It's 2021. Happy new year. New year. New opportunities, right? Definitely nothing but good things ahead. Hopefully everyone out there, a few days into January, you've started thinking about all the amazing things you're going to achieve this year. It's so many cool things that you can do. Nothing stopping you. What we wanted to do this episode, though. Is that correct, Bob? We want to talk about one of the things we achieved in 2020. That's correct. And today, I want to talk about Python tips specifically and the book we launched at the end of 2020. Yeah, exactly. So this book was something that was super exciting for us. We've talked about it to no end before, but that's because it's just something we're super proud of. So we wanted to talk in this episode about the book, why we wrote it, some mindset behind it, and then what you can expect to see inside the book when you read it. So, Bob, why don't we start off with, why did we write this book? That's a great question. Yeah. Overall, we find with books that, I mean, there are some really good books, but overall, it takes a lot of effort to go through a full book, and it can be very dense. And we wanted to kind of do things a little bit different in making specific code snippets or tips, as we call them. More digestible. Yep. And it's the thing about that, about them being more digestible, is that you can pick and choose. And this was something that we don't see too often out there with python books in general. There's generally a lot of long form text, and as you're saying, you know, tutorials are pretty dense. So we didn't want this book to be too dense. We wanted you to be able to pick it up, almost like a little handbook that you could hopefully one day. Well, I won't say hopefully that you will one day be able to keep in your pocket. Hint, hint. But at this rate, with the way the tips are written, you can pick and choose. Just flick to a page and you'll find a random tip. Tip to a page and then you'll learn something new. And that's one of the pride points for us, is that this book is pretty engaging and accessible to anyone. Yeah. And we wanted to expose you to things you otherwise would not easily come across. Maybe operator module or import lib inspect. Those kind of modules are not commonly known and they can be very powerful. So expect to see the standard library inside out. And the standard library is immense. There's always more to learn. I mean, we've been studying it for years and we still come across modules every day. We didn't know that exist. And that can just enhance your python knowledge. Yeah. And this is one of the things, right? Discovering this code to put into the book? Well, we only did that by reading code. It wasn't just about reading other books or watching courses, it was about reading code. You know, playing with other people's code, doing code reviews, learning as we went and building things ourselves, exposed us to these libraries and these other different aspects of python that we otherwise would not have come across. And as you just said, bob, the standard library is massive. So there's so many cool things in there that you likely won't come across in your day to day coding, which is what we've put into this book. So get into the habit of reading code, go through the book, read through the actual code, and not only will you learn things like, well, about the new library you've never seen, but also how to format your code to use it, which is really exciting. Yeah. If you're not reading a lot of code, you're seriously missing out. We definitely got so much better by reading a lot of code and writing a lot of code. So tinkering with it. There's actually this website or tool that allows you to search across a half million git repos. It's called Grep app. For example, if you would type like class method, you see a lot of examples of class methods. But also in the preparation of this book, I was just randomly reading standard library code, and we will get to a project in a second. But there's no better way to become proficient by reading and writing a lot of code. That's exactly it, though. So one of the other things that we really wanted to do when we wrote this book was motivate you to try out the new code. So it's one thing to read it, it's one thing to be, you know, inspired by it and think, oh, wow, this is cool. But then we want you to go try it. This is one of the fun things about it and just bring up the repl and just import it and just have a play. These are really cool things you can do. And for those of you who have projects of your own that you're actively doing these, that you're actively coding, I should say, you might even find some inspiration for that. You might find that you could do things in, you know, I guess, half the space or with half the effort or more effectively with some of the things you discover in the book. And yeah, the motivation to try these things is what we really wanted to push across. And last but not least, as pivots, we were committed to write a book. We have been thinking about that for years, and now that was the right time. We just celebrated four years of pivytes the 19 December. And yeah, this is really like a digest of four years of our python journey. So we had a lot of materials to use. This is why we need sound effects as we grow this podcast, we need some sound effects because as you said that, I really wanted to have fireworks going off and people cheering and so here's me clapping. Don't you have the Tada emoji? Yeah, so just. We're going to read out emojis to you all now. So, shifting gears a little bit into the mindset and process of writing a book, I think that's equally interesting as the python itself. Again, this was something we talked about for years. It actually took us longer than we expected to put the pedal to the metal, so to say. But yeah, the process, it could only work when we dropped perfectionism. I think that's the gist here. So what we did is we, although we were aiming for, and we are aiming for at least 300 tips, we went live as soon as we had 100 tips. And I think that really made a difference in how fast we could iterate, because if we would have waited till 300, then it's very hard to make that happen in one go. Now with 100, we went live faster. We got already one third of the content in people's hands. We started to receive feedback, but even before that, actually, we have been posting the tips to Twitter and LinkedIn for almost two years. And it was there that we got invaluable feedback and people were just loving it. So we was almost guaranteed to succeed because they encouraged us like these tips are so valuable. Keep them coming. So we knew that this format was going to work again. I think the takeaway was to, if you can test drive something as small as possible, because even before launching 100 tips, we were doing single tips on social media. That's very important. Yeah, well, to. To challenge that, though, right? So here's, here's the thing. You said we've been doing this for a couple of years, but it took us a couple of years to actually write the book. And that's the clincher, right? We had to drop that perfectionism, we had to drop that fear and realize that we set a goal for ourselves. I think it was three years ago where we sat there and we said, one day we're going to have a book, going to have our names on it, it's going to be fantastic. And we still didn't do it. We had the overwhelming feedback from Twitter, from people saying, these tips are great. We'd love to see it in a book one day, or, you guys should do this, you guys should do that. And we still didn't do it. And the lesson for us that we learned was that, well, look what happened. We literally just started. We said, screw it, we've had enough. We're just going to do it. And we got something out. And to quote you know, from our last episode with Mark and Anthony where how do you eat an elephant? Well, one bite at a time. That age old quote, well, the elephant was 300 tips. We'd set that goal of 300 tips for the book, but we launched the book with 100 and that was our way of one bite at a time. So I guess the motivation here that we want to try and give to all of you is if you have any projects that you're working, whether it be or even projects that you want to work. So if you've wanted to create an open source app, if you've wanted to run, write a book, if you've wanted to just start developing with Python, whatever it might be, just start. And this is the perfect time for this episode to be pushing this message to everyone because it's the start of a new year, but just start now. There's no better time than right now. So there's my two cent bob. Yep. And also the starting is the hardest. It sounds cliche, but once you get that initial momentum, it's kind of a snowball. So it gets easier as you get started. Well, one of the key things there as well, I forgot to mention was when we did launch the book with 100 tips, the feedback that we got on the book itself was fantastic. People were giving us all sorts of feedback, like, this is great. We love it. We just love how condensed it is and how easy it is to read, rather than just being drawn out over 500 pages. But we also had some critical feedback, which helped us then shape the book for the next release. So how many releases do we have now? I think we're on version three. Yeah, version three. And version four is right around the corner. So there you go. And it just keeps getting bigger and better. Yep. No, totally. It's a constant process of improving. Yeah. So with. With writing the book. So there's a lot of work involved with. With writing a book. It's not just as simple as copying and pasting stuff in there. And here's another bit of mindset, and, I guess, productivity to throw in there. So, Bob, when writing the tips, how did you organize your time with all the other stuff that. That we have on our plates? Yeah, that's a great question. So I didn't really have a schedule, like, do one or two tips a day or five. It also was a bit tied to inspiration. So sometimes I had weeks I couldn't come up with that much. And then maybe I did more coding or more reading or more research overall of previous content we had, and I could come up with 1520 tips in a week, so. But definitely overall, doing them early in the day is much better because you have a limited bucket of willpower. And as the day progresses, I'm in Spain,

so 03: 11:48

00 p.m. Us is online, so there are a lot of meetings, a lot of distractions. So I think what really helped scale Newport's deep workbook, it's basically block out time and make sure you get that undistracted time and then just plow through it. A lot of grit. It was the same. Same for me. Right. The way I did it for my stuff was to choose a day because I only had a couple of hours in the evenings after work and kids and everything. So it was choosing a specific day because there's so many other things on our plate that it could. That could easily take over the progress time towards the book and all the other moving pieces around it. So, yeah, if you are working on something like this, make sure you carve out that time. Don't just expect it to come and say, I'm just going to do it in my spare time, because that spare time is never going to come. You'll always fill the time with something. All right, so, Bob, to finish this one off. Let's talk about what is in the book. We'll split into two. So we have, there is going to be a lot of standard lib in there, but the book does have some external libraries in there. So what was one of your standard lib picks? Yeah, one of my favorites is the import lib and inspect, which I mentioned before are not very well known. But diving into those importing standard library modules and using inspect to get the source code, I was actually able to make a little open source project. We will link below, which is called pisource, and it allows you to read in python source code from the command line. And that's again, another nice benefit of writing a book or any content of that kind is that you can reuse it and one thing leads to the other. So in this case it led to a little open source project and article and, and whatnot. So that, yeah, that was one of my favorite standard library ones. Well, there are many, but I have to choose, right? It's hard to picture one. I love it because that to me is amazing because it's almost like we eating our own dog food, right? We're not just writing this stuff down, we're playing with it and learning from it, experimenting and coming up with cool stuff. And that, that leads into my pick from the standard lib, which was zip file. And that was something that I just, I think it was just random that it happened, but around the same time that we were writing some of these, I needed to work with some zip files and need to automate some extraction and compression and things like that. And it was just super handy to have this one there. So it's in the book and it works really well. So downloading and extracting a zip file and two lines of code, that's awesome. I think the biggest compliment people can make or testimonial towards the book is that they actually use the code in their day to day work. So moving on to the external libraries then, let's highlight another two. I will go first, the how do I tool. I read about that a long time ago in the hitchhiker's Guide to Python, and it's a nice tool to search for stack overflow answers from the command line, and I think it highlights that apart from standard lib and external modules by themselves, the book is also about the tooling. We also have a lot of pytest coverage. It spans further than just Python, so how do I. Is just a useful utility. We show how to use it, but it's also a really nice library to read its source code. Yeah, that one's cool. I really like that tool. The other external one I wanted to quickly mention was caching with requests, and that one was really cool because it was something we discovered in 2017. So this is how old? Not old, but aged or how long we've been hanging on to some of these goodies, these tips, because that's something we played with back then, but we're now putting into the book now, and that is tip number 36, which is caching API calls. Awesome. Yeah, we really like that library. So I think that's a wrap then. Where can people find the book? All right, so if you want to buy this fabled Tome of tips of python tips, if that's what we're going to call it, head to pibytes, forward slash tips. P y b I t e s tips. And that's where you can find the book. And we'd be really grateful if you gave it a look. We love it. A lot of people love it. You'll get a lot out of it. And let us know what you think. How many tips there are now? 200? I think 250. We're aiming for 250 later this month. Talking about accountability, right? Accountability thing. When we hit 300, as was our initial goal, we want to get it out in physical form. So we're really excited about that. I can't wait. It's going to be so good to have the physical book because this is a podcast and you can't see, you know, I'm just giving you a heads up from what I'm seeing on screen. Bob's sitting there with his bookshelf behind him, buckling under the weight of the thousands of books he has there. And I can't wait to see our little pie bytes book nestled in there next to some of those Tim Ferriss and Halliday books. Jillian just made an imaginary pile of piebites books stacked on his desk. Yeah, that's. They're just going to sit there and prop up my monitors and stuff. Right? No kidding. And yeah, the last thing is that we are not only about Python, we're also about career and mindset, and we also produce tips about those. So if you want to get those, head over to Codechallenge ES tips and you can subscribe to get weekly not only Python tips, but also career mindset tips. Those ones are really exciting because those are some really cool tips for managing the workplace, managing the mindset for when you're working on projects and whatever else you're tackling in life, and I'm going to put some accountability in here. We are going to be making a book similar to the Python tips one, but we'll do one around career and mindset as well. So we'll be throwing more of those in there. Some of them will probably have a couple of stories or anecdotes from our experiences with those tips and something that we're going to release this year. I won't give us a date yet because we have other stuff we're working on first, but it's coming this year. There we go. Definitely after the physical Python Tips edition, right? Yeah, I want a python tips physical book first to give me motivation before I move into a career and mindset. Tip book will be coming. Yeah, very exciting. All right, let's make it a wrap. So thank you all for listening, as usual. And just to reiterate, all those links that we've mentioned will be in the notes below, I hope in whatever app you're using. Thank you as always for listening. And Bob, thank you so much for your time. Really enjoy this as always. Yeah, really enjoyed this. Also, shout out to all the people that have feedbacked on our tips and helped us. It really has been invaluable and I'm really happy and proud of this project. And again, thanks for your support. And if you have a project you're working on, go and get it. Now's the time to start. Get cracking. Yep. Gain some momentum, especially in the new year. Beautiful. Thanks, Bob. Thanks, Julie. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To hear more from us, go to pibyte friends, that is Pybit 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 community. We hope to see you there and catch you in the next episode.