Pybites Podcast

#157 - Code, Music, and Python Education: A Conversation with Christopher Bailey

β€’ Julian Sequeira & Bob Belderbos

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🎢 Dive into the intriguing journey of Christopher Bailey, video tutorial producer at Real Python, host of their weekly podcast, and an advocate for learning and teaching Python. 🐍 😍

In this episode Christopher shares his unique path from music to programming, illustrating how his passions for music, education, and coding have intertwined to shape his career in tech.

From early coding fascinations and playing in a band to becoming a key figure in Python education, discover how Christopher's diverse background and persistent learning mindset have propelled him through an inspiring transition into the world of technology.

We also delve into Python industry trends that excite him and what's next on his learning radar, along with a win of the week + book recommendation.

Join us for a captivating discussion on the intersections of code, music, and education with Christopher Bailey, and discover how embracing diverse experiences can enrich your tech journey. πŸš€

Check out The Real Python Podcast hosted by Christopher here.

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
02:00 Christopher Bailey intro and win of the week
03:47 Background and career progression
13:12 Real Python work and how to stay technical
17:10 Mindset of learning, music and teaching influence
21:20 Immersive learning, deliberate practice and building for others
26:12 How to get unstuck when coding and dealing with perfectionism
29:39 Python trends and what to learn next
36:40 Books
39:15 Wrap up and outro

Book tip:
- The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

Reach out to Christopher:
- LinkedIn
- Fosstodon
- X
- Pybites Circle

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Julian
Bob

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I get so much excitement, especially when I was doing programming at the bank and stuff where I would build something and the person's like, oh, my gosh, you just saved me like 3 hours, you know, and I'm like, yeah, that's great. That's fantastic. You know, and then it might be like, you know, ongoing, like 3 hours a week or something like that. And that, that's what really. That is definitely a motivating thing for me. Hello, and welcome to the PY Bytes podcast, where we talk about Python career and mindset. We're your hosts. I'm julian Sequeira. And I am Bob beldibles. 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, everybody, to the Py Bytes podcast. This is Bob elaborates, and I'm here with Christopher Bailey. Some of you might know from Realpython. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How are you doing? I'm doing good. It's early morning here for me, so it's always fun spanning these different time zones. Yeah. You're in Colorado zone, right? Yep, yep. Right in mountain zone there. Yeah, yeah. Recording this. My afternoon. Your morning. Yeah. Getting off of the coffee or getting on. Yeah, I'm just, uh, I'm just going to be drinking here in the background sometimes. So fueled up, right. Yeah. That's also funny because I was recently on your podcast, and this feels now just like a natural continuation with the difference that there, you interviewed me, and today I'm going to interview you. Yeah, I haven't done very many of these, so I'm interested to see how. What kind of reaction I get out there in the community. And I haven't done much video stuff either, though I have an interesting background. I'm thinking kind of funny. So people listening are going to think they're listening to a real Python episode because we are so used to your voice as the host right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're going to have to stop myself and stop asking you questions. Well, you can if you want, but, yeah, it's good to be about you. So, yeah, so maybe you can introduce yourself to our pivots audience for the people that don't know you yet. And, yeah, we also always start with a win of the week. Cool. Yeah. Well, so I'm Christopher Bailey. I go by Chris, uh, and Christopher, I'm not very picky about it, and I've been working for real Python for about five years. I discovered them in my python journey, which maybe we'll talk about a little bit more. And Dan was looking for people to do video stuff, and I had a background in teaching and a background in making videos, and was very interested in doing that for that audience. And then four years ago, almost to the month, I started the real Python podcast. I had asked Dan, why don't we have a podcast? And he didn't have time, and I said, well, I can do it. And I dabbled in doing a podcast before that. And so he helped with the sort of background and that stuff, and it's been a real journey, and I have used both real Python and the podcast as a tool for me to continue learning, and that's definitely what my show is about. I really like to ask questions, break down acronyms, and try to provide listeners with actionable stuff they can do. Like, I go out of my way to have lots and lots of links on the show and. And so forth. Yeah. So if you haven't checked it out, I guess this is my win of the week. I'm recording episode 200, and so that's very exciting for me. Kind of a big milestone. Uh, I have a co host, Christopher Trudeau, and we're going to be recording that Friday, and that'll be coming out next week, but that is kind of big. I also, uh, did another recording this week, and, of course, being on your show, that's kind of a win of the week for me, too, getting out there and being out there in the world. So those are kind of my background. Yeah, that's awesome. About 200 episodes. I think we're around 160, but that's a big milestone. Yeah. Well, we'll talk about the podcast in a bit and definitely want to know more about it, the backstory. But, yeah, maybe we start with because you're not originally from a programmer, computer science background, talked about editing music education. So I'm curious to hear how you got into coding, then. Yeah, well, I got a computer very early. I'm at the age when people in the United States could still have a paper route. And so I was always eager to have, you know, money and be able to buy things on my own. My parent, I was a six of six kids, so there wasn't lots of, like, oh, showering me with presents and things like that. So if I wanted something, I needed to go out and earn it and buy it and so forth. And that has always been my kind of thing. And I was very much into the idea of getting a colecovision. I know that's really dating myself, but that game console that Coleco put out back in the day. And it was fantastic. And I saved up all this money to buy it. And why am I saying that? Is because my parents gave me the attachment that went to it. That was what was called the atom computer, which basically turned it into an apple two, along with a really awkward Daisy wheel printer. I don't know if anybody remembers those. Very clacky sounding printer. And it had tape drives, again, dating floppy disks on personal computers at home and so forth. It was a interesting computer. I learned how to program on it a little bit basic, obviously made my own little dungeons and dragon like sort of character generator sheets. And I made a kind of snake game that was a two player that you could kind of challenge each other. That was a fun thing as it came with these controllers. And so I could kind of interact with that. And it was a time when you would maybe code things out of the back of a magazine or whatever and type it into a machine. In school, I did really well and had a scholarship to go to the Arizona State University. And I was like, well, I'm interested in engineering. And so I took electrical engineering, and I hated it. I I was not a great school at the time for engineering, in my opinion. This is late eighties. They have turned into quite the world class institution and that stuff now. But at the time, it was very, very frustrating. And I had discovered music and how much I loved it at the time. I decided to pursue that. I formed a band in the nineties and we toured the US, and the band was called beats the hell out of me. And we were assigned to Metal Blade Records, which is like, the only band that we were similar to at the time was there were bands that were way more metal than us, and we were kind of more like a grunge, early nineties, heavy rock punk kind of stuff. And so they didn't know what to do with this, and we couldn't really tour with other bands on the label. So it was a very interesting thing. But we did three albums, and then I kind of trying to find work and do other things in my life. I ended up working at a music store, and that kind of led to a gig where somebody was looking for a teacher, somebody who could train people about Midi and keyboards and digital audio. And so that landed me a job where I worked at a place called the conservatory of recording arts and sciences thats in Arizona. And I taught there for ten years. I taught midi, musical instrument, digital interface, I taught digital audio. I taught basically computers to people that were interested in, maybe not so interested in computers, but much more interested in touching big consoles and tape machines and things like that. Its a weird time, like the late nineties into the early two thousands is when lots of industries started to have that digital turnover. The print world had already happened, right, with desktop publishing and laser printers and so forth. And so audio was really on the cups of it. Digi design at the time, which is now avid, their pro tool software was new ish. And I remember Apple buying the logic platform. And so those are things I taught, logic and pro tools and digital audio. We started a program in audio for video games. He taught a platform called Wise, which you might see in games today, but it was hard. It was 4 hours of teaching in the morning and 4 hours of teaching in the afternoon. And I sort of was burning out on the idea of it. And I picked up sticks, moved to Hawaii with my wife who grew up there, had her folks there, and I worked for Apple for a while. I was a trainer for them. I was teaching logic, which makes sense because I had been teaching that and I taught final cut because I was really getting into video. And that whole thing turned into, you know, working in the retail stores, which was interesting. I enjoyed more teaching the staff, uh, I would teach people how to repair iPhones and things like that. I did both jobs, uh, they call it a creative job and uh, another job they have where there, which is called the uh, genius, you know, or you're back there repairing things. And that was a very interesting journey. But retail is also very hard. And I was kind of burning out on it and my wife turned to me and said, why don't you come work at my bank? And I said, okay, what do you, what do you think I can do? I think you can do SQl programming because I've been doing it and I'm like, what do you mean? So on the side, they had hired somebody as a contractor to do SQL programming of all these reports. And the person was very slow. And my wife was able to like figure out on her own how to do these kind of reports by modifying them and so forth. And she wanted to, you know, present me. So I dove in and taught myself SQL. And this is after having gone through an engineering program where I learned Fortran and I learned c at the time, and computers were really boring at the time. Again, this was before that big changeover where music and video and all this other kind of fun stuffs happening with computers today. And so I was very interested in learning SQL. And so I went on Lynda, I don't know if you remember that platform. It's now, I guess LinkedIn learning now. And I learned SQL there, bought books and basically did the whole sort of teach yourself everything. And they sat me down to basically do a job there. It was a bank, and we were working in the mortgage area, mortgage finances and loans and things. And they were sunsetting an entire platform that they were using in the past and they were moving to a new one. And they needed that data still accessible and they needed to be able to pull the same reports they used to be able to pull out of it, but just using raw SQL. And I said, okay, well, you have a schema, right, for like this database and so forth. No. Okay, can you give me some example reports that were written? No, that going to be gone. It's just going to be in these MS SQL databases. So I basically taught myself SQL from the ground up, and I would mimic existing reports from past documents and so forth. And I had to teach myself mortgages too, because I had to learn out what all these different forms and numbers mean and so forth, which was very fascinating. So it was a really neat way to get back into programming and full circle then, right? Yeah, yeah, kind of, yeah. And then I really enjoyed it. I loved the idea of putting headphones on and working. It was really, really fun. And I probably my favorite thing to do, though, is people would come to me and say, I want this. This will make my job easier. And I'm like, let me solve that problem for you. So there were very much one off kinds of things. It wasn't quite building architecture in a way. So that was different. And then I got into Python kind of through another job change. There was a marketing job that was opening actually at another bank. Banks are not unlike other, you know, sort of industries where lots of people move between different institutions. And in Hawaii, it's very much a small little community. And so I moved to another place, and they wanted somebody that knew Python. I'm like, I think I can learn Python. And they were open to the idea of somebody who is, you know, at least capable of learning on the fly what they were doing. And so I looked at real Python. I learned, you know, from Miguel Greenberg's flask tutorial. I went through that whole thing and I had, it was a long hiring process, so. And then I actually did like a test to, to be able to, you know, get the, get the gig. I'm embarrassed at what I, you know, wrote at that time as far as my python, but. And I became an automation engineer. I was building tools for, uh, this marketing department. And then what's weird is I learned r at the same time, and because there was another apartment learning that was doing that there, and they needed other tools that would interface between it. So I went back and forth between r and Python quite a bit, but kind of started to fall in love with Python and real Python. And then that's kind of the whole thing with Dan. He was growing real python, and he sent out like an email looking for somebody who, or looking for people that could make video content. And I've been dabbling in video and had been a teacher for, you know, a long time, and what a great way to learn, right? And so I jumped at the chance. And so, like, my first video course was about f strings. Anything that was like, kind of a question mark for me. Uh, decorators was my second one. I was like, what are these things and how do they work? And so that was really fun to create a video course on that, teach myself that type checking. I did a course on lists and tuples and. And so I did, like, about ten courses. And then Dan kind of turned to me and said, I really like your work. Would you be interested in reviewing other people's work? And so that's kind of what my role turned into, and then that's kind of what I've been doing. Less creating and a lot more making sure the other creators putting out their best video product. So it's just been interesting. Yeah, that's quite a journey. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it took some time there. Sorry. No, that's cool. There's a lot of follow up questions I could ask just quickly, the real python stuff. Is that, that your full time occupation now or you? Yeah, it's. I was a contractor, and so I would submit, you know, basically for the hours I spent making videos initially. And then I think it's. Maybe it's around the year after I started doing the podcast is when Dan was like, maybe we should, you know, make you a full time employee. And so, yeah, that's a full time gig, and we're all remote. I mean, it's probably not like you guys, uh, most of the contributors and other team members. There's one other person in the US with me who's a video editor who lives in Vegas, Tappan, and have pretty big presence in Canada, and then another presence in, gosh, all over Europe. So there's a, you know, I basically am hired through a remote company, but it's full time and got benefits, which is really great. I'm very excited, and it was a great timing for me because that was 2019. I'd moved away from Hawaii, and again, having a remote job was a thing that allowed me to be able to move very easily. Yeah, that's awesome. So, yeah, again, quite a journey from knack for programming into electrical engineering that you didn't like into music. Complete shift. And I think when you said stories there, too, you know, grunge is that. Is that grunch is kind of nirvana, like, right? Yeah, yeah. We would be Soundgarden, Nirvana, you know, bands that kind of Seattle sound. We were that. But imagine the most random bunch of people that you would see at a party, and somebody points at, like, ten random or five random people and says, oh, those guys are in a band. That was, you know, that sounds like a really fascinating career option. It was interesting. Yeah. It's hard, though. Yeah, yeah. And then you went into teaching and then into programming, and now you're basically back into teaching. Yeah. So how do you combine the two? Because now you're more than in charge of video content, producing, reviewing, maybe less. So programming. So how do you stay technical? That's been kind of a balancing act that I've been trying to figure out right now myself. The podcast is nice because I do get a chance to experiment with lots of different libraries. That's one of the types of shows that we do every other week. I do that show with Christopher Trudeau, and that show is much more water articles and news items. And so I could kind of pay attention to what's happening with, like, certain libraries. And then often we'll pick a project that I'm interested in out of that as, like, a highlight at the end, and I will do everything I can to set it up and, you know, kind of go through some of the tutorials and experiment. And then, you know, I have other things that I kind of play around with a little bit, but I'm doing less architectural in these things. I'm actually kind of chomping at the bit to do more of that. The other stuff is keeping me very busy. No, that's great. And that answers a question as well, which I had about the podcast of format. So it seems like you have interviews, but then also, like, kind of news. It's kind of a news thing. Yeah, but, like, python bytes does, right? Yeah, we kind of approach it a little bit differently. We'll do, like, a little sort of newsy segment, then, well, grab articles specifically. And then when I had started it with David Amos, who was my other sort of co host at the time. We would then talk about a project each and Christopher and I have expanded that to having not only the two articles each, but then a project each, but well sometimes then have a discussion which sometimes gets pretty more detailed and almost turns into an interview of me. Of of course Christopher because he has way more opinions and has worked in the industry a lot more. Hes much more of a web dev kind of guy, APIs but he also does training and other things like that. Hes one of the other video creators on the platform. So yeah, so thats kind of I guess the format and then youre right, every other week is more of an interview like the one that we did. I had Wes McKinney on recently, the creator of Pandas, and talk about really whats happening with data science and all the tools there that just been interesting. Yeah, nice, nice. And it seems in your career several times you had to learn stuff from scratch, not only Python but also the SQL job you spoke about. So I want to talk a bit like the mindset about learning and picking skills up fast as we know is a requirement in this space. And yeah, maybe also how your background in music and teaching has helped you there, if so. So I've always been fascinated with technology and I definitely came into the music industry at an interesting time. Also, like right when I'm getting out of high school and getting more into like a full time or part time job kind of thing, I this is when four track tape recorders were coming around that were kind of a small thing you could set on your desktop. And so I could write and record music by myself and play multiple parts. And so that's why I kind of guitar is my main instrument, but I got into keyboards and would program drum machines. And so I got very good at like interfacing with like technology and learning how to learn what it's trying to tell me from the front panel. And I've always kind of enjoyed that sort of immersive part of it. And I think programming is the same thing for me. Like for like learning SQL. I am voracious. If there was a SQL podcast, I didn't know of it at the time, but when I got to Python, I was like immediately was checking out talk Python. That's where I heard about Dan at the time. And I guess Python Bytes had started up around that time also when I was just getting going in the python world and anything I can do to kind of immerse myself and so on that show very often don't slow down for the beginners. It's very much more of an immersion kind of thing, at least at the time. And so I would be like, what are they talking about? What are these tools? What are these different technologies theyre talking about? And acronyms and so forth. And so id have to go off and research those things. But that was kind of fun part of it. Or I would eventually run into it and go, oh, thats what that is. Thats what that combination of letters and numbers mean that youre speaking about and how they would use things. Im very much that type of person where I dive headfirst into things. And that's kind of, I guess my mindset of it is, I give you an aside. Like, I got really into video when digital video became a thing. And you could get, like a digital video camera, even though they were still tape, you could still connect it to, like, a Mac and do video editing and, you know, ingest it. So I would do these video challenges where you had a 48 hours time period to write, shoot, edit, and then basically produce this video as a contest. And so they wouldn't let you know, like, there'd be like a prop and a line of dialogue and other things like that, where you wouldn't know that until you showed up at this meeting at late, usually late on a Friday night. That's usually where the 48 hours would come from. You turn it in Sunday night, and we'd run off and write stuff and create this whole movie. And what an insane way to learn how to do editing is like this massive timeline. So it's kind of like the whole project idea that a lot of people, I definitely aspire to that this is different, even beyond that, because if your stuff was good and was selected and you finished, they would have a showing at a movie theater, and there'd be maybe a couple hundred people there, which was really fun. And so I was able to get in a couple contests, one like a Amity award. I made a, I learned how to do time lapse, like with figurines, like a Lego kind of thing. And that that one did pretty well at one of the contests we did. But that's kind of my approach is, it's like a challenge is very interesting to me. That's why I I'm very interested in your guys's platform for that, too. Like, I think that's a neat way to approach things. Yeah, no, I see a lot of similarity to our approach. And now we started because as we were talking on, on your podcast, we started with coach yeah. Code challenges. Right. So yeah, the immersive learning and deliberate practice is the way because you cannot really learn how to program just or learn a language by reading a dictionary end to end. Right. It's not a sequential thing. The best is to just learn it from the inside out. You dive in and do what we call just jet learning or just in time learning. And you just. Yeah, just start. You're completely lost, but you just start to look up things just as you need them and bit by bit it starts to all make sense inside out. Right. Yeah. And challenges are great for that because now you have a goal, you have a deadline, there could be some competition with it and you come out with something to show for. Right. Which you're talking about with the movie and it might be featured or something. Right. So, yeah, yeah. This is like at the dawn of YouTube also, which was really kind of interesting. So I put a couple of those up on YouTube back in the day, but you couldn't get any traction off of it. You know, it's more like an interesting thing. So. Yeah, because people that get stuck is usually they don't have a goal or they just stick into the tutorial or they. And then it's boring. Right. But if you, you're tasked to do solve a specific problem you care about, then it's actually fun. And it seems like that that has been your experience as well then, right? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, that's definitely. I want to add one wrinkle to that. If I have this personality type that I want to help other people, there's actually this person who makes this thing about four different sort of personality types and I fit into what a category they call the obliger. And so somebody asked Myers breaks. No, it's different from that. It's actually just I can't remember all the different terms, but maybe I'll share the link with you. But the obliger is what I am and if people ask me to do something, I will feel obliged to do it. And the only problem with this personality type is that people can take advantage of it in some ways. But I like to build tools for people. I like to help people. And so that for me is more inspiring than maybe doing it for myself. So if I'm part of a team, hence the video, the movie contest thing and so forth, I would feel obliged. We have to finish. We have to turn this in. I invited all these people over and they're helping me. And like, I can't be the one just says, oh, I didn't have time to finish. Like, I don't. I want to make sure that they feel it's done or this person needs this tool and it's going to make their life better and easier. And so sometimes I feel like making a project for yourself, depending on your personality, may not be enough. If you make a. A project that you can share with others that not only show it off to them, but to like that it's something that they can use, then that even inspires more out of it. I get so much excitement, especially when I was doing programming at the bank and stuff where I would build something and the person's like, oh, my gosh, you just saved me like 3 hours, you know, and I'm like, yeah, that's great. That's fantastic, you know, and then it might be like, you know, ongoing, like 3 hours a week or something like that. And that, that's what really. That is definitely a motivating thing for me. It has more skill. Right. Because if it's something for you, that can also be satisfactory, but it always will be, you single user. Right, exactly. I have a similar experience that when I was making tools for the sport organization and I had this web front, and all of a sudden I saw the whole team literally saw like five monitors and I saw five instances of my page on the screens and they were all saying that they were saving time. So, yes, that's great. That's amazing. So if you have that commitment towards others and you're helping them, I think it's, yeah, double win, right? Like, and you. You go further and you get more out of your. Yourself, you. What's the word? Yeah, you will push yourself harder, right. Because you will be more motivated. Yeah, push myself way harder for someone else than for myself, which is kind of a weird thing. It's the same thing with, like, there's those people that can set like a New Year's resolution and I can't, I mean, if I'm doing it with someone else, like, if I can find a buddy, you know, or whatever, to sort of commit to doing something that's going to work better for me, and I just know that about myself over time and I have to watch out also, though, of people taking advantage of that, of me feeling obliged to complete things and build things for people. But I know it's a very large number of the population that have this personality. They were raised well, in my opinion, versus people that are like straight up rebels or there's a questioner is another person, they have to ask lots of questions before they'll do anything. So the obliger is one of these that I know there's a large amount of the population and I know that that's hard for them. You know, it's hard for people to like, just build something for themselves. You know, like cooking food. Like same thing. Like, I love hosting people and making like a fantastic meal for them. I won't necessarily make a fantastic meal for myself, if that makes sense. So, yeah, it's something to balance, but can also be tremendously powerful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a bit more about the mindset. What do you do when you get stuck in deep technical challenges? Do you have any tips? Because that's often where people start. Yeah, and one of those people that definitely liked the walking thing, and luckily the organizations I was at, even though they were in office, I did have kind of a free rein kind of thing. So I would go take a walk and walk around, and that definitely helps my brain kind of get past that stuff. I am a teacher and I would like to try the rubber duck thing. I've never done it. The idea of having somebody else to talk to, uh, my video courses, they, I would spend tons and tons of time to make them perfect, which is not great. And so a perfectionist is sometimes a balancing act and can be part of the block that I think a lot of people have. And so I think talking things through again, I havent done it with an inanimate object, but ive thought about that, like teaching with having someone else there. So im thinking about doing some video courses that are like that because I think that helps me get past this own sort of personal block that I have of making the perfect thing and not starting. That's kind of one of those things. So I don't know if that completely answers your question, but, like, that's definitely some techniques I've used. Oh, yeah, perfectionism is a big thing, right? Yeah. When I did my first course, I had to edit out all the ums and ahs and stuff and all of a sudden still do on the podcast. Right, right. And actually, we, we got back into that because we have somebody now that edits it. So we bit back into that. But when it comes to. Yeah, sometimes, especially with teaching, right. I like the raw format better, and especially when I'm teaching coding, that people can see the mistakes because if you carefully edit all that away, it becomes too polished. And yeah, people, of course, can still learn the concepts as f strings or whatever, but when it really comes to solving a programming problem, they need to see the process, they need to see where you get stuck, otherwise it's not going to be very relatable. Right. So it's definitely a balancing act. And, yeah, we've had courses where that's gone overboard occasionally where I've had to cut it back and say, yeah, I'm sorry to say this, but you practice a bunch of really fantastic stuff here, but I need you to redo this lesson because it's just hard to follow at some point. And so that can be kind of a balancing act there. But I am definitely the same person where I would rather hold, not necessarily hold somebody's hand, but be the coach next to them, walking them through it. There was this whole term and having the other person drive, that was definitely an apple thing. And I want it to feel that way where I'm teaching this other person to do it. We have this format called code conversations, where we're trying to do more of that. And I haven't done one myself, but we have a really good one about packaging, simplified python packaging with, by project Tommel, which is a really great code conversation. And Gerard is kind of walking somebody else through the process, which was really kind of neat. And the other person had their hands on the keyboard, so the student has to. Yeah, exactly. We had. Ian was driving at that point. Yeah, yeah, no, that's better, because if you just show it, it can be too passive. Yeah. Student has to type and make the mistakes, and it's going to stick better, I think. Right? Yeah, I think so, too. Yeah, yeah. Cool. Yeah. What python or development trends are you passionate about? What things are you planning to learn? What about? So right now I'm interested in electronics. You can probably see my crazy setup behind me, apart from all the instruments. Yeah, it was another sort of pandemic thing is building electronic projects. I like making guitar pedals, which is kind of a fun thing. You can get them as a kit and solder them and put them all together. I know this sounds weird, but this is one of the things I truly love about my wife. I taught her how to solder and we would spend a Saturday sitting there building things together, which is really, really fun and definitely. Yeah, kind of a fun bonding thing. And it's cool again when you're done, to have something that you can play with and build and so forth. And so circuit Python has been one of those things for me. I've had a few different guests on the show to discuss circuit Python and its, gosh, probably over a year now that I havent had somebody on but circuit Python nine just came out. It has more music stuff in it, midi stuff, sound stuff, which is always interesting to me. They always keep simplifying ways of interfacing. And Adafruit is definitely doing a good job sponsoring that to keep going, which I think is fantastic, where I want to spend some time and might be, I don't know. I'm not going to make any promises, but this is something I'd like to make some content for real Python for to talk about, but also just, again, kind of scratching the ditch of building something nice and any industry trends you're following, or I would say doing the show. I'm following what's happening with wozzy and scripting iodide, the sort of python in the web, on the Internet kind of thing. And I've had Brett Cannon on to talk about it, and I tried to pick his brain. He's still working on the target, if you will, for Python to be ready to go for it. I'm also very interested in beware what they're doing and excited that they have some financing too, as an open source project. And I'm really watching those things. Why? I think it goes back to the idea of building usable tools for other people. And I didnt mention this in my journey, but one of the things I did for a little while when I was in Hawaii, I did a consultancy where I was building tools for small businesses, and my friend had a small business, which is an environmental science company, and Apple had just tied up their connections with a tool called Filemaker Pro, which is a programming environment, a database, everything. But what was fantastic is that you could build something and it would immediately work on the phone or immediately work on an iPad. And these are people that were going out in the field and they were doing science, you know, like sampling water, you know, checking soil and so forth. And they were doing it on like clipboards and stuff was getting filthy, and they'd come home and this dirty document on like a scanner and loaded in. I'm like, oh my God, this is like how many transposition errors and how many steps? And talk about saving time. So I built a couple apps for this company that would help them in that process. It was a neat platform. It was really fun to learn and so forth. Again, that idea of handing your tool to someone else, and it didn't require hosting and it didn't require a cloud instance and so forth, it was like something. It wasn't as great because it did run locally on one iPad, but that person could take that one iPad into the field, and then we could download the data as excel or PDF's or what have you, and I created some other tools like that. That was. I really dig that stuff. And so that's kind of like, I'm like, python, come on, come on. Let's. Let's make it more on these hand computers and so forth. And so I've been looking at that stuff a lot. Yeah. So basically, at the core, it comes down to how we can more easily distribute Python and help other people, right? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I've not listened to that conversation yet. So can you. And you said, was he, can you quickly explain? So that's basically, is that Python in the web, in the browser? So probably the best example would be almost two years ago now, is Peter Wang doing the keynote Pycon? Yeah. And pyscript, the idea of python running on the web, and it's using all these other tools kind of underneath it, this sort of web assembly, which I heard about it, like my first year of podcasting, and I was like, what is that? And I had Armin Roanoker on to talk about flask, and it was like, kind of like his journey through that whole project and so forth. And I have this question I love to ask, which is, what are you excited about in the world of python, like you do or in technology? And he's like, I'm just into web assembly. And I'm like, oh, what is that? And then I heard two or three other people kind of mention it, and this idea of just code running in your browser and being able to make applications there. And so WASM is one of the terms for it, web assembly. I don't know what all the acronym stands for, but the SI, the WASi one is a systems interface, and it basically starts to be able to connect to the computer, to ports, to interfaces, to things that you would need to be able to do more than just sort of display data or maybe enter in data as text into it. And talking to Brett last year about sort of the state of this stuff, he let me know that there are lots of parts of industries where this is happening. So you know how there's embedded applications on televisions right now? The idea, like, oh, you can have Netflix on your tv, just built into your tv somehow, right? Your tv is a computer, and a lot of those are wozy. They're actually these web assembly tools that are written in this format that then it runs on this device, which is just, again, fascinating to me. I'm like, okay, let's get Python there, and that's kind of the stuff that's happening in the background. Does that help to explain some of that? Yeah, that totally does. Yeah. Okay, cool. So, yeah, that's definitely something to look into. Yeah. But again, it comes back to making it more distributable and easier to access. And Python in the data science world, the PI script is definitely that. There's so much stuff that's sort of included there, which is really great. And it's something that I haven't, like, I talked to Peter after the thing, and I'm like, I want to have you come on the show and talk to him. And I've never quite gotten him on the show again, so I think it'd be a good time to do that check in, like, where are we at, what's going on with it and so forth? Because I think there's been a lot of development there. Yeah, I guess if you said two years ago. Yeah, I remember that coming out was a big deal, and I did a quick demo as well, using it on our code clinic in Penn. Yeah, yeah. But then. Haven't really looked back, but, yeah, I remember the excitement around that and. Yeah, definitely. Cool. Awesome. Well, lastly, we always talk about books. So what are you reading, or do you have a recommendation? I have a series of books that I really like. It's from an author. Her name's Martha Wells. She's written fantasy books and other things like that, but she delved into Sci-Fi with a series called the Murderbot series. I don't know if you've heard of that. It's a really fun series. It's basically following an Android that has a lot of personality. You get to hear all the sort of internal voice. I listened to it in an audiobook format. There's a new one that I haven't listened to yet, and it's very snarky. He's always constantly worried about his humans and making sure that they're okay and not doing something stupid and getting themselves into trouble. Because he's a security combat model, though. He keeps trying to not get into those environments. And I guess Apple has decided to make it into a series, which is interesting to me, and so maybe that'll come out soon, but I've enjoyed a lot of the Sci-Fi that's actually on the Apple tv platform. Silo is a really good one, and I've bought those books. I haven't started to read the silo books, though. But, yeah, I love the murderbot series. They're just very, very consumable. You go right through them. Yeah, I think Brian Occam was talking about that on my. Oh, cool. I'll have to talk to him about that. Yeah. If I'm not mistaken. Yeah, well, we'll link that. And so that's a good tip. Yeah. I'm reading all over the place, so I don't have a specific recommendation. Just by keeping the diet varied. Nice. Cool. I guess the other one would be, Christopher Trudeau has a Django book that I have read, and then I wrote a blurb before it. I don't know if they'll use it or not, but it's his first book. It's called Django in action. And it's interesting. It has, like, an HTMX chapter, which I think is really kind of fun combining Django with that. Django is one of these tools that I've always looked at as, like, maybe bridging some of what that filemaker stuff would be, combining database and a web interface and so forth. I'm excited for that to come out soon. Yeah. Is that self published or Manning? It's on Manning. Yeah. In action. Sounds like manning. Yeah. It's funny. Yeah. Yeah. I always think that sounds a little weird, like that's an americanized thing, but in action, like doing nothing. Well, they got their branding right. The fact that I associated. Yeah. Yeah, you totally did. Yeah. It's a fun early access to, I think, their meep program, so. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Cool. Right. Anything I didn't ask you that you wanted to share or final shout out. Again, I'm super excited to keep doing the podcast again, episode 200 is coming out shortly, so this will probably maybe be about the same time. So I'm excited about that. And if people are interested in checking out those kinds of things and, you know, definitely come check us out on unreal Python. I'm always trying to figure out how to get more engagement. I'm on Twitter still as Digilean. D I g I g l e a n. Digi glean. And I'm the same on Mastodon, on Fostadawn. But, yeah, if you type in Digi glean, you'll find me there. And you can also follow me on LinkedIn or what have you. So feel free. I've been to. Not great about that. I think most people follow the real Python account and think it's me. Nope. We have another person who's doing most of that work, so. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. I'll link all that below. And I think you're also in the pybads community, right? I am. I joined just right after we had our talk. So. Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Cool. Now, you're doing a great job at the podcast. Really, really good stuff. And, yeah, I should say always linking all the stuff. So I think that's. That's important for developers to have all these resources and, yeah, listen to a few episodes and, yeah, I think people come back to them. You know, I think that's one of those kind of useful things. Chapters is another thing I really am a champion of. Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Well, it was great talking today. Thanks for joining and sharing. I think people get a lot out of it and, yeah, now we have done it. We have been on each other's podcast. All right. We did it right. Thanks, Bob. Have a great day. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To hear more from us, go to Pybite friends. That is Pybit es friends and receive a free gift just for being a friend of the show. And to join our thriving community of Python programmers, go to Pibytes community. That's Pybit es forward slash community. 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