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Being able to do that for people and then see them achieve the things that they set out to do, it's just amazing, you know, seeing people build incredible things, get the confidence to go for things they otherwise never would have. It's just, that's that, to me is what is going to make me stick around another billion years and keep doing this. 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 Baldeboz. 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 another Pie Bytes podcast episode. This is Julian and I'm here with Bob. How's it going, man? Hey, man, I'm good, thanks. How are you? Fantastic. Tell everyone. Why am I in such a good mood? Why are you so far? What's happening? It's our five year anniversary. Not, not you and me. We go way back, further than that. But today or yesterday, I should, to be accurate, Sunday, the 19 December, was the five year anniversary of pie bytes. Five years since we did what started. We started. Posted a dunder in it on some sort of pelican block. 19 December 2016. Yeah, we should bored. And we were looking for a Christmas project and it looked horrifyingly bad compared to today's website. It looked terrible. But hey, first revision, right? Exactly. Iterate fast. That's definitely what we did back then. And we're still doing hopefully. Hopefully. Definitely. So, yeah, big celebration podcast episode. And today we wanted to celebrate the win, but also look back, highlight some favorite moments and some lessons we've learned. Yep. So the first thing I'm going to say is that this will be a bit self indulgent and I think we've earned that. Especially because I want to point out, Bob, this was super important to me. This is actually two days ago. Two days ago. The 18 December was one year since we launched the first episode of the podcast as well. So weve officially done a full year. And this is episode 53. So we did one episode a week. Even if they didnt land week to week, we still did 52 episodes, one per week for a year. So Im super proud. And also, heres the opportunity Im going to take to say thank you to everyone who listens every week, but also thank you to everyone whos just been part of this pie bytes community. Five years is no mean feat. It's no easy feat. Sorry for something like this. That started off as just a passion project, hobby, something for us to learn, but to keep pushing and keep driving into more things, it really took a lot of support from everyone. So all of the feedback, positive, critical, whatever that we received over the years that helped us improve and know where to go, I'm just super grateful for so all of you listening, you so much, I really appreciate. I know you do as well, Bob. Yeah, I second that. It's good to start this episode with a note of gratitude for everybody that tunes into the podcast and that has supported us over the years and helped us with this journey, gave valuable feedback, helped us iterate, and, yeah, just made this journey a lot of fun. And yeah, we're proud of hitting five years. I mean, the one, two years, you're basically still experimenting, and we're still experimenting right to this day. But yeah, to us, a five year mark, this definitely is. It marks a steady journey we're on. And again, we're just super grateful that we get to do this gratifying job. And given where we were at five years ago compared to where we are now, I can't even imagine what's coming in the next five years. So very exciting. So, all right, as, as I have a sip from this rum, this celebratory rum that I've got in front of me, which I can't hear, bro,

I think it's 11:00 10: 4:28

00 you go first. Shara, do you have any insights you want to share with everyone? Well, we said this many times, right, but it's just to get started. It's very cliche, but it's definitely what helped us get to this place. By, I mean, we were talking for years, we had these now infamous commute chats, right? And we always said, like, you shouldn't record those because we were always listening to podcasts and a lot of consuming, of course, and brainstorming, but we didn't really execute right. Well, we did. We did our side things always right, but this was the first time we really put something serious together. It started very basic, very elementary, with just a block, like the gazillion Python blocks, and we just going there, launch another block with a static site generator. Not really a typical business thing, but we had to start somewhere and we wanted to learn more python. And that was the niche we wanted to do something in. It literally started just by content sharing and providing value, putting stuff out there. And because we did that over time, we saw other opportunities. They came after a while. So for me, the main takeaway is to get started and keep iterating. No, that's cool. It's a great takeaway and something we keep doing. So a lot of these points that I think we're going to bring up are things that we either did at the start and have kept doing or things that we've kept up along the way, like, just, you know, randomly picked up a good habit. Not randomly, but picked up a good habit and just kept on pushing. Right. So even though we're well into it now, there's always something to start on, and it is. It gets hard to continue that because you want to continue the things that we already do. And so the idea of starting something new at the same time can be very stressful, but it's the only way to keep pushing and improve. So, yeah, good takeaway. Can I have another one? Yeah, go on. Stealing it away. I'm still drinking. I'm still drinking. You go, all right, you drink. I'll take over for today. Yeah, no, I'm looking here at that big poster we did in Pycon, 2019. 2018, then in ourselves, was a big win, but there's this little timeline we had there. Right. Like, founded. And actually, in January 9, 2017, we started our first code challenge. So we're already niching out a month later. But one thing that stands out there as well is, like, May 2017. So six months in, we'd say pibytes opens a slack channel for their growing python community. And I think that community aspect was a very good decision. Like, we bring people together, listening to people, consuming our content, and really, like, brainstorming with them what to work on next. And, yeah, that, I think, is one of the things that has set pie bites apart. Yeah, you're right. And that community has just grown. So what was the date you said on that? 2018. We sat in the community. No, 2017. Like, six months in. I thought it was later, but it was within the year. Yeah. That's insane, because that community's grown immensely. And you know what I love about is just how this isn't a pitch, of course. Well, everything is. Although you should join. You should join. You just join the community is that. It's so welcoming. That's what I love about it. You join, people welcome. You know, people asking you what you do with Python. If you have a question, bunch of people just jump on it and answer. It's just a great place to be. So I like sitting there. I don't always type in there because of the distraction factor sometimes, but I love just reading it. People are all over it. It's great. And when I do jump in, everyone's just happy to. To be there and chat, so. All right, can I have a turn? Yeah, you go ahead. All yours. Oh, mine. Okay. Okay. Hope the pressure. All right. So I think for me, one of the lessons that we've learned over the years is to not give up. And I know that's a cliche, whatever. The point is that we've done so many things over the past five years. We've been on podcasts. We started this podcast, we've released online courses, we have the talk python courses with Mike. We've got our own courses, we've got just all sorts of things. The emails that we send out, PDM coaching program. There's just so many things that we've done and there were so many things, pieces along the way, including in those where the feedback wasn't great, you know, or where people around us were perhaps saying things like, oh, you know, that's a tough space to get into, or that's not going to really work out or. Are you sure you want to focus on this? I'm not talking about people in the python space. I'm talking about people in our lives, right? Because we had day jobs for most of these five years. And so people say, are you sure? Why don't you focus on the career? And all this doubt does creep in. And this is where I'm very thankful for you, Bob, because we are accountability partners. We've spoken about this before. But yeah, there is that decision, I guess, paralysis that comes in as you go, oh, is that even a good idea to create another course? Is it a good idea to branch off into this? So again, the idea of launching Einscribe, right? I mean, that's not got nothing to do with Python, but it's something that we were just passionate about. And if we were solo, if we had that self doubt, if we didn't just have that mentality of let's just do it, let's just have some fun and push. And why not? If we didn't just take those steps and just do it, then, you know, we would have held ourselves back on many, many different occasions, especially with the coaching program. That was the biggest jump I think we made through these five years. And so for me, it was the biggest lesson is just to push that self doubt aside and just do it. You know, it was to just always think big, always keep reaching for the stars. Right? I know all these things people have heard before and might sound very cheesy, but the reality is we just keep thinking huge. And that's what sustained us through all of this. Like, oh, we can. We can do more. There's always more. And that that's what's been exciting for me. And one of the greatest lessons I've taken away from this, because it's true. It all meant a lot, and it's all achieved a lot as a result. Yeah, I think you're right. Like, aiming big and taking massive action and then have an accountability partner. And as we have spoken many times about, you can search back in history. There's a dedicated episode on this with and mark. That's a huge deal because it's scary. There's a lot of imposter syndrome. We also talk about a lot. And then having each other and then pushing through, that's massive. But, yeah, I think the massive action part and not sitting on our laurels, constantly innovating, that has really helped us. Yeah, that's it. The iteration has been a really big point, especially when people come back with feedback. I mean, that's another little thing as well. We get a lot of feedback, and it is very easy to sit there and say, you don't know what you're talking about, or no way, man. I've spent, like, five months in this thing, and if we get defensive and. And don't take the feedback of the people actually using our platforms and taking our courses and going through our content, then we're not going to succeed. And so that was a thing that we, you know, we had to learn along the way because we did have imposter syndrome. We still do, but when we were starting and you're launching your first course, like, oh, my gosh, the first negative review or the first person who criticizes the way that you speak or something, you take it to heart. And we've had to grow that, um, thick skin, and we just don't care anymore. I mean, we care, but we don't. It's. It's always a sign of growth. If you're getting feedback like that, that means you're pushing. That means you're out there. That means you're doing stuff that's, um, different to the norm. And that's exciting now, as opposed to, um, making us, uh, want to run and hide and sit in a corner and cry. So, yeah, we'll give you a negative review as Python is the 1234 handle. Yeah, use your name, buddy. I'll see you on WhatsApp. That you will care. Yeah, yeah, we'll take it up on Reddit. Oh, let's not go there. Okay, so let's. Let's pivot a little bit to some of our favorite moments of those five years. All right, do you want me to go first? All right. All right. So I'm going to do choose a bit of. Bit more of a human thing than technical. So for everyone who doesn't know, when Bob and I kicked off pie bites, we didn't actually know each other in person. We hadn't met each other in person, so we hung out on Skype or whatever, but we'd never actually met at work or anything like that. Because you're Spain, I'm here in Australia. So the first time we physically met was in Cleveland Pycon in 2018. So considering that was, what, two and a half years after launching pivots, it was a big deal. Uh, and about ten years after knowing each other through our days and sun microsystems and, um, what was one? I got to say this, Bob's like 10,000ft tall, so I look like his child standing next to him. So I try not to stand next to Bob, or I say crouch down, because I'm so short by comparison. But when. When we met, it was just. It's one of the biggest things for me was that it was just like we picked up the conversation from our WhatsApp chats or our calls in the car or whatever it is. There was no awkwardness, no weirdness. It was just, hey, man, good to finally meet you. Let's go grab a drink. And we went. I think we spent the evening at the pub, had a few drinks, and probably. I don't think we told anyone this story, but we stayed at. Stayed at an Airbnb. I wasn't allowed to tell it, but, yeah, you tell the story. You tell the story. It was the worst place to stay. So clearly we're having a bit of fun with this episode. But it had this smell. Actually, I think the one person who experienced it was Chris Medina. I think he's the only one who came in and saw it. So, Chris, if you're listening, I hope you don't remember it, but, yeah, the place was shocking. A great view and everything, but it smelled funny, had this weird chemical smell. We'd have to hold our breath coming into the building, running to the apartment. Uh, it wasn't exactly clean. And, uh, we found drugs in, like, actual medical drugs, like people's pills and stuff that were just in a cupboard. And we're like, oh, okay. So it was a. It was a really unique place. We tried not to spend time there. The Internet didn't work. Oh, my gosh. Of all things, that was pills, right? That was the most painful thing. So it was. It wasn't great. And, hey, this is a lesson in procrastination. We took so long to try and write the Airbnb review that by the time we actually wrote it and hit submit, it said, sorry, times up. We couldn't submit. Oh, my God. Yeah. That was ridiculous. Yeah, but there. So to the point. Well, back to one of the points. So we had obviously had a great time at Pycon that year, but not only did it solidify more our friendship and the business and everything, but we actually presented that poster that Bob was just mentioning at the poster session at Pycon, I think it was called, so people can print out posters for cool things that they're working on to do with Python and education, whatever else. And we had this thing pinned up, and this was our first time talking to strangers about Python. Sorry about PI Bytes and Python and what we do and everything. We spent time at Mike Kennedy's talk python booth the first day and got to meet a lot of people. Like, that's where we met Andy Knight and a few others. So that was great. But when we stood in front of this poster, this was something. This was like owning pie bytes. This was putting our stuff out there. No hiding behind a computer screen, no shame. We had to be able to talk about it. And what I just remember so much was sweating profusely and loving how much people enjoyed what we were doing. Like, I thought we cop feedback. Like, this is a waste of time. But no, it was. Everyone loved it. Everyone said, you guys are doing amazing stuff. Keep at it. This is really cool. I'm going to check it out. And that was one of my, I think one of our defining moments. Awesome. Yeah, that was scary, right? Presenting is always scary. Yeah. The feedback and the enthusiasm of people was really impressive. So, yeah. Was that. I'm not sure if that was the first or was that the first or the second Pycon. No, that was the first. That was the first. Okay. Wow. Second, we had a different booth, which I'll tell you, tell everyone about in a minute. All right, Hugo, what did you. Yeah, the favorite moment. So, definitely, I think the building of the platform, which was a lot of late nights, a lot of effort, and of course, also as a lesson. Right? Like, yeah, there are coding platforms out there and it's all been done, so it's easy to get discouraged and say, like, I'm never going to build a solution that's that mature or anything. But we just started, and actually, we started with those block code challenges. Right. And that was actually the goal, to have people submit code through GitHub and then make a platform to make that easier. But as we were building that, yeah, we actually pivoted and managed to execute code in a browser. Now, the front end solutions were not that good at it because we had all these external modules and then we found AWS lambdas and all that and got that working, and that was a big win. And also, yeah, it was really, really exciting. We got people on. I remember we got people to sign up, are you interested in this? And you get it at an introduction rate. And we got enough traction and it was super exciting. It was a hell of a job. But, yeah, look at them now. We have 330 plus exercises and a whole bunch of features added and, yeah, look at. Look at what people are getting out of it. Right. That's the most satisfactory thing is that people really become ninjas as well. They earn ninja belts, obviously, but they really become ninja in their skills. And they go into this coding interviews, and then they impress people with the skills they learn on the platform. So that's, I think that's one of the biggest wins. I mean, we went into coaching later, but it all starts with the platform, and a lot of people we work with in the coaching actually first go through those exercises. So that was definitely one of my favorite things. Yeah, I agree. That was scary. And it also, I think, gave us confidence as well, you know, seeing that people were signing up and enjoying it and saying, this is great. Better than the other stuff out there, so. And no better way to learn Django. Yeah, you're exactly right. The amount of issues. Yeah, I remember the late nights. All right, so I'll go one last one and it'll be Pycon again. But it'll be the second Pycon we're at in 2019, which was, I want to say, even bigger because at that point we knew people, we had friends, people we couldn't. We couldn't wait to see. It was just. It was a really special time, something I really looked forward to. And obviously we got to hang out again. I think it was the first time I had a iced coffee or something at one of the coffee places. I hated it. It's gross anyway, whatever it was. But the scary thing for me at that Pycon was we got to stay at the Pycharm booth. So they asked us to come and present there, and they gave us time to talk about pie bytes and what we did, it was really cool. So we got to hang out with friends and talk to people again. And at that point, we had a lot more confidence meeting people, and it was just. It was a lot of fun. But the thing that really got us and definitely got me was when we had to get up and present with a microphone at the pycharm, like, talking area, presentation area, whatever you want to call it. And I just remember standing there holding the mic. We're both talking back and forth on this presentation. I can barely remember it now, what we actually talked about, because it was such a high stress moment, but to me, that was a huge win. We'd never done anything like that before in front of a whole room full of strangers, everyone who came up to sit and talk, and obviously everyone was welcoming and very nice. But I just remember sometimes I've had some advice, when talking to an audience, find someone who looks really interested and, like, talk to them. You know, keep looking at them. Who cares? You know, look back and forth and then land your eyes back on them. And to me, that person was Chris May. So, Chris, if you're listening, thank you. Because he was sitting there, he was nodding, he was smiling, he was just, like, agreeing with what we were saying. Yeah, you guys preach, preach. And I just remember going, okay, he's my rock while we're. While we're presenting. And, Chris, you're nodding as our anchor. Yeah, exactly. So it was actually a really great session. And, you know, everyone, it went well. People came to talk to us after, but again, that was another hurdle for me. I'd never presented like that before. I presented at work, but never in a public forum like that about our own business. So aws went down that very moment. Like, it never goes down. And we're hitting there to buy submission. Lambda's not working, like, of all times, you know, like, it never went down before and after, during the. It's like Murphy's law, right? I know. What are the odds that the actual infrastructure that never goes down will go down while we're presenting? That's amazing. Yeah. Anyway, so, yeah, that was my win. That was another great moment for us, I think. All right, and lastly, I have another one. So end of 2019, I think we got kind of stuck, right? Like, everything was working, but it also got a bit saturated. Subscriptions went down, and it was time to innovate. Right? So we. And we knew we were struggling with the whole marketing business side because we are mainly developers, right? And so we seriously looked around to get some coaching. Right. And we hired a bunch of coaches. We joined a coaching program focused around marketing and offer building and all that. And yeah, I remember that chat we had with them and it was pretty scary because they actually, on that call, they said like, well, do you want guys want to do coaching or do you want the guys focus on business? And, like, we're not really sure. Right. Because it's very hard to get into businesses. B two. B. So we went for the coaching route and actually we made a great decision because over the next months, starting 2020, we built out our coaching program. And I remember it's one of the hardest things we did. That was the first product where it was more face to face, working with people more intensively coaching. And I remember that was pretty scary. And like, those first calls with people and helping them and later we did group calls as well and it really stretched us. Right. But at the other end, we came out with a program or product which seriously increased the value we could offer because there's still a lot of value in working together. Right. One on one, having that individualized help or coaching. So I think that was one of our biggest wins. One of the scariest things we did and one of the things I'm happiest about, that we did that. Yeah, I agree that one. Starting PDM was just absolutely completely different to anything we'd done before. So it took a huge leap of faith and confidence to just jump in and do it. And thinking back to when PDM started looks completely different to what it looks like now because we had to grow it. We had to figure out what worked for people, what didn't. Every single person that goes through, we take the feedback and implement and iterate. So the program does look completely different now to a year and eight months ago. So, yeah, I'm just stoked that we did it. And I think a good place to end this episode is just reflecting on the fact that we're going to keep doing this for another 510, 1550 years until we're in the ground. And then automation, our AI's will take over with our Personas. No one will ever know when we actually die and. But the feeling of helping people, supporting people and like we say, like our core values. Right, my core value is just and us for the, for the business piebites is that we lift people up. We want to help people, we want to bring people to the table when they don't think they're good enough or confident enough to do it right. And being able to do that for people and then see them achieve the things that they set out to do. That most of the time are, by and large, far beyond the stuff that we could ever dream of doing in this space or in that space. It's just amazing, you know, seeing people build incredible things, get the confidence to go for things they otherwise never would have. It's just, that's, that, to me, is what is going to make me stick around another billion years and keep doing this. I think that's a really nice way. Yeah. To end the episode. I fully agree. Like building something yourself, it's nice. But helping somebody, going from beginner level to very advanced, doing stuff you couldn't even imagine, like the winds we see in PDM every day and launching new apps, businesses, and people didn't think they were capable of. Right. And they were that uplifting. You mentioned that. That's nothing better than that. Yeah, damn right. Okay, well, look, we'll leave it there. Thank you, everyone, for listening, as always, for tuning in and especially for this episode, letting us just tell you a few stories, a few anecdotes, and enjoying the memories with us. Really appreciate everyone. And I think we're going to take a break for a couple of weeks while we go on, while we have our holidays with our families and stuff just going around, but that's pretty much it. Thanks so much for joining us this year. We'll be back in January. Hope you all take care. If you do celebrate it, have a wonderful Christmas. Otherwise, happy holidays with whatever it is you might celebrate, and we'll see you then. Thanks everybody, for listening. Happy holidays, Merry Christmas, and we'll be back in the second week of January. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To hear more from us, go to Pybite 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 PI Bytes community. That's Pibit es community. We hope to see you there and catch you in the next episode.