#183: AI’s silent takeover - are we losing our programming skills?

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the world of coding, raising vital questions about our approach to software development. In this episode, we unpack the implications of AI on programming skills and the future of learning to code. 

As AI increasingly handles various programming tasks, some developers are concerned that new, and even seasoned, coders may be losing touch with critical programming skills. While AI offers opportunities to streamline processes, we highlight the necessity of engaging with coding on a fundamental level.

Throughout the episode, we celebrate successes from our coding community, and highlight that while the journey can be challenging, determination and a positive mindset can ultimately lead to career success.

Article discussed: AI is Creating a Generation of Illiterate Programmers

Pybites Circle Community: https://pybites.circle.so/

Pybites Community Events: https://pybites.circle.so/c/community-events

Books mentioned:

Nexus - https://pybitesbooks.com/books/n4rvEAAAQBAJ

FastAPI Cookbook - https://pybitesbooks.com/books/H6oSEQAAQBAJ

___

If you found this podcast helpful, please consider following us!

For more Pybites:

Developer Mindset Newsletter: https://pybit.es/newsletter 💡

Bob LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bbelderbos/

Julian LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliansequeira/

Bob BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/bbelderbos.bsky.social

Julian BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/juliansequeira.bsky.social

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pybites/

Twitter: https://x.com/pybites

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pybites-podcast/id1545551340

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1sJnriPKKVgPIX7UU9PIN1

Transcript

Introduction

Julian 0:00

If all of our collective skills in these almost fringe sides of coding and development and IT and even other industries, if they're all getting absorbed by AI and we're kind of dulling that blade, what's the impact of that? Hello and welcome to the PyBytes podcast, where we talk about Python, career and mindset. We're your hosts. I'm Julian.

Bob 0:27

Sequeira, and I am Bob Beldebos. 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.

Julian 0:40

Welcome back to the PyBytes podcast. This is Julian. I'm here with Bob. How's it going, bob? Hey, very well, how are you doing? I'm good. Good for this Tuesday evening. We're getting close to autumn now in Australia, so it's starting to get a little bit cool, but then, you know, you get these hot days. It's fantastic. What about you? Yeah, spring is coming. Yeah, thank you.

Bob 1:07

You. Yeah, no, thank you. So you'll be rubbing that in for a couple of months. Yeah, so it gets like 40 degrees, whatever.

Julian 1:09

Yeah, but yeah and then. Then you'll be stuck on summer holidays and I believe in your part of the world the kids get to stay home for like three months.

Bob 1:17

Don't get started, yeah bye, bye, so get me through it you're perfect, all right.

Julian 1:24

So let's, let's jump into some wins. Then let's start on a positive note. So, personal wins, what do you have? What's happening?

Bob 1:32

Yeah, I think the win here for me this week is consistent working out. So I completed seven full weeks of five times a week, plus this week too. So I'm 37 out of 37. And I don't use a tracker, I only use whatsapp and I just um sent you the uh n slash m. So m is kind of the goal accumulated goal and then n is what I realized. So now I'm, with another week or five to go, I'm 37 40 and that's kind of my way of accountability and track. Yeah, it feels great, it's now a habit, so still tempting to keep reading in the morning, but the alarm goes off and you just go up, you know. You just know that you need to do it because during the days will be procrastination and hard that is.

Julian 2:19

That's awesome, man, and I need to hear that right, because I've actually found it much harder to meet my goal of the exercise this year which I'm struggling with. I'm only averaging about two to three a week, which is, you know, it's something, it's better than nothing, but it's not what I used to be doing and I want to be doing more. So I like hearing that. Thanks for sharing that.

Bob 2:39

That's still better than nothing. Right Like five is definitely ambitious, but if you can do two or three, it's still better than zero right yeah, and that's also how I take it with this right like um, yeah, sure, I want to do 45 minutes, but if I day I do like 30 minutes or two-third of a workout. It's still better than than zero and I think that really dropping the perfectionism plus having the trigger in the morning, that really helped. Yeah.

Julian 3:06

No, I love it. That's awesome. Habit building in action. It works.

Julian 3:14

It works. Love you. My wins what do I have? Look aside from the workout and just copping to it and not making excuses and doing what I can. That's I'm considering that a win, just being, you know, honest with myself.

Julian 3:27

But one win that I shared in the community that I wanted to, a goal that I had for this year was to learn some computer assisted design, so CAD software for the 3D printing that I picked up last year at the end of last year, and I'm proud, man, I actually did it. I started using some Fusion 360 and our just-in-time learning, the JIT model. I was learning specific pieces that I needed, like how do I make this a curved edge and how do I make this hollow, and all of that and of all things that I created. I was able to design my own dimmer switch knob for a light switch on my kitchen wall that had been snapped off for months. The stuff from the shops didn't actually fit it perfectly, and so I designed this from scratch, took about 45 minutes and I was really proud. It took three prototypes before or three revisions till I got it just right.

Bob 4:24

So there's a personal win for me, so cool man, yeah, seeing all these pictures on WhatsApp and you're really excited about it and really, yeah, getting results, it's super cool.

Julian 4:38

Yeah, I think the impressive thing about the age that we live in is that I can have an idea, sketch it out and then have the physical product within a couple of hours, all without leaving my house. You know like that's mind-blowing to me, yeah.

Bob 4:54

Same as going from an idea to an MVP coded in a day. Ooh, which brings us on the topic.

Julian 5:01

Maybe Kind of Very finished.

Bob 5:04

No no.

Julian 5:05

Before we jump into the main topic, which is about technology and its impact on us, uh, first we have some wins from our community which we wanted to share before we dive into the meat of the episode. So what's? Um? What's happened? No, you do it. What's happening?

Bob 5:19

well, I think one. Well, I know the one you're going to do, so I will do the other one. They're equally cool, right, like Blaze started to host these community events, right, and so now I mean, the community was great. It's growing, people post a lot of cool stuff. There's really great engagement and interaction, so we're really happy about that. By far surpassed what we had on Slack, but now Blaze is hosting these events, so now we have live events and people just randomly join in and it's really cool and I feel it really has taken the community to the next level. So shout out to Blaze, thank you, and yeah, just keep an eye on the community events tab or space. It's amazing.

Julian 6:04

Yeah, and especially because some of them have been quite ad hoc, right unplanned. He just feels like jumping on and people come along and help him code and learn as well, and it's just incredible.

Bob 6:17

So exactly, yeah, some are planned and some they just go live and work on stuff and yeah, randomly, you know, people chime in and that's really cool.

Julian 6:29

Yeah. So if you, this is the next. I feel like it's the next stage of our community for everyone listening and watching. Make sure you join and stay present. You know, even if you lurk, keep it open so that you get a notification that someone from the PyBytes team has gone live to just code and share, and you know, then jump in and participate. It's the best way to build your skills and build some community at the same time.

Bob 6:54

Right, and it's also the flywheel effect, right, like people start posting and then people get notifications and they start posting and it's almost like the more everybody contributes to this, the the better. Everybody wins, right? Yeah?

Julian 7:08

yep, I love it and that. So the speaking of you know everybody winning. Uh, very, very excited and proud to share that uh, two members, two clients of ours, uh and members of the community, mira and cj, have just shared, in the past week or two, max, that they have both landed software developer jobs and they're just it's for them. For each of them, it's the dream job. Whether it be because of proximity to home, the stuff that they're working on, it doesn't matter. The point is they landed SDE roles and they are absolutely over the moon. So are we.

Julian 7:44

And the thing I constantly drive home to everyone listening. I know you, you hear this all the time, but this is like the proof. The proof is in the pudding. It was just persistence and determination that got them the job. It was purely that they didn't give up. They had infinite setbacks, they had lots of ghosting, lots of people knocking them back, but the fact that they didn't give up, they didn't throw in the towel, they just kept going and they just used as motivation to keep on to the next application. They got there in the end and they got their jobs and they're absolutely chuffed, very excited, so congratulations I think that's, that's a good reminder.

Bob 8:21

Right, like, also for them, it was not easy and they had to overcome a lot of setbacks. But how badly do you want it? Right, they kept going and ultimately they. But, yeah, when it was tough they might not have been able to see it, because it can be really demoralizing. Right, yeah, in the moment they persisted, yeah.

Julian 8:45

Beautiful, yeah. So I'm very proud. I'm very, very proud of the both of them. It was just um, incredible. So I'm just looking forward to seeing what happens next. And then also a special shout out as well uh, one of our community members, ashlyn, just shared and she's been searching for a role for ages and again just persistence. And she's got the callback as second round interview coming up, uh, for a developer for ages. And again just persistence. And she's got the callback as second round interview coming up for a developer role. That she's very excited about. And it's just. You know, this is what happens when you don't throw in the towel and when you keep going and you know, of course we have to nurse the wounds a little bit sometimes and the disappointment when you get through multiple rounds and so on. It is frustrating and disappointing, but again, it's the people who get back up that get the next chance and get the opportunity. So I'll stop ranting there, but I'm very proud of everyone in the community and very excited for everyone. It's awesome.

Bob 9:36

Yeah.

Julian 9:38

Awesome, all right, okay. So now, bob, talking kind of about community, we have seen a trend and everyone listening and watching, you know, obviously, for our coaching program for PDM and PDI, bob and I we get on calls with people before they join because we want to see where people are at and set expectations correctly and all of those sorts of things Right, all of those sorts of things right. So one of the common threads now that is more common than anything else with the calls that we have and we have plenty of these calls is that people are hitting a wall and they're getting frustrated. So, bob so I'm not doing all the talking what are people getting frustrated about? What are they fed up with at the moment?

Bob 10:20

That AI gives them all the answers and they don't really learn how to troubleshoot and put it all together. So, somebody shared this article with us, right? It's on NJ's blog, something that goes as Neo, or at Namanjg on X, and it's called AI's Creating a Generation of Illiterate Programmers. Yep, I can do the intro.

Bob 10:55

It's a really good article. You read it as well. Right, it starts as A couple of days ago, cursor went down during the chat GPT outage. I stared at my terminal facing those red error messages that I hate to see. An AWS error glared back at me. I didn't want to figure it out without AI's help. After 12 years of coding, I'd somehow become worse at my own craft, and this isn't Hyperbole. This is the new reality for software developers. Yeah, oof Ouch Ouch. Emoji.

Julian 11:31

So that was written on January 24th this year, 2025. So actually roughly a month ago from now, and I hadn't seen it until. Was it Christo that shared it with us? Yeah, is that right? Yeah, yeah, so I hadn't seen it since Christo. It Christo that shared it with us? Yeah, is that?

Bob 11:44

right.

Personal Wins and Community Success

Julian 11:44

Yeah, yeah. So I hadn't seen it since Christo, until Christo shared it with us and it just it resonated with me because of all those calls that we're having and so many people frustrated. They read books, they watch videos. They don't understand, it's not sinking in. They go to AI because that's kind of what the I guess the stereotype and what the society say yeah, use AI. And almost to the point where you go and ask someone, their answer is have you asked chat GPT, yet have you Googled it? You know and and. So people aren't getting the expertise. The AI is doing the work for you and you're not learning through the fire, like many of us did back in the day. So this generation that's learning to code purely through AI and that's what I'll preface this with is that, if you learn purely through AI, what are you actually?

Bob 12:42

learning Drowning in tutorials. Finish the bootcamp but still feel stuck. Ai makes coding look easy, but turning knowledge into real world skills is the real challenge.

Julian 12:52

That's where PyBytes coaching comes in. With one-to-one mentorship, we help you focus on what matters, build real projects and achieve real results. Land a dev job, launch a freelance gig or build your own SaaS.

Bob 13:06

It all starts with a free goals call, where we look at your unique situation and provide you with solutions. For more info, check out pybites.

Julian 13:17

So where do you see? And everyone, we haven't prepared for this conversation. We're literally just talking. Now, You're you're listening to you're listening to just a raw chat between bob and I on on this situation. So well, we read the article at least. Yeah, we read the article. There you go. But but so where's the gap? Where where's the the friction here?

Bob 13:41

yeah, and and, by the way, this this resonated with a lot of people, right? If you look at the stats at the top 1.25 million views, 3,500 upvotes plus upvotes on Reddit and 100 plus comments on Hacker News. So definitely resonates with a lot of people. So the friction resonates with a lot of people. Um, so the friction, yeah. So I think where experienced developers can leverage these tools effectively, it it's because they have the experience right, so it expresses a better prompting, but also in the skill of putting it all together.

Bob 14:17

Now, if you're new and you go straight to these tools, um, are you not going to prompt it effectively because you don't have the knowledge, or you're going to struggle to put it all together, because that's a different skill set, almost right. So, yeah, it's tough because if you're new in this field, how can you earn your stripes right? Like back in the day, it was a lot of Google Stack Overflow and you had to kind of filter through the answer debug, try, try, trial and error. That's a lot of that is gone if, if the ai is going to give you complete solutions, right. So I don't have a good answer because I'm not a newer programmer anymore, but of course we do coach newer programmers. So you really have to find a balance of how to use, where to use these tools, versus still doing some of that, that hardship you know, and I think the article suggests like do it like a non-AI day a week or something like that, right To make it a bit more harder on yourself, or deliberate to actually get those skills.

Julian 15:26

Hmm, right, I think as well the frictions coming in, because and he mentions and I didn't think of it this way before is the dopamine hit right? We get these instant answers to things that historically would take us hours sometimes to figure out. One of the things he mentions in the article is the trace. Essentially, if you have a bug or there's an issue, you get error code right. Figuring that out could take ages. It could take hours. You'd have to go and put. Sometimes you have to debug stuff in an actual debugger. You'd have to. I remember stack traces. We'd have to copy and paste those into an actual tool back in Oracle and Sun right to debug what those, or just read the errors right and go through the stack trace manually.

Bob 16:18

Yeah, Look at the source code.

Julian 16:21

Yeah, but now you can literally just paste it into GPT or whatever, into an LLM, and it'll decode it for you. And so the opposite side to this argument is well, yeah, that's the point. What's so bad about that? And this is where just AI in general, where I think we kind of have to be cautious with how much we let it take over the stuff that we should be knowledgeable about. Because the hypothetical that I run through in my head which may not be that hypothetical anymore is if you don't have the skill and you rely purely on AI to do it, what happens if, in this case, there's an outage, or who is going to be the person that solves the problem when AI can't actually solve it? Because what happens when you put an error, in that it can't actually figure out, or it doesn't give the right answer, it hallucinates or something. Who's going to figure it out? So if all of our collective skills in these almost fringe sides of coding and development and IT and even other industries, if they're all getting absorbed by AI and we're kind of dulling that blade, what's the impact of that? So what do you think about this?

Julian 17:44

I enjoy the idea, by the way, of having an AI-free day, right. But I guess the question is if there's a new developer coming in who feels that, look, I can get ahead and churn out things much faster. Because here's the thing as business owners ourselves, as people who have a certain literacy with code, we're much more comfortable using AI to develop, and sometimes with our products and things that we do, we want to move quickly, right, so there is a good part of having AI. There's a benefit there. Quickly, right, so there is a good part of having AI. There's a benefit there. But to say that we do everything through AI would be false. So when you have AI there as a method of speeding things up, to get things done quicker, which would make a new developer look better and sometimes the employer may not care about how they came to the answer, as long as it was done quickly what would you say to someone in that situation? That's a great question.

Bob 18:52

So I think it goes with discipline because, yeah, it's kind of human nature to take sometimes the path of least resistance. Right, but it's still in you how you're going to use those tools right, like um, you can paste the stack trace into the tool or you can still have the discipline to go through it yourself and and read source code right and to read books about software to get, like the, the holistic understanding and skill set right to do some refactoring manually. So have the discipline to still use the tools, because I don't think it goes away and I think you're still missing out if you not use them. But maybe just stay curious and you know if you I gave the example to somebody yesterday about if you want to understand fast api depends and dependency injection not just use the depends class in your code, as GPT would suggest, or the docs, but actually ask it to explain and then ask it something like what is the depends?

Bob 19:59

And that's where the prompting comes in, because I could follow up immediately like oh, that's a dependency injection, explain me dependency injection. Right, and somebody newer to coding might not make that link right, but at the very basic level you can just add oh, I have this route in FastAPI, I see the dependence class being used. Why is that? Oh, that was the thing. I was linking it to decorators in Django to make a comparison, right, so my prompt was a bit richer, but even so, if you don't have that knowledge, at the very least you can still, instead of just using it, you can just ask about what is this depends class, why is it used?

Bob 20:35

In this route in Fastly? That's purely what you see on the screen, right? What's the source code? It even went to the source code and and was actually, yeah, pulled that in as well, right, so you can really dive deeper and use it more like an explaining tool, um, and and have that discipline right to still do things by yourself and just use it as an aid instead of just because that was somebody commended about reading this article. What the concern was that people literally started to copy paste stuff without even knowing what it is, not even testing it. So, as long as you still have the discipline to do the common software craft, I think you, you, you can learn a lot and faster. But, yeah, that's kind of in how you use the tools, right, so it's kind of a double-edged sword, right, you can have it take over and not become a skilled developer, or you can use it as an aid right.

Julian 21:36

Yeah, does it make sense? No, yeah, completely. And you just got me thinking. You know, there's this whole concept that isn't making us illiterate as developers. There's when you actually understand something, you can talk to it. You can talk about your decisions, you can talk about why, you can talk over your code, right?

Julian 22:00

What I fear for people is one, as a developer, being in a situation where they've just kind of relied completely on AI and they get to a point where someone asks them the question like why did you write it that way? Or how did you miss this glaringly obvious exploit? I didn't. I didn't write it. And then then how does, like as a as an individual developer, you feel kind, you'd feel very silly jobs at stake, all of that kind of thing yeah, yeah, on the flip side, managers and hiring managers, people who I would say you know this is getting kind of political in the corporate scene, but there will be managers out there who care nothing, who care about nothing but the bottom line, the money, efficiency, metrics, that sort of thing. They don't care about the code quality, they don't care about why decisions are made the way they are. They just have pressure from above.

Julian 22:50

Get this thing done and over the line, fair enough, but if they start reducing metrics and deliverables because they are allowing their teams, or expecting their teams, to rely on AI, they're promoting a very dangerous precedence here. I think and that's something that makes me worried because I want to say this might be controversial they're promoting the ignorance, right? They're not allowing their teams to grow and they're not promoting them to grow. They're just promoting them to be the conduit, as, say, this person says in the article. They're essentially conduit between the ai and their code. They're just the hands and feet, essentially, for what they used to call this in the data centers, right?

Addressing Frustrations with AI in Programming

Bob 23:35

so yeah, yeah, and a shout out to the books as well. Right, I think we still should read software books because they always talk about code quality and the craft, right. And if you keep that in mind, what I said before, right, if you take it as a craft, you will actually validate all the lines of code, you will write tests, you will make sure that what it gives you is is of quality, right and, um, oftentimes even with experience prompting, I got an 80 90 good solution, but I still had to tweak it and iterate right and putting that extra care in, then you can have this really nice hybrid. But I think it starts with craft and caring and being curious, right, and yeah, I think that will come. But again, I'm talking more from an experienced perspective, so it's hard to speak from a. Maybe you can speak more from the beginner mindset.

Julian 24:28

Yeah, Well, the thing that I would say from a beginner mindset is just build. How did you do it before? How did people do it before? They read documentation? They experimented, they played their app. Wouldn't work for a few hours, they'd fix it, they'd get it working and they'd fix it. They'd get it working and then they'd break it again, you know, and that was just the trial by fire that we had and a shameless plug for our coaching program. This is what we do. We build. We build with you.

Julian 24:55

You are constantly coding and trying new things and experimenting and coding on branches and merging things into your mainline only when they're of a certain you know quality and if they actually work, you know. So you can break things, you can experiment. It's fun, you know, it's satisfying, it's not just copying out of a web browser and pasting it into a repository, you know. So that's my encouragement for people is get that passion back for coding. Get that interest, the curiosity that drove us before to write code, the experimentation, the kind of scrappiness that first drew you to writing scripts on your computer, to copy files from one location to another at a certain time, mapping it to a cron job and feeling like you were a god, you know, like that kind of energy we need to bring back and not this kind of just heartless, soulless reliance on artificial intelligence to just tell us what to do and what's right and what's not. You know, yeah, um, so I I will say I reminded myself when I mentioned cron is that this isn't just coding, right, this is every other aspect of our I'll say technical. This goes into all kind of uhplaces and job types and things. Think about IT in general. Right, I mean, I'm doing all this home server stuff and doing my home lab and things like that.

Julian 26:28

It is so easy when I have some sort of an issue with Linux to just pump it into AI and say what's the problem. It's so easy. But it's because I don't get to really troubleshoot hardware and deal with data centers and that kind of stuff anymore that I just sit there and go through the pain because it's kind of fun. It takes me back, it's nostalgic, so you know, remembering how LSPCI works and remembering how to slice up a disk and screwing it up and then going, oh crap, I've got to format the whole thing and blow away the table of contents and start again. Right, this was stuff from when we started back at Sun, you and me, and I love that. But it's very easy to have AI just walk you through the whole thing.

Julian 27:13

And again, even more obvious in that kind of industry, when things go down, things go down, the server that's running your AI may be the thing that goes down. So how do you troubleshoot that? How do you fix it? How do you do that? From a terminal? How do you replace parts? How do you troubleshoot physical components, these things through the physical tools and a serial terminal attached to it or something like that. These things are lost, they're starting to become lost, and I'll give one more example.

Julian 27:48

I'm on a rant here, bob, but this means a lot to me. Okay, bob, is that I'm also seeing in a lot of large IT companies. They're relying on AI and workflows to kind of tell their employees exactly what to do. And in some large they shall not be named cloud companies that we all know and love employees are told not to think for themselves. They're told follow the exact steps on your screen, even if you think you know better, and those of us who do know better will say no, that's not the fault. This is the fault.

Julian 28:26

It's going to save hundreds, if not a thousand or so dollars or thousands of dollars, to not replace that part and to do this one that actually works. But if you do it, you get a slap over the wrist, there's a warning in your route and that's this overall. This is where I go back to that first part of saying companies who are focused on the bottom line, on the time, on the dollars, and not on the actual skill set and nurturing their employees. That's what's going to happen and that's what's happening around the industry and it's pretty sad. I think it is pretty sad and I think you and I we were in IT in some of the glory days, you know, in the late 90s, early 2000s. We got to see this beautiful, flourishing technology push that was involved humans quite a bit, and now it's I think it was troubleshooting skills back then that really set the set the stage.

Julian 29:19

You know, still using that till this day and that's why I love when in our community, people join and they were back. They were from sun, or use some of the sun micro systems equipment from where we started, you know this brings it to the eye. Yeah, yeah, all right. Well, I think I'm done with my rant. Everyone, that's my cheat.

Bob 29:40

Yeah, we'll link the article, Give it a read. It's good awareness and, yeah, that's just something we really have to find a good balance with Not going to go away. Yeah exactly.

Julian 30:00

So just I think another way everyone just take away from this is be interested, find a reason to have an interest or passion for what you're doing, and you're probably going to be less likely to just let an ai take over the the job for you, you know, yeah, so and, and my summary would be definitely use AI.

Bob 30:20

I use it very intensively, but also have the business owner hat where I just want to build stuff fast, yeah. But I think if you keep caring about quality code, then you can actually find that balance and still use it intensively. It's just that your prompting will change like, oh, maybe you should do another. Then you can actually find that balance and still use it intensively. It's just that your prompting will change like, oh, maybe you should do another iteration and challenge the AI you know, and then the more you iterate, you can actually get to a very nice hybrid solution, I think.

Julian 30:50

And again, the challenging comes from knowledge, if you know how to challenge it. So keep reading your software books yeah, and articles, exactly, yeah, yeah, and go through our coaching, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's really helpful talk about books. What are you reading? Wrap it up. What am I reading? Well, I will say I'm very excited I've I didn't want to finish it because I was enjoying it so much. I finished that korean book. The welcome to the highainan Dong Bookshop.

Bob 31:20

I'm sure I've been to it. Can we do a collections counter on that Most common book mentioned? Like how many times did you mention that? I mean I just Three times, four times, three or four times? How many more times will you mention it? Like five times?

Julian 31:34

I want everyone to read it. I want everyone to read it. I want everyone to read. It was such a good book, but but it's a good book for me because I love oh, hit my microphone, because I love, uh, korean culture and stuff. But what I want to say was I finally finished it because I was allowing myself just one chapter a day, because I didn't want to finish it. Um, and now I picked up, started again, like I mentioned on the podcast a week or so ago Nexus Yuvul, noah Harari so now I've opened it and started readings today. So that was it's pretty interesting right.

Julian 32:05

Yeah, already into it.

Bob 32:06

So what about you? What are you reading? I wish I had that hardcover, because I'm listening on Audible and I still have to get it to work. Man, like audiobooks, it's hard, it's hard.

Julian 32:18

Yeah, it takes a bit of getting used to, but yeah, I still enjoy it. Listen to it in the shower, yeah, okay no, I don't think so.

Bob 32:26

Anyway, somebody from my family started reading the Idiot by Dostoevsky, so now I feel inclined to read that again. But I also picked up a Fast APII cookbook because kind of similar to this discussion. Well, I think I know FastAPI and I do know quite a bit of it, but probably corners I don't know very well. For example, I was making this ensemble programming tool with FastAPI.

Bob 32:55

WebSockets rightckets, right, and, of course, using a lot of ai. But then, uh, yeah, let's, let's step back a little bit and read that chapter on web sockets with fast api to really, you know, understand it better. So yeah, that's kind of my motivation to um, although I use it a lot just to see if I can really understand all the parts of the framework and challenge myself. So that's why I'm saying, like, read the books, use ai, but read the books as well, just for the, the conceptual knowledge you know yeah, and as always, we always have a disclaimer read the books, but implement what you're learning.

Julian 33:33

There's no point. This is after. This is after the implementation.

Bob 33:36

Yeah yeah, building first always yeah don't go just sit there reading. Well, some like this book. I wouldn't just read it like like before building anything. But then there are of course the timeless books. They you can read those without building clean code. And pragmatic programmer. Those are more conceptual, yeah exactly cool, all right and pragmatic programmer.

Julian 33:58

Those are more conceptual. Yeah, exactly Cool. All right, man. Well, that was a good chat. Thanks for listening to my ranting as well and for your input. I really enjoyed that.

Bob 34:05

Yeah, we didn't plan on talking about this article Now we did.

Julian 34:09

Yeah, it just came out of nowhere, so excellent. Any call-outs for everyone listening and watching. Any call to action.

Bob 34:17

Yeah, cliche, cliche go build.

Julian 34:19

You always say that come talk to us about coaching. We want to coach you. You want the coaching. It pays off.

Bob 34:27

It's amazing, so just do it um yeah, I'm really happy just just seeing the transformation and the results people are getting and that's yeah, just they. They see the light right when they start to implement and build these more mature apps and then seeing those wins about these, these apps. Example uh, somebody built this, this google books api the books app with fast api stream, that marvin ai using google books api and it. It's such a joy seeing that coming to fruition right and becoming a real app and something really cool with AI recommendations. And then they share that win right and it's like wow, that's really cool.

Julian 35:10

Yeah, and I think, on that note, one of the things I want to call out for everyone is that half of the people who come through our coaching, they're not in developer jobs. I want to set that expectation right. Right, they're not in developer roles, some of them. You know one of the people currently in the programs in the finance industry, I think, a chartered accountant, something like that. We've had lawyers.

Bob 35:34

Two accountants right now. Yeah, two accountants We've had lawyers in the that.

Julian 35:36

We've had lawyers, two accountants right now yeah, two accountants. We've had lawyers in the program. We've had people from all walks of life. Right, there's a nurse who's going through some coaching with us. Coding is for everyone. You just have to give it a try and believe in yourself, back yourself and you can do it. That's it. It's not just for the technical nerds who grew up with it. All right, totally, we could talk forever.

Julian 36:00

So, everyone, thank you for tuning in, join the community, use the links in the comments below and we will see you next week. Thanks, bob, cheers, bye-bye. Hey everyone, thanks for tuning into the PyBytes podcast. I really hope you enjoyed it. A quick message from me and Bob before you go to get the most out of your experience with PyBytes, including learning more Python, engaging with other developers, learning about our guests, discussing these podcast episodes and much, much more please join our community at pybytescircleso. The link is on the screen if you're watching this on YouTube and it's in the show notes for everyone else. When you join, make sure you introduce yourself, engage with myself and Bob and the many other developers in the community. It's one of the greatest things you can do to expand your knowledge and reach and network as a Python developer. We'll see you in the next episode and we will see you in the community.