Pybites Podcast

#185: Expanding the world of Pybites with cohort coaching, book platforms and more!

• Julian Sequeira & Bob Belderbos • Episode 185

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PyBytes is taking an exciting step forward with the introduction of cohort-based Python coaching, creating an accessible learning pathway for developers worldwide. After five successful years working with over 200 clients through 1:1 coaching, this new model provides opportunities for collaboration, networking, and group problem solving - skills that translate directly to professional development environments.

Beyond coaching, we're partnering with "Explore With Us" to give university students across Australia a 50% discount on the PyBytes platform, and we've also completely revamped PyBytes Books - with a sleek new interface, custom reading lists, and gamification elements.

With so many opportunities to learn and explore, we invite you to join our Pybites community, where we celebrate the power of developing together.

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Interested in our new Cohort Coaching? Check it out here: https://pybitescoaching.com/

Explore with Us: https://jobs.explorewithus.com.au/pybites/

Pybites Books: https://pybitesbooks.com/

Pybites guest articles: https://pybit.es/articles/

Julian's post on "vibe coding": https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7310433075216162817/ 

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Julian:

So that's something that we're really excited about with all of this is that it gets you together with other developers. You're asking questions, you're having a lot of fun and you're getting stuck together, which is cool and very reminiscent of what it's like to be on a developer team in the real world. Hello and welcome to the PyBytes podcast, where we talk about Python career and mindset. We're your hosts. I'm Julian Sequeira.

Bob:

And I am Bob Beldebos. Python Career and Mindset we're your hosts. I'm Julian Sequeira and I am Bob Beldebos, if you're looking to improve your Python your career and learn the mindset for success.

Julian:

this is the podcast for you. Let's get started. Welcome back to the PyBites podcast everyone. This is Julian. I'm here with Bob. How are you going, bob? Hey, welcome back everybody. How are you doing? Good, I am very good. We've had a couple of weeks hiatus of the podcast, so it's good to be back recording. It's good to be back with you. Where did you go? Why were we off for a couple of weeks?

Bob:

Hiatus. Here's the inventor of Scrabble. I had a little break, travel to Holland, so that was nice, did do work, but, yeah, no, no meetings, no recordings. So, uh, it was good. Yeah, yeah, good to change environments from time to time, um, and I think it was the first time where it was raining in spain the whole week and it was like sunny the whole week in holland, like before.

Julian:

Good problem to have I like that Nice I kept you busy.

Julian:

Well, yeah, it wasn't the best couple of weeks, but my daughter went for you know this, just for everyone that's listening you know, my daughter went in for surgery nothing crazy, just tonsils and adenoids, that sort of thing. So it was a very hectic couple of weeks for the household, with her not being able to eat and the pain and all those things. So I'm glad we didn't record anything, because I would have had to stop halfway through and deal with, you know, crying children sort of thing. So anyway, all is good and we're back and it's nice to be back working again on all this stuff. So, with that in mind, we have a special episode today of lots of news and things that we want to share with all of you. So stick with us to the end. Every one of these things is kind of for a different audience, isn't it? It's just kind of cool. So number one is probably the biggest announcement that we've had in quite a long time. So what's, bob? You do the honors, what's what's coming, what's happening?

Bob:

you need to say how many items are going to be right, doesn't?

Julian:

that be. That'd be a surprise. Four, five, six, who knows? Okay?

Bob:

so the first one is that we are working on cohort coaching, so we've been doing one-on-one coaching like forever. I think it's five years now. Yep, that's five years.

Bob:

Congrats, oh yeah, congrats on five years, man, I think we have worked with 200 plus clients by now and, yeah, this has been an amazing journey, um, but it's also an option not everybody can afford always, um, so we're making this more. I mean, first of all, they want the one coaching. They'll be there. Uh, business as usual, right, like if and we think it's still the best option right, if you want to work privately with a coach cannot be more effective, right, but if you want to have maybe an option that's a bit less effort, it's shorter, it's more economical, well, soon you will be able to join one of our cohort programs where you will be grouped with, I think, five max ten people.

Bob:

Yeah, maybe more five. You're still building it, obviously, um, and then you're going to build a pretty mature app. I would say, uh, you're going to we're aiming for get like 20 key skills done, uh, ranging from uv, software architecture, all the good stuff, but it will be the same app and in group setting. So we think it's going to be amazing. I think we are going to learn a lot. It's just a bit more economical, a bit less time investment, a bit more standardized, but, yeah, it does mean that we can coach many more people and I think the community aspect of it of bringing people together, have them collaborate, getting them into private circle spaces it's going to be really, really exciting for them, for us as a team, and I think the next iteration of coaching Again, it's just a side thing, the one-to-one still will be there, but, yeah, I think it's a nice alternative option that we will soon have, I think in a couple of weeks or even maybe faster.

Julian:

We'll have it. Yeah, hoping to launch in April. I think it should be ready to go this month, which is pretty exciting.

Julian:

Did I do it justice? No, not at all. No, it was fine. That was great. No, that was fantastic.

Julian:

So the thing I want to add to that is just that in our one-to-one coaching that we do, one of the things that we promote is community right, and you touched on that, bob, that community aspect. We have group calls, we have a channel where people can talk and all that sort of stuff. But one thing that they love the most even though the majority of the program is one-to-one, most people really appreciate that connection with other developers. So while we're reducing the one-to-one aspect with this cohort program, we're really boosting that community aspect of working with other developers and connecting and being able to network and build this group and this relationship between developers, and that's a valuable skill and it's a valuable experience to have. So that's something that we're really excited about with all of this is that gets you together with other developers. You're asking questions, you're having a lot of fun and you're getting stuck together, which is cool and very reminiscent of what it's like to be on a developer team in the real world. So the other thing I want to say on that is we're very aware, bob, you mentioned the economics of it all but the current one-to-one coaching.

Julian:

As amazing as it is, the cost of running that program really does and I'm being pretty blunt and honest here and open and transparent it does cut off access to that program to quite a vast majority of the world. You know only very uh countries where the dollar is very strong, as the us dollar and that kind of thing does the program become accessible, and so we just personally, as our values, we don't like that. So much of our stuff, our core program, is cut off from people. So this allows us to have countries from all across the planet start accessing our coaching and our way of doing things. We take pride in what we do and how we teach and how we coach and how we push people to build and get out of the comfort zone, wrap the mindset in it, and that's really exciting. So this is finally a way for us to scale that to people so that it's actually affordable.

Julian:

It doesn't matter whether you're from the Middle East, from Asia, from, you know, oceania, it doesn't matter. All these different places that otherwise couldn't afford the premium programs before are now able to access part of it, right? So? And our energy as well. So there you go. I just wanted to add that on top of what you said. But I'm very excited. This is cool. This has been a long time coming, a lot of work. We've got a little bit more to do, but you know, bob and I we're burning the candle at both ends, to use an overused term. But we're going to do this to get this out to all of you.

Bob:

Building it as we speak. We out to all of you building it um as we speak.

Julian:

You know some heated debates on whatsapp this morning, but, um, part of the process, um. So, yeah, the call to action, well, look, the call to action from this is you know, if you don't, if this engages with you in any way, there is a form in the show notes for this episode or in the YouTube description, whatever. Click it, register your interest so we can reach out to you and talk with you about it. And what I'm asking you all to do is, if you know anyone that is interested in coding in any way, this is your way to finally support them with it, because you're not going to push them to a super expensive program now. This is something that is very much affordable and accessible to everyone, of all skill levels. So please share this out, tell them this is the thing to do and this is very exciting.

Bob:

So yeah, there you go. We also want to start planning, so it's good to know who's interesting, what they want to get out of it. That can influence the whole building process still.

Julian:

And our community is pretty excited. The people we've spoken to about it already have a waiting list there, so no guarantees the first cohort will be free to get into at the moment, but it's exciting to have a number of people already waiting to jump into this, so it shows that there's some need and value there. Yeah, cool All right.

Bob:

Well, that was the big one.

Julian:

That was the big one. What's the second one?

Bob:

University stuff University. Well, I think that I will do the next one. I think this one you want to do.

Julian:

Yeah, this one's me All right. So explore with us. This is a partnership I announced on LinkedIn the other day. I'm going to post more about it in our Python community, in the PyBytes community, in more detail, but this is a partnership with a company in Australia that supports international students as they come to Australia to study at universities, and we are partnering with them to offer university students across the country a 50% discount on the PyBytes platform.

Julian:

So you all know we have our coding platform, but we've wanted to make it accessible to students, and one of the interesting things is that university students in the you know courses and the degrees that actually teach them Python, or they need to learn Python for it. The you know myriad engineering degrees, comp, sci. You think about all these different things. The Python aspect is often unable to bridge every gap. With Python, you can't teach them everything because it's not a Python degree, right? So a lot of the students are required to go and do self-learning and what's become really evident to us is that they engage with the platform.

Julian:

University students have found this super valuable, so we've started pushing into that industry and Explore With Us is extremely well connected within Australia for the university scene. Extremely well connected within Australia for the university scene, and so getting partnered with them and then getting our name, pybytes, into universities across the country is super exciting for us and that's something that we just launched last week, and the next step is to then use that experience to help us push into the United States and the UK and all these other places where anywhere there's a university really. So, for those of you listening, you know, check out the link in the description. If you know anyone in university, if you yourself are in university, please, you know, check it out. Tell your friends about it, tell those people who are studying. This is the place to go to bridge that python gap and really form that understanding that's going to help you really excel in that degree. So, yeah, stay tuned. More to come in this space yeah, super exciting as well.

Bob:

Um and helping more students. Yeah, love it cool awesome related not yet but hopefully to come is pybytes books, so I'll explain why that's related. So we finally bit the bullet right and did the redesign using our favorite Stillwind CSS and HTMX, like we did with the V2 platform. That's nice. That's really fast and responsive.

Julian:

Hang on For the people who don't know what PyBytes books is, because maybe not everyone knows. Okay.

Bob:

Sorry, yeah, let's go to the backstory. So we have this uh books app. Uh, we built like four years ago, I think um, I think it was even to learn django and uh no we already did django with the platform.

Bob:

But the platform, yeah, I think it started out as as an example app for a course and then it became a bit too involved for the course, so we kind of, okay, we'll branch that off. Yeah, so, and then we put it out as an open source project. We got some contributions as well and it's a very minimalistic, simplistic books app where you can just search for books. It uses the Google Books API very accurately. You can find almost anything and you can then add your books and say if you have read them or you want to read them or you're reading them. You can add them to lists, um, you can favorite them, you can you have a user profile with your stats and there's gamification, all the good stuff, right so, but it was still using, I think, movie css kind of we fell into it.

Bob:

Uh, the v1 platform. It's nice for a project, but doesn't really look, um, that professional and they were like page refreshes and stuff like old school django, um. So, yeah, we just so. That that's the back story. Then we had it like on the back burner forever to come up with a better design and make it nicer and, yeah, finally did. That took a bit of effort, but, um, yeah, I think it's uh, it's much better now. It's uh. You know, the hd max makes it very fast until it makes it look very nice. We added some features as well. There's even premium tier. Um, yeah, it's basically a product now yep, it's awesome.

Julian:

so if, if you're a reader, if if you read books, give up the other platforms, tell them to get stuffed and come read on our platform, not to be named.

Julian:

Yeah, not to be named Goodreads, but the reason I'm super passionate about this is the privacy aspect. So I think what's really interesting out there and a slight segue or tangent, I should say is that there's a real move, I think, with people to start being cautious about where they put their data and who they give their data to specifically, and there's becoming more and more mistrust with these large conglomerates like you know, your Meta, your you name it right Amazon, google, all that stuff and Goodreads is owned by our beloved friends at Amazon and, for better or worse, your data is being used. You are the product, because Goodreads is free, which means that they're getting paid somewhere else for you using this platform, and that's the same with many other book reading platforms. Right, that data is being used to sell to book selling companies such as amazoncom, perhaps, you know, and all these other places right, to help them with their marketing, their sales and all that stuff to make them richer. Right, and that's why we left Goodreads. We just did not like that at all and that's why we built this in the first place and we were, why we built this in the first place and we were inspired to build something like this. So if privacy is something that you actually care about, this is the platform to migrate to, and it has a feature to migrate your books the CSV from Goodreads as well, because we migrated off Goodreads, right, but yeah, so if you have friends, family, anyone who's reading that cares about privacy, tell them to come over to this platform.

Julian:

The premium tier that Bob mentioned is literally just a premium subscription with some basic premium features to make the platform a little nicer, have some custom reading lists, but nothing deal-breaking that you need to subscribe for. The whole purpose there is to just support the running of the platform, right, pay for the infrastructure costs and maintenance and support all the usual stuff. So, um, please go ahead, support us through that. Uh, sign up, enjoy it. And the cool thing is, on the home page you'll see all the latest books that people have added. So the books you see on the home page are not random. That's what people on the platform in that community have been adding.

Bob:

So there you go and there's like categories page as well where you see like the most read book per category. So, uh, yeah, people are already finding, um yeah, new books that never heard about. So and we have been going back to the platform forever. The gamification really works like. It's almost like yes, I can add another one, right, and then, your profile.

Bob:

On your own profile, you see kind of the stats, how many books you've been reading actually fell behind. I didn't know because until I did the django query. Yeah, so it's super cool and yeah, bring it back to the students. Um, ultimately, our aim is to have teachers use this in a classroom as well, where they can redact lists and give students recommended reading books and have students be motivated and read more, because, as we all know, there's a lot of social media and apps and it's very tempting and it just happens a lot where kids waste a lot of time on these platforms and they rethink what they should be reading. Overall, we should keep the books alive, right? Yeah, so that's Agreed. I think it's also a bit of an ideological app for us.

Julian:

Yeah, well, that's the thing. My kids love it. My boys read and love adding their books to it. So that, to me, was the kind of push to be like, yeah, we should get other kids to use this as well. So, yeah, if you have kids, this is a great way for them, in a safe environment too, because there's no there's no interaction with other users other than being able to follow accounts and, like I said, privacy, usernames. That's the only thing we ask for username and email and usernames all other people can see. So, as long as you don't use your real name, the username- you'll be fine, pretty private yeah.

Julian:

Yeah, all right.

Bob:

We have eight minutes left. We have a hard stop, but let's close it off with two more right? So yeah, this one is very quick. Quick, because this is just really something to go check out. So, on the pivotes articles uh, four new articles in the last two weeks, uh right. So a shout out to uh zach for writing fast api deployment, made easy with docker and flydo. Josh angroff gave us optimizing Python understanding generator mechanics, expressions and efficiency. Michael Dinbas gave us case study developing and testing Python packages with UV Very relevant and actual. And yesterday Chris Petty published try an AI speed run for your next site project. So yeah, a lot of cool stuff on the blog.

Bob:

All right, so that's all. It's the harvest of only two weeks yeah, it's amazing.

Julian:

So, thank, thank you to the guys for for writing those. It means a lot to us that you're contributing like that and for anyone who's interested, right, these are articles written by people in our community. You know, if you have a a great idea, we'll help you write it and you write it, we'll review it, all that sort of stuff and then it can go live on the blog and that's something that you can add to your portfolio, like, hey, look what I did publish something. So, yeah, please get in touch if you're interested in that. But we love it. So, thank you again, guys, cool, cool.

Bob:

Lastly, the last one is all right.

Julian:

I've got two minutes to get on my soapbox for this one, no minutes, no more, no minutes. Vibe coding so I know we've talked a lot about AI over the previous episodes so I won't get into that erosion of skills and stuff. But what I will say is that I discovered vibe coding last week. Someone mentioned the term and I laughed at them. That was a friend of mine named Nigel and I said you can't be serious, that's not what it's called and it's what is it. It's just essentially using AI as an assistant to help you code, but, more importantly, getting it to write the code for you and just getting it to iterate over the code constantly and then pushing to production. So the kind of push here is to use this and say this is the new way of doing things, this is the new wave, this is, this is the end of the developer. I'm like you're joking like this.

Julian:

This can't be real um and what a ridiculous name for it. It's so embarrassing. What are these like? 20 year old not even 20, 15 yearolds coming up with this vibe coding.

Bob:

Anyway, aside from my clear disdain, it's kind of wing it coding right.

Julian:

Yeah, exactly, you're just fake coding. Anyway, I won't say that what about the vibing.

Julian:

Revibing, vibing with the machine man? I don't know, but it's ridiculous. So the point is that the pushback on this is that people are just going to lose their skills and you're going to eventually need skilled developers to come and bail you out. If you push AI-written code to production without actually knowing what the hell it's doing and that's inevitable that will happen because you've got to have people in there for fact-checking. You have to know things, and the quick analogy that I thought of was that with a car right, we have, you know, a whole bunch of cars. Be well, cars are made by machines. Right, they're made in factories, that's fine. But we also know that when a car breaks, a machine doesn't fix it. You have to take it to a mechanic. Someone needs to do it. So if you do the same thing here, you build all your code through ai, you're going to have to bring in very expensive developers to fix it every single time something breaks.

Julian:

And, um, we're going to have an episode on the podcast with cristo olivier is that how you say his last name? I think that's right. Yeah, um, who's going to come and talk and demystify the deeper inner workings of llms very soon and that I hope will show people that actually you can't trust it and this whole fallacy is, in my opinion, that ai is just going to keep getting better and better, man I actually disagree with, and we'll talk about that on the episode with Christo, but for now I need a drink, I need a rest, I need to sit down. So vibe coding, don't get caught up in it. It's garbage that term and everything Anyway.

Bob:

You can use the tools if you know what you're doing right. Yes, to make it a craft, it involves so much more Actually understanding it for starters, but writing your tests, et cetera, et cetera.

Julian:

I mean, look, I will say this use AI to support you with coding, go back and forth, use it as if it was a developer sitting next to you, Challenge it. But to do that you have to understand a certain level of coding. I'm saying, that's it. And people say this is a great gateway entry into coding for novices, and that's fine, but I would like to think novices aren't pushing production code, so there is a conversation to be had here. This is not we're running out of time, so this is not it, but maybe another time with a guest.

Bob:

It also, yeah, depends what you use it for, right, Like if it's a one-off script experiment with what you want right. But if you're talking about production level stuff, exactly yeah, different game.

Julian:

Do a few stuff at home, stuff that you're not going to introduce, exploits and security vulnerabilities and things that might break with scale, and don't consider X, y and Z, you know so anyway, all right. So with two minutes left, thank you everyone for listening. Bob, quickly book reading, anything.

Bob:

Managing Popeye's books. There's a lot there. Yeah, I picked up Jeff Hamer's recommendation software tools Kernighan classic. I just started it, but he said it's one of the best software books. So I have to have to read it.

Julian:

Cool, yeah, okay. Um, well, you know I like to read many books at once, so naturally I've picked up a new, new book to read. Um, it's called before the coffee gets cold and I won't go into it. It's awesome. It's a cool Japanese book that's been translated and I'm actually really enjoying it. So I'm on the first book. I've got the second one already lined up ready to go, so that's the fiction I've been sucked into at the moment.

Julian:

Nice, awesome, cool, nice, all right. Well, look, everything we talked about today. We're going to have links in the show notes. If you're listening to a podcast or if you're watching on youtube, it'll be in the description. Um, thank you everyone for everything, for all your continued support and sharing things and really promoting what we do. It means so much to bob, and I and the rest of the team eat, indeed, indeed, you're a man of few words, bob. Very, yeah, thanks. Actually, before we go, I just have to say everyone we have a special shout-out to possibly our youngest listener. Ewan, nine years of age, listens to our podcast with his dad. So, ewan, if you're listening, you're a champion. Thank you so much for tuning in and I'll see you when I see you. That makes me happy. Yeah, it's fantastic. All right, everyone, take care We'll catch up soon In the next one. Cheers.

Bob:

Cheers, Bye hey everyone.

Julian:

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.