, 3 min read

Deep Dives Complete: 600K Words of Talk Python Insights

It’s been a real journey. I’m thrilled to announce that every single Talk Python To Me episode now has a deep dive analysis for that show. This short post is just a bit of a celebration (and heads up!) about this new way to learn from the podcast.

What are deep dives?

A quick review: Our deep dives are a quick, detailed way to revisit the best points of an episode without scrubbing through the audio or reading the full transcripts. They include additional insights and resources beyond our episode page notes and links such as “What to Know If You’re New to Python”, “Key Definitions and Terms”, and “Learning Resources.”

I wrote a whole blog podcast and created a faux podcast about them at Introducing Episode Deep Dives at Talk Python if you want to read more about their origins.

Stats

I want to share some stats about our deep dives. It’s a great time to remember that small actions done consistently over time really add up. After 10 years of weekly podcast episodes, it turns out there is a lot to say about our episodes.

  1. Each episode deep dive is around 1,200 words. That’s about 5–7 minutes of reading time per deep dive.
  2. Today at 509 episodes, deep dives total 600,000 words (4.5M characters)! That’s 50 hours of reading time if you try to read them all.

As you can imagine, this was an immense amount of work get put them together. But I feel like they really add a lot of value to each episode and I’m glad we have them for our latest episodes as well as the full back catalog.

In addition to being just great content for the episode web pages, this dramatically increases the relevance of our search engine, which can even be added as a top-level search engine to your browser. It should be easier than ever to find episodes that cover topics you’re interested in.

How did we do this?

Well, how did I (aka Michael) do this? It took some of the most powerful AI models you can find, very very detailed prompts, and a fair bit of human edits afterward.

I spent days crafting just the right combination of information, details, structure, and more to get AI to generate truly useful deep dives. I knew I had it right when I would read through the results, and I learned new and useful information even though I was in the episode.

One more stat: Each prompt (per episode) is roughly 22,500 words or 128,000 characters.

Feedback is welcome

I’d love to hear from you about whether you find these useful and if there is additional information I could add that you would find valuable.

Cheers
Michael