WEBVTT 00:00:00.001 --> 00:00:05.580 You'll find this episode to be part discussion on how to teach and learn Django, as well as why 00:00:05.580 --> 00:00:11.060 learning web development can be hard, and part meta, where Will, Vincent, and I discuss the 00:00:11.060 --> 00:00:16.520 business of creating content and teaching around Python. I think you'll enjoy both parts on this 00:00:16.520 --> 00:00:20.720 episode of Talk Python To Me, recorded December 6th, 2018. 00:00:20.720 --> 00:00:38.780 Welcome to Talk Python To Me, a weekly podcast on Python, the language, the libraries, the 00:00:38.780 --> 00:00:43.380 ecosystem, and the personalities. This is your host, Michael Kennedy. Follow me on Twitter 00:00:43.380 --> 00:00:48.060 where I'm @mkennedy. Keep up with the show and listen to past episodes at talkpython.fm, 00:00:48.060 --> 00:00:52.860 and follow the show on Twitter via at talkpython. Will, welcome to Talk Python To Me. 00:00:52.860 --> 00:00:53.560 Thanks for having me. 00:00:53.560 --> 00:00:59.480 It's great to have you here. I'm super excited to talk to you about teaching developers in 00:00:59.480 --> 00:01:04.800 general and teaching Django in particular, and even how do people go about making that 00:01:04.800 --> 00:01:09.400 kind of stuff part of their job and stuff. So I think there's a lot of interesting angles 00:01:09.400 --> 00:01:13.160 to touch on here. But before we get to them, let's start with your story. How did you get 00:01:13.160 --> 00:01:14.080 into programming in Python? 00:01:14.080 --> 00:01:18.580 Sure. So I got into programming later in life. I didn't grow up coding. Computers were 00:01:18.580 --> 00:01:20.040 just scary and frustrating for me. 00:01:20.040 --> 00:01:21.180 Define later. 00:01:21.180 --> 00:01:28.220 Later would be... So I first coded a site in 2008 when I was 27. I started my career as a 00:01:28.220 --> 00:01:32.680 book editor, which you probably haven't heard before. And I noticed that two things were 00:01:32.680 --> 00:01:35.980 happening. Amazon was coming in and telling all the publishers what to do, and they were 00:01:35.980 --> 00:01:41.120 sticking their head in the sands. And I also noticed that we were spending $10,000 on a website. 00:01:41.600 --> 00:01:47.340 And I thought, I could do that. So I decided to get an MBA, diversify my options, because 00:01:47.340 --> 00:01:51.360 publishing seemed to be going the wrong way. And I learned how to build websites. So I built 00:01:51.360 --> 00:01:56.440 websites for a bunch of my former authors. And that was a side business I did throughout my 00:01:56.440 --> 00:02:02.340 MBA. It was a frustrating experience. It wasn't that fun. I just sort of pushed through it. 00:02:02.660 --> 00:02:09.120 And then I was able to join a startup called Quizlet in 2010 as the third employee we could talk about. 00:02:09.120 --> 00:02:09.480 What did they do? 00:02:09.480 --> 00:02:14.460 So they're the largest education site in the US, at least. They're a top 20 website. 00:02:14.460 --> 00:02:20.700 It's study tools, flashcards, and games for students. So when I joined, it was just a couple of us. And 00:02:20.700 --> 00:02:25.780 when I left in 2013, there were 10 of us, but it was a top 100 website, I think. And now it's 00:02:25.780 --> 00:02:29.660 a top 20 website and I think something like 200 people. 00:02:29.660 --> 00:02:32.900 Yeah, it's a good looking place. Do you know, is it done in Python? 00:02:32.900 --> 00:02:35.900 No. Well, I think they do some scripting now. It's PHP. 00:02:35.900 --> 00:02:36.380 Okay. 00:02:36.460 --> 00:02:41.320 They're so big now. I'm sure they do some Python stuff, but yeah, PHP. So I did a lot of the hiring 00:02:41.320 --> 00:02:46.480 there or I helped with a lot of the hiring there to be accurate. And even back then, PHP wasn't hot. 00:02:46.480 --> 00:02:53.060 Everyone wanted to do, you know, it was a disadvantage hiring MIT Stanford grads with PHP. They wanted to 00:02:53.060 --> 00:02:54.840 do Node or Rails at the time. 00:02:54.840 --> 00:02:56.740 Right. At the time. Yeah. Makes sense. 00:02:56.740 --> 00:02:57.040 Yeah. 00:02:57.040 --> 00:03:00.900 Okay. So I think this is really interesting. So let me stick into this for a minute before we move on. 00:03:00.900 --> 00:03:07.400 Like you were doing book editing and then you went to get your MBA and also learned programming. 00:03:07.400 --> 00:03:13.380 And that those sound at first blush, like completely two different directions. But I think there's 00:03:13.380 --> 00:03:19.460 actually a lot of intersection in people who want to create their business or enable their business. 00:03:19.460 --> 00:03:23.820 They have an MBA. And I think these programming powers are like really important actually. 00:03:23.820 --> 00:03:24.240 Yes. 00:03:24.240 --> 00:03:29.720 Yeah. They're incredibly important. I mean, and back when I was doing this 10 years ago, 00:03:29.900 --> 00:03:33.560 which is weird to say, you know, tech wasn't cool. I think it was still, 00:03:33.560 --> 00:03:37.240 we're just coming off of real estate. I was sitting in a finance class when the market crashed in 00:03:37.240 --> 00:03:39.220 2008, learning about efficient markets. 00:03:39.220 --> 00:03:39.440 Wow. 00:03:39.440 --> 00:03:41.940 They had to throw away the book and start over. 00:03:41.940 --> 00:03:44.300 Not quite. 00:03:44.300 --> 00:03:50.700 Yeah. We could talk more about that, but tech wasn't sexy. Startups weren't sexy. I knew I wanted to go to 00:03:50.700 --> 00:03:54.040 San Francisco because I'd come from an industry publishing that was being 00:03:54.040 --> 00:03:58.680 disrupted. And I thought it'd be better to be on the side of change rather than defense. 00:03:58.900 --> 00:04:03.340 But yeah, it wasn't, people were still in traditional mindset. I mean, now where I went, 00:04:03.340 --> 00:04:07.160 I got my MBA at Tuck, which is the business school at Dartmouth in New Hampshire. Now 00:04:07.160 --> 00:04:12.020 tech is the biggest thing by far. I think it even exceeds finance and consulting. Everyone goes to 00:04:12.020 --> 00:04:17.080 Amazon and or becomes product managers. So, you know, digital literacy is really, really important. 00:04:17.080 --> 00:04:21.480 That's actually a course I'd love to teach at some point. Some schools have this, you know, 00:04:21.480 --> 00:04:25.300 you say, okay, you're going to go in and be a manager. You know, what do you need to know, 00:04:25.360 --> 00:04:28.760 right? Like you should build a static website. You should know how the internet works. You should 00:04:28.760 --> 00:04:33.620 have some basic concepts. I'm not sure that they're doing that yet, but they're aware that they need to, 00:04:33.620 --> 00:04:38.240 you know, educate the managers about how the modern world works because everything is tech. I mean, 00:04:38.240 --> 00:04:42.360 even marketing, they, I'm not sure if they've changed this, but used to be really advanced, 00:04:42.360 --> 00:04:47.360 you know, Excel macros, which sounded sexy. But the reality is, you know, if you're an MBA going to a 00:04:47.360 --> 00:04:52.200 company, you need to learn SQL or Python scripting. Like that's going to be much more valuable 00:04:52.200 --> 00:04:56.300 today. So yeah, so I think it's exciting. They didn't teach it back then. Now everyone's kind 00:04:56.300 --> 00:05:00.040 of catching up. It almost makes me think tech has peaked a little bit that everyone wants to go into 00:05:00.040 --> 00:05:00.640 tech, but. 00:05:00.640 --> 00:05:06.860 That's right. Well, I think, I don't know if I agree with, I think if you want to go into tech for pure 00:05:06.860 --> 00:05:11.600 tech, maybe, right. Just, I just want to be a straight programmer and I don't have any specialties. 00:05:11.600 --> 00:05:16.460 I'm not sure I would say that, but that's a possibility. But I think there are just so many 00:05:16.460 --> 00:05:20.320 opportunities to take the thing I'm building, the thing I'm doing, the thing I'm special at, 00:05:20.400 --> 00:05:25.280 and just 10 exit with software that that's going to have a really long run. 00:05:25.280 --> 00:05:29.000 Yeah. I think you, yeah. If you had like an MVP for MBAs course, that would, 00:05:29.000 --> 00:05:30.880 I think that would make a lot of sense. 00:05:30.880 --> 00:05:32.240 Yep. 00:05:32.240 --> 00:05:36.520 But yeah, but we'll just to finish my story. So I was at Quizlet, which is fantastic opportunity. 00:05:36.520 --> 00:05:42.440 And then I decided to leave. I thought, you know, I could go again, as an MBA person, 00:05:42.440 --> 00:05:45.480 I could go raise some money and try to hire people for the startup idea I had, 00:05:45.560 --> 00:05:50.660 or I could teach myself how to properly code over the next two years. And I decided on the latter, 00:05:50.660 --> 00:05:55.080 knowing that, you know, most startups fail. The one I worked on didn't work out. So we left San 00:05:55.080 --> 00:05:59.120 Francisco, my wife and I, and I basically locked myself in a room for two years and learned how to 00:05:59.120 --> 00:06:04.500 code, which was kind of awful, but for various family reasons was the way it had to be done. 00:06:04.500 --> 00:06:07.760 You know, I had that optimism. I'd just been at Quizlet, right? It just worked. 00:06:08.080 --> 00:06:11.840 So I assumed everything, you know, would kind of work for me. I'm curious, you know, for you, 00:06:11.840 --> 00:06:15.220 like you've gone out on your own, there's trajectory of like the first year, you're so excited, 00:06:15.220 --> 00:06:18.500 right? It's like, you're doing your own thing. You're so efficient, right? You have days where 00:06:18.500 --> 00:06:21.680 you work two hours and you go like, that's more than I would have done in like a week, 00:06:21.680 --> 00:06:25.480 maybe at my last job without all the responsibilities I had. But then, you know, 00:06:25.480 --> 00:06:29.880 year two, three comes in and it gets a little more real. And, you know, you're kind of like, 00:06:29.880 --> 00:06:36.140 huh, you know, I'm on year five now. So without arguably a big win. So it's an interesting 00:06:36.140 --> 00:06:39.760 trajectory. It's so fun to do for a year or two. Like, I think everybody, if they can, 00:06:39.760 --> 00:06:43.900 should try to, it's like the sign I saw on a school bus as a kid. It was like, kids, 00:06:43.900 --> 00:06:47.160 like leave school now, go out on your own before, you know, while you still know everything. 00:06:47.160 --> 00:06:52.060 It's a little bit like that, right? Because now sometimes you're like, oh, a big company. 00:06:52.060 --> 00:06:52.780 That'd be nice. 00:06:52.780 --> 00:06:53.920 Yeah. The stability. 00:06:53.920 --> 00:06:54.880 Exactly. 00:06:54.880 --> 00:07:00.300 I will have a vacation or that I will get paid this much that I can plan around it. Yeah. 00:07:00.300 --> 00:07:02.700 I still don't know what I'm going to get paid. It's, it's all over the map, 00:07:02.700 --> 00:07:08.280 but on my side, like I can't, I can't complain. Things are super going super well. You know, 00:07:08.280 --> 00:07:14.280 listeners are really supportive of the podcast. Businesses are sponsoring the podcast are really 00:07:14.280 --> 00:07:19.200 great. And I've been with me for a long time. The courses I'm doing, you know, people really 00:07:19.200 --> 00:07:25.160 seem to appreciate them. So I, in that regard, like I have absolutely no complaints. It's just great. 00:07:25.160 --> 00:07:32.620 But I do sort of feel the drag of reality, if you will. I mean, it's in that, you know, 00:07:32.620 --> 00:07:40.240 like I probably spend 30% of my time just doing paperwork, answering like what sometimes are mundane 00:07:40.240 --> 00:07:43.380 emails. Sometimes they're amazing stuff I get from people, but a lot of times it's just like, 00:07:43.380 --> 00:07:48.940 I got to keep this moving, that going. And there's just more friction in the world. So yeah, 00:07:48.940 --> 00:07:49.420 I hear you. 00:07:49.420 --> 00:07:53.320 Yeah. And I think it's, I think it's the grass is greener. I mean, there's friction in every job, 00:07:53.320 --> 00:07:57.500 but, but it's, yeah. And I think it's too, as you mentioned vacations, like, I mean, 00:07:57.500 --> 00:08:01.880 I can speak honestly, like I'm super burned out right now. Like I haven't taken a, from coding 00:08:01.880 --> 00:08:05.840 anyways, I haven't taken a coding break in, you know, five years of more than a couple of days. 00:08:05.840 --> 00:08:06.640 Yeah. 00:08:06.640 --> 00:08:11.200 I have one plan coming up and I'm sort of aware that I need to make it, but I'm also aware that 00:08:11.200 --> 00:08:15.700 I'm not, you know, making great decisions right now. So I'm sort of like, I'm going to wait on that. 00:08:15.820 --> 00:08:20.620 But yeah, as you said, like with the drag of success, like, I think that's an important point 00:08:20.620 --> 00:08:25.440 is that two things. One is that sometimes a moderate success is the hardest thing because you don't know 00:08:25.440 --> 00:08:30.120 if it's, if you should stick with it or not. Right. Like it's better to fail fast or fail big when you're 00:08:30.120 --> 00:08:33.480 kind of in the middle, you're like, you get the self-questioning loop, which is not productive. 00:08:33.480 --> 00:08:38.500 But then, yeah, for me, like I'm, you know, this is my first year doing this full time. You know, 00:08:38.500 --> 00:08:43.140 I have to hire an accountant. I have to emails, you know, just more distractions, you know, 00:08:43.140 --> 00:08:47.120 positive things. I'm still working out how to deal with that. You know, it's just me. I don't, 00:08:47.120 --> 00:08:50.640 I know I don't have the ability to hire someone. Even if I did, I sort of feel like it'd be almost 00:08:50.640 --> 00:08:55.980 be easier to hire six people than one person. Yeah. Oh, I totally hear you. What I would say, 00:08:55.980 --> 00:09:02.860 at least around that, at least those are the kinds of things that you sort of go on autopilot with to 00:09:02.860 --> 00:09:07.060 a large degree. It's like driving. Like when you first learned to drive, I taught my daughters 00:09:07.060 --> 00:09:11.960 recently how to drive. And like every interaction with the mirrors, with the gauges, with the controls, 00:09:11.960 --> 00:09:16.220 it's just like, I can't do all this at once as dad. I'm like, I understand now that you feel that 00:09:16.220 --> 00:09:20.380 way. You need to learn how to do it. And then it's going to be fine. And I know it doesn't like 00:09:20.380 --> 00:09:25.600 completely fix it, but a lot of like the accounting stuff and whatnot, it does at first, it's such a 00:09:25.600 --> 00:09:30.100 challenge. And then it doesn't become, it becomes not so much. I think it's speed bumps rather than, 00:09:30.100 --> 00:09:34.400 you know, a parachute. Yeah. I'm guilty. You know, I have an MBA, so I'm a little bit like, 00:09:34.400 --> 00:09:37.940 I know how to do accounting, but I don't know how to do accounting. And even if I did, 00:09:38.080 --> 00:09:41.320 I wouldn't want to do it. So there's a priority stack, right? So that's sort of the, 00:09:41.320 --> 00:09:45.840 the nice thing about a big job is like, I want to hire me to tell me what to do sometimes. 00:09:45.840 --> 00:09:49.880 Right. It's like the curse of autonomy. It's like, so I've actually like, you know, 00:09:49.880 --> 00:09:54.840 I've gotten much more disciplined with making time to schedule my days. Like, 00:09:54.840 --> 00:09:58.460 so I come into each day and I've, I just execute rather than think about it. 00:09:58.460 --> 00:10:02.020 Yeah. I think that's important for anyone who's like, maybe they just work for themselves 00:10:02.020 --> 00:10:07.920 or they work from home. They're trying to do their own business. If you don't create this 00:10:07.920 --> 00:10:11.700 structure again for yourself, it can get really overwhelming or it feels like you're spinning 00:10:11.700 --> 00:10:14.760 your wheels. It's weird to think about how, you know, if I think like for you, right, 00:10:14.760 --> 00:10:19.320 like how productive we can be, even though sometimes we sit here and think, what am I doing today? 00:10:19.320 --> 00:10:22.660 Right. Like you have the podcast, you have your courses, you have everything else. Like 00:10:22.660 --> 00:10:27.500 I was looking back on my year and it's like, it's been a big year for me in terms in the aggregate, 00:10:27.500 --> 00:10:30.700 but day to day, it's a lot of, you know, you don't have wasted time, right? Like when you have a 00:10:30.700 --> 00:10:33.440 normal job, you have the water cooler, you have this, that, or you have days where you're like, 00:10:33.440 --> 00:10:37.560 you know what, it's three o'clock. Like I'm going to do low level stuff. There's really no low level 00:10:37.560 --> 00:10:42.840 stuff, which is a blessing, but it means that I need to, you know, go take a walk instead of 00:10:42.840 --> 00:10:47.560 banging my head on something. So yeah. So those are all challenges around, you know, being self-employed 00:10:47.560 --> 00:10:51.640 and creating content. Yeah. I think, you know, I don't want to go too far into this because it's not 00:10:51.640 --> 00:10:55.560 the main topic necessarily, but it is super interesting to me. So I'm going to have to resist the urge 00:10:55.560 --> 00:11:00.660 in a hard way. So I think one of the big differences that people are trying to create content 00:11:00.660 --> 00:11:04.820 for themselves, they're trying to be self-employed, maybe even in a consultant role, 00:11:04.820 --> 00:11:12.200 they're trying to be a book author, whatever, is you have to shift your mindset from, I get paid to 00:11:12.200 --> 00:11:20.220 create value. I know not, I get paid to spend my time. Right. So if I, if I, I've worked at plenty of 00:11:20.220 --> 00:11:25.780 like large companies or in small companies as well, but even if I have a bad day, if I show up and I 00:11:25.780 --> 00:11:29.720 have like, Oh, I wasn't so productive today. It's like, whatever. Like I get paid exactly the same. 00:11:29.720 --> 00:11:35.020 Cause I exchanged my time for money, but now it's like, I've worked on projects that were super 00:11:35.020 --> 00:11:40.260 successful for a month. And I've worked on projects that would be like bad, bad pay for a month, you 00:11:40.260 --> 00:11:46.360 know, like, and you just have to, realign your thinking of, I get paid for the value I create. 00:11:46.920 --> 00:11:49.200 How do I do that? And just optimize around that. 00:11:49.200 --> 00:11:52.240 Yeah. Yes, exactly. I think about this a lot. 00:11:52.240 --> 00:11:56.960 Easier said than done, but yeah. I mean, because you have days where you, you know, like a weekend, 00:11:56.960 --> 00:12:02.260 right? Like I try not to work on weekends cause I have a family and generally I have higher sales on 00:12:02.260 --> 00:12:09.200 weekends. So it feels pretty awesome to not work and get paid. Then again, sometimes I'll really work 00:12:09.200 --> 00:12:13.600 hard for an extended period of time during the week and sales are low, which, you know, this is a bad 00:12:13.600 --> 00:12:18.500 habit. I, I, because I'm self-published, I can see my daily hourly, you know, minute by minute sales. 00:12:18.500 --> 00:12:19.520 Minute by minute. Yeah. 00:12:19.520 --> 00:12:24.160 I've gotten better at not looking at it, but it is a weird shift, right? And the challenging for, 00:12:24.160 --> 00:12:28.600 you know, tech content is it's not, it's not really an annuity. It requires constant upkeep, 00:12:28.600 --> 00:12:33.740 which is a challenge for burnout, but also an opportunity because most people don't update 00:12:33.740 --> 00:12:38.640 stuff, you know, especially frameworks, right? Like I'm a little bit envious or people who work 00:12:38.640 --> 00:12:43.000 with programming languages because you have a larger audience and probably more competition, 00:12:43.000 --> 00:12:51.420 but Python, you know, 3.6 versus 3.7 isn't changing as much as Django 2.1 to 2.2. You know, 00:12:51.420 --> 00:12:55.600 Django has two major updates coming out next year, which is fantastic for the language, for the 00:12:55.600 --> 00:13:02.200 community and for developers. But, you know, like I published my first book in, you know, 00:13:02.200 --> 00:13:05.580 March, I had to update it this fall. I'm going to have to update them again in April. I'm going to 00:13:05.580 --> 00:13:10.780 update them again in December and I'll have three books out. So there's, you know, it's a chance. 00:13:10.780 --> 00:13:15.020 I like the idea of constantly iterating on my stuff and with text as opposed to video, 00:13:15.020 --> 00:13:20.140 it's very easy for me to do. I probably do changes every week, small things making them better, but 00:13:20.140 --> 00:13:24.100 yeah, it's a challenge and opportunity. I mean, that's partly why, you know, there's so few books on 00:13:24.100 --> 00:13:29.180 frameworks. It's just so hard to keep up. Right. You don't want to be behind, but got to put a stake 00:13:29.180 --> 00:13:33.880 in the ground somewhere. I guess the best bet is just pick the newest possible framework you can go 00:13:33.880 --> 00:13:39.980 with. I think so. Yeah. Or I'd say, I think, I think that the key is to not do everything. It's to, 00:13:39.980 --> 00:13:43.760 it's okay to be known for one thing. Sure. I've thought a lot about this because I, 00:13:43.760 --> 00:13:47.620 I use Django. I like Django. I also write a lot of JavaScript. I've done a lot of React. 00:13:47.820 --> 00:13:52.780 You know, I want to do everything, but really it's better to, you know, look through the world 00:13:52.780 --> 00:13:57.060 through a keyhole. And, I think that's better for people too, right. To be known as like, I need 00:13:57.060 --> 00:14:02.300 to learn Django. I think Django in particular, if I had to bet is going in the right direction on that 00:14:02.300 --> 00:14:07.540 stuff. So, but it's a little scary bet, right. To sort of say like, I'm attaching myself to this 00:14:07.540 --> 00:14:12.100 train. I mean, we do it all the, like we do it across the spectrum though. Right. If, 00:14:12.100 --> 00:14:18.080 if I'm developer at a company and we're going to start a new website, I've got to pick a web 00:14:18.080 --> 00:14:24.600 framework. If I'm a book author, like, like you, I got to pick a framework, right? if I do 00:14:24.600 --> 00:14:28.620 training, same thing you're going to like, you can't do it all. So like you said, you got to 00:14:28.620 --> 00:14:33.260 specialize. I'll say it across the board. I think picking the frameworks and making these kinds of 00:14:33.260 --> 00:14:38.180 technology bets are super important for our careers, no matter where we are. Like imagine 00:14:38.180 --> 00:14:42.980 you just work in like cubicle. You don't do anything public. You just, you, you pick to work 00:14:42.980 --> 00:14:48.100 on this one project or whatever, right? Like if you decide to change careers, if you worked on say 00:14:48.100 --> 00:14:54.400 some obscure framework versus Django, when that switch or that, that choice didn't seem obvious, 00:14:54.400 --> 00:14:58.860 well, it looks pretty like a pretty good choice now, right? When you go to get that next job. 00:14:59.040 --> 00:15:04.220 So I think having this, this vision for what is the right, like where are things and where are they 00:15:04.220 --> 00:15:08.480 going is actually something everybody should continuously cultivate in themselves. 00:15:08.480 --> 00:15:12.540 Right. Well, I think with content, I'm curious on your thoughts. There's, you know, the levels of 00:15:12.540 --> 00:15:16.560 like, who do you, who do you do the content for? I think teaching is all about levels. And if there's, 00:15:16.560 --> 00:15:21.160 you know, three levels, beginner, intermediate, advanced, beginners don't know anything and don't 00:15:21.160 --> 00:15:26.680 value their time. So they won't pay for stuff. Generally speaking, intermediate is probably where you 00:15:26.680 --> 00:15:31.560 can say, Hey, I'll save you 20 hours instead of one or, you know, the inverse of that. And then 00:15:31.560 --> 00:15:36.720 advanced, assume that they can read the manual and figure it out. So most content I think is at that 00:15:36.720 --> 00:15:40.760 intermediate level for that reason, but it's, you know, it's something we have to figure out, 00:15:40.760 --> 00:15:44.860 right? Like with your courses, I'm, I think about this all the time. I try to not skip a step, 00:15:44.860 --> 00:15:49.860 but I try to make it intermediate level. And then I often get emails about, you know, why didn't you go 00:15:49.860 --> 00:15:54.860 advanced on this? It's like, well, I'd love to actually, that would be more interesting for me 00:15:54.860 --> 00:16:00.360 as a developer. But I think that's not where the, I'd rather get people up that curve and, you know, 00:16:00.360 --> 00:16:04.380 and take all the steps to go like, you know, building projects. So, so my first book, you build 00:16:04.380 --> 00:16:10.260 five different web apps. It's not a book length, one project where at some point you make a mistake 00:16:10.260 --> 00:16:14.380 and you fall off and you're just like, and you're done, you're done, right? Like, cause that's how 00:16:14.380 --> 00:16:18.580 I learn. I mean, that's, you know, I know with your courses, you do that. I think everyone says, 00:16:18.580 --> 00:16:23.040 oh, how do I learn this? Like go build a bunch of projects. Okay. Where do I do that? Where do I see 00:16:23.040 --> 00:16:27.980 that? The answer is like nowhere. Yeah. You know, even with Django, as big as Django is, if I've asked 00:16:27.980 --> 00:16:32.840 this people and I wondered this, wondered this five years ago, where do I see a Django blog implementation? 00:16:32.840 --> 00:16:38.380 Where do I see that list of 10 Django sites? If it even exists, it's out of date in a year or two. 00:16:38.940 --> 00:16:44.260 So the first book that I wrote was just my own notes to myself just to remember this stuff. 00:16:44.260 --> 00:16:49.380 And then I eventually put online and eventually I decided to call it a book, but you know, I didn't, 00:16:49.380 --> 00:16:53.100 wasn't aware of anything else that really did it like that. I still don't know if there's anything 00:16:53.100 --> 00:16:58.360 that goes and builds multiple apps in a book format. I think most things are one big mega project, 00:16:58.360 --> 00:17:03.620 which I don't know if that's my learning style or what, but I like the repetition of, you know, 00:17:03.620 --> 00:17:07.440 in my book, each thing builds upon itself. So I don't re-explain stuff, but it's like, okay, 00:17:07.440 --> 00:17:11.060 we've seen this before. I think that that's such a valuable one. And so this book that you're talking 00:17:11.060 --> 00:17:12.800 about is Django for beginners, right? 00:17:12.800 --> 00:17:13.120 Yes. 00:17:13.120 --> 00:17:18.840 Yeah. Okay. So I really liked the format. You have the five different web apps that you build. They 00:17:18.840 --> 00:17:22.620 start out really, really simple and they get a little more advanced and a little more advanced, 00:17:22.620 --> 00:17:26.560 like, oh yeah, let's now talk about databases. And now let's talk about user authentication. 00:17:27.260 --> 00:17:30.760 And it builds up. And I really think that that is the way that people learn. 00:17:30.760 --> 00:17:34.600 Well, it's how I learn. So it's hard to know, right? I mean, I just threw it out there thinking, 00:17:34.600 --> 00:17:39.020 who knows what will happen. And the reason I kept doing it is because the online sites started getting 00:17:39.020 --> 00:17:43.380 traction because I looked at it, you know, when I, back in 2012, when I first thought about this, 00:17:43.380 --> 00:17:48.240 to me, I was thinking, well, I'm going to do Rails or Django because those were the two hot things in 00:17:48.240 --> 00:17:53.060 San Francisco. And Rails was a lot hotter. Rails had a much better beginner community. I would say, 00:17:53.160 --> 00:17:58.060 it had the Rails tutorial, but I, for whatever reason, I just picked Python and Django, maybe 00:17:58.060 --> 00:18:02.400 because I thought Python was more useful, but I knew that I was like, I just got to stick with one 00:18:02.400 --> 00:18:07.680 for a couple of years and do it, but it was really rough. So that book in the, originally was my attempt 00:18:07.680 --> 00:18:13.000 to do like a Rails tutorial, you know, the Michael Hartle Rails tutorial, because I think that once I 00:18:13.000 --> 00:18:18.780 understood Django, I thought it wasn't that Django itself was so complicated. It was that the explanations 00:18:18.780 --> 00:18:22.680 assumed a level of knowledge that people didn't have. And I think this, you know, 00:18:22.700 --> 00:18:27.080 I'm curious on your thoughts. This is a thought I have on the Python community that many people 00:18:27.080 --> 00:18:34.560 are more advanced. You don't just jump into Python. Like you usually come from HTML, CSS, JavaScript, 00:18:34.560 --> 00:18:41.680 or maybe you're doing, you know, Java or something in a university. And you already have a lot more 00:18:41.680 --> 00:18:46.220 experience before you get to Python. And then before you get to Django. So the Django docs, like the Django 00:18:46.220 --> 00:18:51.580 docs are fantastic, but they're written for an intermediate web developer new to Django. 00:18:52.240 --> 00:18:57.400 So if you're new to web development, it's just like, ah, yeah, you're in for a world of hurt. I mean, 00:18:57.400 --> 00:19:02.640 that's why I just submitted a talk to PyCon for next year on, you know, why learning Django is hard. 00:19:02.640 --> 00:19:07.020 And I think the biggest reason is because web development is hard. And if it's your first time 00:19:07.020 --> 00:19:12.680 learning web development, you're going to associate all that pain with the framework that you choose, 00:19:12.680 --> 00:19:17.040 which is unfair, but that's how it is. So anyway, so that first book was, you know, a couple of years in, 00:19:17.100 --> 00:19:21.700 I thought, you know, Django is fantastic, but why isn't there actually truly beginner? 00:19:21.700 --> 00:19:22.460 Why isn't there better? 00:19:22.460 --> 00:19:25.780 Why isn't there better stuff? You know, in the, in the docs and most tutorials assume 00:19:25.780 --> 00:19:29.560 they just kind of jump in halfway. It's, it's how you and I would discuss a project, 00:19:29.560 --> 00:19:34.960 but you know, like one of the, I think best things I do is I literally say to people, okay, 00:19:34.960 --> 00:19:40.060 we're going to create a directory for the code and here's where to put it. And here's the commands. 00:19:40.260 --> 00:19:46.320 And that seems so basic, but so many people can't even get to that step. So they just fall off. 00:19:46.320 --> 00:19:49.900 I did like that about your book. Yeah. Yeah. When I was looking through, I really liked that. 00:19:49.900 --> 00:19:55.240 I find it interesting. I think I'll run this by you. You let me know what you think. Cause 00:19:55.240 --> 00:20:01.300 I learned to do programming later than a lot of folks. I don't know, like a medium age, 00:20:01.300 --> 00:20:08.260 I would say I learned proper programming junior, senior year of college. Right. So I didn't start out 00:20:08.260 --> 00:20:13.560 like programming when I was young. I fiddle around. I love computers and stuff, but I didn't really get 00:20:13.560 --> 00:20:18.320 into programming until I was almost done with college. And I feel like people who learn programming 00:20:18.320 --> 00:20:24.700 a little bit later in life, the sharp edges and the pain that you hit on these things you 00:20:24.700 --> 00:20:31.460 get hung up on are the memory is more recent. Right. And I think that's actually a super important 00:20:31.460 --> 00:20:37.840 aspect of being a good teacher, either in books or videos or in person or whatever, 00:20:37.840 --> 00:20:44.100 even just speaking at a conference is remembering the sharp edges because a lot of the people out 00:20:44.100 --> 00:20:48.240 there are just about to bump into them or they just recently bumped into them. And if you have that 00:20:48.240 --> 00:20:52.900 empathy and that shared experience a little more deeply, then it's, it's a little bit easier to help 00:20:52.900 --> 00:20:57.040 and go like, actually, no, don't just say create a virtual environment. Say, these are the four commands 00:20:57.040 --> 00:21:00.300 to create the folder and then the virtual environment, then activate it. Because if you 00:21:00.300 --> 00:21:05.440 don't write some people, let's just go, ah, so frustrating. Right. Yeah. It's empathy. Right. 00:21:05.440 --> 00:21:09.680 I think empathy is what makes a great teacher. And yeah. When you learn programming later in life, 00:21:09.680 --> 00:21:14.000 I think it's two things. It's more recent. I think the bigger thing is you, you have experience, 00:21:14.000 --> 00:21:19.280 you've learned other things. When you're a kid, you just accept everything as at face value. And I think 00:21:19.280 --> 00:21:23.840 this has changed, but 10 years ago, a lot of people who knew how to program learned how to program 00:21:23.840 --> 00:21:27.980 because they weren't playing sports or doing traditional activities, they were at home 00:21:27.980 --> 00:21:33.020 on their own or in online communities, learning how to code. And they became known for coding and 00:21:33.020 --> 00:21:37.600 it sort of builds up. They just get used to it. Right. It's just normal to them. Whereas, 00:21:37.600 --> 00:21:42.380 you know, as an adult, I mean, I was 32, I think when I got serious about coding and, 00:21:42.380 --> 00:21:47.680 you know, I have a brain, I work hard. I've never been so frustrated in my life. Right. And so you get a 00:21:47.680 --> 00:21:51.900 little bit of the Stockholm syndrome. You're like, is it me or is it coding? And I think it's really 00:21:51.900 --> 00:21:55.960 just that it's could be explained better. I don't think that programming is any, 00:21:55.960 --> 00:22:00.860 and this is interesting thinking about programmers. Like I feel like programmers are the group that's 00:22:00.860 --> 00:22:06.380 most prone to telling themselves that they're smart that I've worked in. I've worked with a lot of 00:22:06.380 --> 00:22:12.180 smart people. And I think maybe it's to do with the fact that our field changes and it is, you know, 00:22:12.180 --> 00:22:17.360 very mentally challenging, but yeah, there's sort of that like macho nerd attitude that's prevalent in 00:22:17.360 --> 00:22:22.180 engineering that I find incredibly off-putting. I think most people do. But yeah, so for me 00:22:22.180 --> 00:22:26.380 personally, like my role model is Julia Child actually, because most people don't know this, 00:22:26.380 --> 00:22:30.480 that she didn't learn how to code until she was, I think 32 as well. She was well into her thirties. 00:22:30.480 --> 00:22:34.940 And so is she the world's best cook? No, like I'm not going to be the world's best programmer, 00:22:34.940 --> 00:22:39.420 but she's really good at explaining it because she, again, as you say, has that experience, 00:22:39.420 --> 00:22:43.260 that empathy. And the challenge for me now actually is with this Django stuff that I, 00:22:43.360 --> 00:22:48.780 I've internalized a lot of it, but I respond to so many emails from users that I use that to sort 00:22:48.780 --> 00:22:54.400 of not lose touch with how hard this is because it, because it is, it is easy to do to just, 00:22:54.400 --> 00:22:58.480 you know, even just the other day, I was trying to show someone, I was like, Oh, you can build a 00:22:58.480 --> 00:23:02.680 website and throw it up online in 10 minutes. And it's hard to do even my book. Right. I was like, 00:23:02.680 --> 00:23:06.040 Hey, here's my book. You can do it. Like, let's do it. Bang, bang, bang. He's on a windows machine. 00:23:06.040 --> 00:23:09.660 An hour later we had Python installed. Yeah. Right. So these are the things too, 00:23:09.720 --> 00:23:12.880 like, like virtual environments, you know, installing Python. Some of my most popular 00:23:12.880 --> 00:23:18.440 posts on my website are how to install Python because right. As you know, there's, it's hard 00:23:18.440 --> 00:23:22.120 to do and there's actually multiple ways to do it. And generally an engineer will say, 00:23:22.120 --> 00:23:26.320 well, here's the five ways to do it. Here are the pros and cons. When a beginner just wants you to say, 00:23:26.320 --> 00:23:29.740 do it this way. What is the best way? Just tell me that. I don't need to know this. 00:23:29.740 --> 00:23:34.360 So in my book, I don't get into these, there's debates within the Django world about structure and 00:23:34.360 --> 00:23:38.540 some other things we can get into, but I don't bring them up. I may quickly reference them, 00:23:38.600 --> 00:23:43.280 but I just say, here's how to do it because I don't think that that matters at the beginner stage. 00:23:43.280 --> 00:23:46.800 I think you want to get the confidence, you want to get stuff going. And then later on, 00:23:46.800 --> 00:23:50.600 you can have those debates. And even now, like we could talk about like with virtual environments, 00:23:50.600 --> 00:23:55.000 PipM is in the news, which I use in my book. There's these kinds of religious debates that are 00:23:55.000 --> 00:23:59.740 beginners don't understand. And on some level I think are counterproductive, 00:23:59.740 --> 00:24:01.600 but kind of just are, and I've internalized them. 00:24:01.600 --> 00:24:10.940 Yeah. This portion of Talk Python To Me is brought to you by us. Have you heard that Python is not good 00:24:10.940 --> 00:24:15.920 for concurrent programming problems? 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I think having these different little apps helps you 00:24:55.200 --> 00:25:00.660 take these first few steps onboarding into the programming world. You do with your five web apps, 00:25:00.660 --> 00:25:03.660 I have my 10 apps course that you build the 10 apps. They get increasingly hard. 00:25:03.660 --> 00:25:10.080 And it's, you make these wins. You're like, I built a thing. Like I've gone from beginning to end and I've 00:25:10.080 --> 00:25:15.220 survived, survived it. Whereas if you have like one long tutorial or one long thing in a book or 00:25:15.220 --> 00:25:20.220 something, you're punished along the way. And if you don't withstand all the punish, it's like running 00:25:20.220 --> 00:25:25.780 a marathon versus a mile, right? You got to run the mile to learn to run the marathon, but you don't 00:25:25.780 --> 00:25:29.900 have to run the marathon first, right? So you can do these steps and you can get these early wins and 00:25:29.900 --> 00:25:35.800 build the confidence. You had mentioned installing Python. And what I liked, one thing I saw in your 00:25:35.800 --> 00:25:41.220 book that I thought was pretty cool was you talked about installing Python on macOS with Homebrew 00:25:41.220 --> 00:25:46.920 on say Ubuntu or something. You just app install the package, right? But I doubt too many of the 00:25:46.920 --> 00:25:51.440 beginners are using Linux. Maybe they are, but... Well, yeah, actually I get a lot, I get quite a few 00:25:51.440 --> 00:25:56.200 questions from Linux users. And I've always assumed if you're on Linux, you know what you're doing, but 00:25:56.200 --> 00:26:01.580 people are on Linux for very strange reasons. Yeah, sure. You can't assume anything, but yeah. 00:26:01.580 --> 00:26:05.640 Yeah. Well, I guess there's traditionally been this way of like, you run this command, you get Python 00:26:05.640 --> 00:26:11.840 on Linux. And that's not traditionally existed on macOS until people started to use Homebrew and it 00:26:11.840 --> 00:26:19.540 barely or doesn't exist on Windows. So I think the leveraging these things is really quite powerful. 00:26:19.540 --> 00:26:25.100 Yeah. I think if, I mean, if I could wave a wand with Python to solve installation, it's a much bigger 00:26:25.100 --> 00:26:30.740 deal than people think because most people don't own their own computer or they're on Windows where it's, 00:26:30.740 --> 00:26:35.500 you know, much harder than on a Mac, you know, a school setting Chromebooks, you can kind of do it 00:26:35.500 --> 00:26:41.440 with Anaconda, but it's messy. So most Python people I talk to are just like, oh, how hard is it to install 00:26:41.440 --> 00:26:46.360 it? And I just think there's a general, yeah, I don't know. I just think people should go and try to 00:26:46.360 --> 00:26:51.260 teach someone up because, you know, we were talking about the easy wins. I think that first win, like 00:26:51.260 --> 00:26:56.860 when I've taught like at the college level and when I show people create an HTML file, put anything in it, 00:26:56.860 --> 00:27:02.820 double click it with your mouse and it shows up on the screen, that wow moment, the look on their face, 00:27:02.820 --> 00:27:08.060 the feeling they have is so powerful and that sustains them through so many things. And I think, 00:27:08.060 --> 00:27:12.880 and those wins kind of, they get harder as you progress in programming, but I think you need those 00:27:12.880 --> 00:27:18.000 wins. Like we're in agreement on this. Like you need that confidence. You need the ability to share 00:27:18.000 --> 00:27:22.260 your stuff with friends and family and have them go, oh, that's cool. Or you can show them how to do 00:27:22.260 --> 00:27:25.660 tracking codes and say, hey, like, I know you didn't look at my site, right? There's all these 00:27:25.660 --> 00:27:31.520 aha moments. And I think, I think very top down in terms of teaching with, I want to maximize the aha 00:27:31.520 --> 00:27:36.020 moments, you know, and say too, like, here's what we're going to build. There's a lot of courses and 00:27:36.020 --> 00:27:40.320 books that just jump into it. And it's like, what are we doing? I think you should always say, here's 00:27:40.320 --> 00:27:44.400 where we're going. We're going to struggle, but we're going to get there. I have that debate with other 00:27:44.400 --> 00:27:49.640 teachers. I mean, Andrew Pinkham, who did Django Unleashed, you know, his book is a fantastic book 00:27:49.640 --> 00:27:54.720 and he goes bottom up with stuff and I go top down and yeah, it's a pedagogical difference, 00:27:54.720 --> 00:28:00.820 I guess. Yeah, it definitely is. And I think at the heart of that difference is how long will 00:28:00.820 --> 00:28:06.420 somebody persist learning arbitrarily small details towards a far goal? If they're willing to go through 00:28:06.420 --> 00:28:10.740 as many details as it takes, you could probably be more efficient that way. But that's not the, 00:28:10.740 --> 00:28:14.860 I don't believe that's the reality. People need these early wins. Yeah. Well, that, and that's the 00:28:14.860 --> 00:28:19.180 challenge with a CS degree is you, you get all the things you need without the context to know why you 00:28:19.180 --> 00:28:23.660 need it. It's like, nobody studies music theory for the sake of it. They hear a song and they want to 00:28:23.660 --> 00:28:29.660 play it. And yet, why do we assume that people need to take all this theory without any context? 00:28:29.660 --> 00:28:35.140 If I could redo everything, I would get a bunch of these early wins, have them feel some pain, 00:28:35.140 --> 00:28:40.140 and then understand why data structures are amazing, right? They're mind blowing when you've 00:28:40.140 --> 00:28:45.320 been frustrated on it, but when they just given it, I think it doesn't mean as much, but that's like 00:28:45.320 --> 00:28:49.580 everything in life, right? Like, you know, the answer is you have to live it to understand them. 00:28:49.580 --> 00:28:55.920 There's something about this experience thing. So I guess experience, one thing that might be a little 00:28:55.920 --> 00:28:59.860 bit different is when I, certainly when I learned a program, this was... 00:28:59.860 --> 00:29:00.840 Are you going to use yours? 00:29:00.840 --> 00:29:06.260 Yeah. I was going to use, I'm just trying to think, when was I a junior in college? This would be like 00:29:06.260 --> 00:29:12.680 1995. World Wide Web was created two years before then. And so there was not much to learn. It was like, 00:29:12.740 --> 00:29:18.520 you get a book and you sit down and you learn it. I suspect there was some differences from say 2013 00:29:18.520 --> 00:29:24.740 when you learned versus say now. Like, how have you seen that change even in the five, six years? 00:29:24.740 --> 00:29:30.560 Yeah, I think it's just a lot better. Bootcamps just started in San Francisco then. There wasn't 00:29:30.560 --> 00:29:34.860 really this idea that anyone could code, but many people were feeling as I did that you feel like a 00:29:34.860 --> 00:29:40.480 second class citizen. You work at these companies. I mean, I was, you know, an MBA well into my career hiring 00:29:40.480 --> 00:29:45.260 people right out of school making more than I was. And so sort of... 00:29:45.260 --> 00:29:46.000 Yeah, that feels great, right? 00:29:46.000 --> 00:29:51.480 Well, you know, it is what it is. I mean, it's deja vu of my publishing career, right? I became a book 00:29:51.480 --> 00:29:57.820 editor, you know, in three years, which I figured would take 10 or 15. And so I was like, okay, 00:29:57.820 --> 00:30:00.900 what does this look like for the rest of my life? And same thing again, you know, 00:30:00.900 --> 00:30:04.780 and I didn't actually go into it thinking I wanted to be a programmer. I got into it thinking 00:30:04.780 --> 00:30:10.260 my glaring weakness is not being a better programmer for someone who's on the business side. 00:30:10.260 --> 00:30:14.960 And I still think if I was, you know, rational about it, how could I make the most money? It would 00:30:14.960 --> 00:30:21.200 be to be a tech whisperer to a CEO or a COO. Because it's that middle management position. It's that, 00:30:21.200 --> 00:30:26.240 you know, explaining tech to people who don't know tech. That's actually the sticking point for a lot 00:30:26.240 --> 00:30:30.740 of stuff. But yeah, but in general, 2018 is so much better. YouTube is a thing. There's video courses. 00:30:31.060 --> 00:30:34.340 There was no one really doing self-published content. I think there was lynda.com. 00:30:34.340 --> 00:30:34.660 Yeah. 00:30:34.660 --> 00:30:38.860 And I think there's more just communities around, hey, it's okay to learn how to code and do it 00:30:38.860 --> 00:30:42.880 together. Because the isolation that I felt that many people feel, that's the really hard part. 00:30:42.880 --> 00:30:48.300 You feel like you're in this tunnel and you can spend a week in Stack Overflow hell. And you ask 00:30:48.300 --> 00:30:50.500 questions in Stack Overflow and people are mean to you. 00:30:50.500 --> 00:30:55.900 Yeah, they're super mean. Like, you asked it wrong. Go away. I was really frustrated. I had to, 00:30:55.900 --> 00:30:56.920 like, I'm just, I'm sorry. 00:30:56.920 --> 00:31:01.040 Yeah, read the manual. I know. I will say though, that something about Stack Overflow, 00:31:01.040 --> 00:31:06.660 that I still keep with me is the idea that there's a community of engineers that will answer 00:31:06.660 --> 00:31:14.240 my specific question and help me for free is mind-blowing in a non-tech context. That is, 00:31:14.240 --> 00:31:18.140 I remember the first couple of times I asked questions and people quickly, you know, that's 00:31:18.140 --> 00:31:22.000 what I love about engineering is that it really generally comes from a really good place of 00:31:22.000 --> 00:31:25.880 we're all learning together and we want to help. And that is not the case in finance, 00:31:25.880 --> 00:31:27.700 consulting, all these other fields. 00:31:27.700 --> 00:31:33.320 Sure. There's probably not a Stack Overflow of, you know, financial analysts or for lawyers or 00:31:33.320 --> 00:31:34.380 things like that, I would guess. 00:31:34.380 --> 00:31:38.540 Yeah. But, you know, the flip side is that engineers' passion gets abused. You know, 00:31:38.540 --> 00:31:42.040 there's a lot of, you know, open source, there's burnout and all these things. So, 00:31:42.040 --> 00:31:44.960 you know, it's one of those jobs where programmers really like what they do, 00:31:44.960 --> 00:31:47.000 but then you sort of pay a price for it. 00:31:47.260 --> 00:31:51.380 It's on net, it's fantastic. Like I love doing something that I'm interested in that challenges 00:31:51.380 --> 00:31:55.720 me, but it's, it's really hard to, most of my friends are not programmers. It's really hard to 00:31:55.720 --> 00:32:02.280 explain what I do to non-programmers, right? I mean, I spend most of my day deeply frustrated and my, 00:32:02.280 --> 00:32:07.360 my tolerance has increased, but I don't, you know, get pats on the back for anything, right? Right. 00:32:07.360 --> 00:32:13.120 Because we, we automate what we know and then we move on. And that, you know, I think ties in probably to 00:32:13.120 --> 00:32:16.320 some of the mental health stuff for programmers, but yeah, it's, you know, I'm like constantly 00:32:16.320 --> 00:32:20.500 learning, but I'm also constantly learning. And that's why you need content, you know, people like, 00:32:20.500 --> 00:32:26.600 like yourself and, and others who say, Hey, this isn't, this can be done so much faster, right? 00:32:26.600 --> 00:32:31.340 Like not everyone can read the manual and grok it. And that's a surprising thing to me is the audience 00:32:31.340 --> 00:32:35.500 that I have, I'd be curious about yours. You know, I have people who been programming for decades, 00:32:35.500 --> 00:32:42.020 people who've been programming in Python for over 10 years, but they're not doing web and they, 00:32:42.260 --> 00:32:48.460 you know, in Django's the web is hard to learn or people coming, you know, yesterday, someone kind 00:32:48.460 --> 00:32:54.080 of grumpily emailed me saying, I actually put a review on Amazon and said, yeah, I'm from a PHP shop 00:32:54.080 --> 00:32:58.680 and we have to learn Python Django. And yeah, this book is good, but it doesn't go into like where I put 00:32:58.680 --> 00:33:03.540 the business logic. So four to five stars, you know, I'm grateful for him for writing the review. 00:33:03.540 --> 00:33:09.120 Everyone should write reviews for tech books, but you know, it's like you, you sort of, yeah, 00:33:09.340 --> 00:33:12.620 you can't win. And there's a very wide audience of people who, yeah, well, that's one of the 00:33:12.620 --> 00:33:16.980 tensions where if you had put too much emphasis on that, people are like, I don't need that right 00:33:16.980 --> 00:33:22.660 now. This is, why do I need all this detail? Right. So it's, you can't have that many variations, 00:33:22.660 --> 00:33:27.840 right? You just gotta, you just gotta decide and try to help as many people. I guess one of the things, 00:33:27.840 --> 00:33:32.220 you know, if, if you're writing these books and you're helping people, a lot of people learn Django, 00:33:32.420 --> 00:33:38.220 maybe touch on some of the things you feel like Django has done right, or Django makes getting 00:33:38.220 --> 00:33:43.900 going in web programming easier, better than say like Flask or Pyramid or something like that. 00:33:43.900 --> 00:33:45.520 Why Django for you, I guess? 00:33:45.520 --> 00:33:52.480 Yeah. So why Django? Because it's in Python, which is a fantastic growing language, which is easy to learn 00:33:52.480 --> 00:33:59.380 and you can use your whole career because I like Django over Flask. That's a little bit of a religious 00:33:59.380 --> 00:34:05.020 debate. You know, it comes down to, do you like to paint between the lines or not? I'm fine with 00:34:05.020 --> 00:34:08.560 decision, not having to make all the decisions, even if I don't agree with all of them, you know, 00:34:08.560 --> 00:34:13.540 Flask and other micro frameworks, people really, really seem to like that. I think that the trap is, 00:34:13.540 --> 00:34:18.880 I think a lot of beginners look at the hello world script for, you know, Flask versus Django and Flask 00:34:18.880 --> 00:34:22.680 is fantastic. You're up and running. It looks so easy. Yeah. It looks so easy and it is so easy, 00:34:22.680 --> 00:34:27.980 but then you add a dozen packages. Where do I find them? Are they up to date? 00:34:27.980 --> 00:34:33.660 It quickly becomes quite advanced. Whereas Django just puts you between the lines in the same way 00:34:33.660 --> 00:34:39.220 that Rails does. And I really appreciate not having to deal with that. Partly, I think, you know, I spent 00:34:39.220 --> 00:34:44.600 over a year working on a startup that used Meteor.js, which is a JavaScript framework, which was fantastic 00:34:44.600 --> 00:34:49.620 to use, but was constantly changing. And, you know, the stability of Django is an underrated feature for 00:34:49.620 --> 00:34:54.620 beginners. It's around, it's going to be around. There's all these benchmarks. It doesn't change that 00:34:54.620 --> 00:34:59.400 much. Actually, those are huge wins for the Django community. You know, in terms of what's, 00:34:59.700 --> 00:35:03.980 the docs are fantastic. The community is really nice. There is a little bit of a learning curve, 00:35:03.980 --> 00:35:09.140 but I try in the book to show, you know, hello world can be done pretty quickly. And actually, 00:35:09.140 --> 00:35:14.340 pedagogically, there's, I have a post on three ways to do an about page, which could be any static page. 00:35:14.340 --> 00:35:18.300 There's like the really fast way to do it. They're like kind of fast. And then like the way you would 00:35:18.300 --> 00:35:22.620 do it with, you know, different apps, if you're going to build out a structure. So I just sort of give 00:35:22.620 --> 00:35:26.720 that to people just to say, you know, it's going to be okay. We're going to, we're going to get 00:35:26.720 --> 00:35:30.900 through this. Yeah. So yes. So those are all advantages of Django. And I was just at Django 00:35:30.900 --> 00:35:34.880 con for the first time. The community is fantastic. Yeah. Did you give a presentation there? I did. 00:35:34.880 --> 00:35:41.020 Yeah. I gave a talk on finally understand user authentication with Django rest framework. So not, 00:35:41.020 --> 00:35:45.940 not a short, not a short title. And I think that that talks on YouTube now, but it was, 00:35:45.940 --> 00:35:50.100 you know, realization I had is you don't really learn HTTP until you build an API, 00:35:50.100 --> 00:35:54.500 or at least I didn't really understand it. It's a really interesting point is I feel like I didn't 00:35:54.500 --> 00:35:59.880 either. And so I started building really restful services, right? You're like, Oh, I didn't even 00:35:59.880 --> 00:36:04.360 know that you use the verbs in this way or that they had these meanings or these are cacheable and these 00:36:04.360 --> 00:36:09.160 are not cacheable and these are modifying and these are not modifying. And the status codes are similar, 00:36:09.160 --> 00:36:13.080 but not the same. Like, yeah, I remember just thinking, Oh, there's, there's get and there's post 00:36:13.080 --> 00:36:17.300 and post is where you submit stuff back in the day. Right. And what's a put in. Yeah. I mean, 00:36:17.300 --> 00:36:22.020 cause I, and I mean, I remember, you know, so I had a project where I needed to build an API and I 00:36:22.020 --> 00:36:28.520 didn't know rest framework very well. And I was just so upset that it was hard to learn when I just 00:36:28.520 --> 00:36:34.140 wrote a book on Django. Why is this hard to learn? And it's hard to learn because APIs are a whole big 00:36:34.140 --> 00:36:39.180 bag of stuff and authentication is a hard thing. And I, and I made the point in the talk that I even asked, 00:36:39.180 --> 00:36:43.320 I said, we talk a lot about headers and understanding what is an HTTP request and response, 00:36:43.320 --> 00:36:48.000 like actually look like I asked the audience, I said, what's the bare minimum header I need to 00:36:48.000 --> 00:36:52.620 include? Because in practice, there's so much cruft in there that you never even look at. 00:36:52.620 --> 00:36:57.200 One of them is authentication headers. And even in that audience of, you know, over a hundred people, 00:36:57.200 --> 00:37:02.020 first of all, almost nobody answered the question. You know, these are like the creators of Django. 00:37:02.020 --> 00:37:07.120 And then I think maybe four or five people got it right. You know, the answer I, a question I asked 00:37:07.120 --> 00:37:12.340 was, is it zero one, two or more? And you know, it's a trick question on purpose. It's just a 00:37:12.340 --> 00:37:15.920 question to say like, nobody really knows it's in the headers because we don't need it until we need 00:37:15.920 --> 00:37:24.700 it. The answer is for a get request in HTTP 1.1, you need one, which is, you need one thing, 00:37:24.700 --> 00:37:28.040 which I'm forgetting what it is. It's like a loud host or something. You know, so it's a trick 00:37:28.040 --> 00:37:31.960 question, but it's, it's this point that even the experts of this, you know, the abstraction exists 00:37:31.960 --> 00:37:35.360 for a reason. But yeah, so that's that, that's, that talk was on. It was actually a pretty 00:37:35.360 --> 00:37:41.180 advanced talk, but it was my personal frustration with learning how to build APIs. 00:37:41.180 --> 00:37:46.320 You seem to, you have this habit of like, I go through this experience and then the sort of 00:37:46.320 --> 00:37:49.800 making it all whole and well against write a book about it, right? 00:37:49.800 --> 00:37:50.180 Yeah. 00:37:50.180 --> 00:37:53.860 Because your other book is on restful APIs with Django Restway Mark. 00:37:53.860 --> 00:37:57.600 Yeah. It's pain driven development or something. I mean, you know, there is an argument. I think 00:37:57.600 --> 00:38:01.000 it's true that the best time to teach is when you're learning it because I, you know, I always make 00:38:01.000 --> 00:38:05.340 notes of, and that actually brings up, you know, I'm the issue I have now with text-based 00:38:05.340 --> 00:38:10.280 stuff is this idea of like happy path programming, right? Like if I were sitting down with someone, 00:38:10.280 --> 00:38:14.160 I would want to show them how to mess things up. Like I would mess, I mess things up going through 00:38:14.160 --> 00:38:19.040 my own books, trying to do it from scratch. So how do I, you know, how do I comfort the reader and make 00:38:19.040 --> 00:38:22.100 them understand that these are normal and these are actually interesting and important, but not 00:38:22.100 --> 00:38:27.880 overwhelm them. Cause I don't want to just give you the recipe and say this, then this, then this, 00:38:27.880 --> 00:38:32.600 then this, I want to mix it up a little bit. But I think that for me, the big challenge of tech 00:38:32.600 --> 00:38:37.700 writing is breaking beyond, you know, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, it's, it's 00:38:37.700 --> 00:38:41.740 putting some empathy in there. It's trying to predict one or two things, but not too many 00:38:41.740 --> 00:38:45.600 so that the reader feels like they're on, you're on their side and you kind of understand. 00:38:45.600 --> 00:38:49.860 So, yeah. So in that, in that talk, you know, I started off saying like, what is the web? 00:38:49.860 --> 00:38:54.300 What is the internet? Like I built it up even for that advanced crowd. Cause I think it's 00:38:54.300 --> 00:38:58.900 important to do that. I mean, I even, I talked about custom user models, which in the Django world is 00:38:59.540 --> 00:39:03.640 a big, big deal that Django has this built-in user model that everyone swaps out for a custom user 00:39:03.640 --> 00:39:08.000 model, which again, you don't find out until you're well into your Django journey and you want to change 00:39:08.000 --> 00:39:10.940 your user model and you go, Oh, I can't. 00:39:10.940 --> 00:39:16.220 Right. So this is like, if you have a users in your website, there's a prebuilt model that has 00:39:16.220 --> 00:39:20.740 prebuilt fields that just comes with Django, but you don't have to live with it. Yeah. 00:39:20.740 --> 00:39:24.440 So it's a legacy issue. So Django has this fantastic built-in user model, 00:39:24.440 --> 00:39:29.300 but the very first time you run migrate, it links up with the admin and throughout the rest of the, 00:39:29.300 --> 00:39:34.660 you know, the framework. And it's very, very difficult to unwind that. And so there's been 00:39:34.660 --> 00:39:39.260 a progression where people used to use profiles and now you can do a custom user model, which is 00:39:39.260 --> 00:39:44.160 basically just a, just a copy of it. And then everything works. Okay. And I actually, I was 00:39:44.160 --> 00:39:47.960 really heartened that when I gave that talk and I demonstrated how to do the custom user model, 00:39:47.960 --> 00:39:51.720 cause that was a whole separate thing that I have a couple of popular posts on. I said, 00:39:51.840 --> 00:39:56.180 why isn't there a simple way to do this? Like, you know, everyone seems to know how to do this, 00:39:56.180 --> 00:40:00.860 but like the official docs do a pretty complex implementation. In my opinion, they use abstract 00:40:00.860 --> 00:40:05.880 base user instead of abstract user, which we could talk about, but people, I don't know if they care 00:40:05.880 --> 00:40:11.040 about that, but even, you know, I won't say who it is, but someone who's very, very, very accomplished 00:40:11.040 --> 00:40:15.580 in the Django world came up to me after my talk and said, Oh, I've been doing user models the old way. 00:40:15.580 --> 00:40:18.320 I didn't realize the new way could be so simple. I should do it that way, 00:40:18.320 --> 00:40:24.020 which I think speaks, speaks to the, you know, humility of true masters, but also just, we're all learning, 00:40:24.020 --> 00:40:29.620 you know, it's, it's worth covering the basics because you just can't assume the experts know 00:40:29.620 --> 00:40:31.420 anything. There's too much to learn to know. 00:40:31.420 --> 00:40:36.100 Sure. Yeah. It sounds like a really interesting talk. What was your experience? Like, what do you 00:40:36.100 --> 00:40:39.180 learn from, from doing this presentation and being with these folks? 00:40:39.300 --> 00:40:43.000 Yeah. It just humanized things for me. I mean, it was, it was, I thought a lot about whether 00:40:43.000 --> 00:40:47.140 I wanted initially submitted the talk because I wanted to go, but I'm self-employed. So I didn't 00:40:47.140 --> 00:40:51.760 have the funds to pay for it. But if you get accepted for a talk, you don't have to pay for a 00:40:51.760 --> 00:40:57.040 ticket. I decided to do a 40 minute talk instead of a 20 minute talk, which is way more than twice the 00:40:57.040 --> 00:41:02.440 effort. So I probably spent about a month of time on the talk and I gave it Django Boston first. 00:41:02.440 --> 00:41:06.140 But yeah, it just made my own understanding rock solid. Even though I'd written the book, 00:41:06.200 --> 00:41:10.620 I thought I really knew it. And I was like, Ooh, there's a couple of edge cases. 00:41:10.620 --> 00:41:14.180 Yeah. It was a, it was a blast. It was really fun to, to see the people I know, 00:41:14.180 --> 00:41:18.860 to see how welcoming everyone is, to go to the talks to, you know, I met people who'd read my 00:41:18.860 --> 00:41:23.240 book because, you know, you probably have this too. For me, I just see numbers on a screen. It's, 00:41:23.240 --> 00:41:29.360 it doesn't feel different having one reader or, you know, a thousand or 10,000, you know, 00:41:29.360 --> 00:41:34.120 and it doesn't really feel different. So to, to get that validation was, was a confidence boost. 00:41:34.360 --> 00:41:38.920 I think that it actually, I think it, it's a confidence boost, but it also, 00:41:38.920 --> 00:41:43.700 at least for me to go to conferences like that and meet folks like that, which I, 00:41:43.700 --> 00:41:48.760 it's one of the things I absolutely enjoy and look forward to and try to make a lot of time to do. 00:41:48.760 --> 00:41:53.560 It just reminds me like there are real people actually getting like real value 00:41:53.560 --> 00:41:59.100 from the work that I do. And it feels like to me, like you and I are speaking right now and that's 00:41:59.100 --> 00:42:03.660 just, we could just be doing this in a coffee shop or over a beer or something. Right. But 00:42:03.660 --> 00:42:08.780 there's lots, lots of people listening who, you know, maybe this is helping in some way. Right. 00:42:08.780 --> 00:42:12.280 And, and having that experience, getting there and interacting with people is, it's really wonderful. 00:42:12.660 --> 00:42:18.320 I suspect, you know, most people. Yeah. Yeah. It's like this, it's like this for days. So it's really nice to, 00:42:18.320 --> 00:42:23.140 yeah. Yeah. Most people who just work on projects, right. Like Django rest framework, 00:42:23.140 --> 00:42:30.980 for example, or API star, right. Tom Christie had a booth a while ago, like 2017, I think maybe 2016. 00:42:31.220 --> 00:42:34.840 I can't remember which, but you know, it's like, Oh, the, all these people are coming to talk to me. 00:42:34.840 --> 00:42:38.860 It's so amazing. And just, I think we all as contributors to the community feel that on one 00:42:38.860 --> 00:42:44.060 hand. And then on the other, I definitely think it humanizes it a lot of, especially for beginners 00:42:44.060 --> 00:42:49.480 because they, they see the tutorials, they see the code and it's like the humanity is largely stripped 00:42:49.480 --> 00:42:54.040 away. And it's like just down to the essence of what do I need to do? And the human side of it is kind 00:42:54.040 --> 00:42:59.580 of not there until you meet the people. Yeah. And the human side, especially if Python and Django is 00:42:59.580 --> 00:43:05.000 fantastically giving. And, and I think you also, you know, I took away to how, how fragile Django is. 00:43:05.000 --> 00:43:10.880 It's easy to think of it as this amorphous thing, you know, with millions of users, but Carlton Gibson 00:43:10.880 --> 00:43:17.780 gave a fantastic keynote. So he's the Django fellow. So it's a halftime position. He's co-maintainer of 00:43:17.780 --> 00:43:22.800 Django rest framework, talking about the fact that it's really about a half dozen people who really make 00:43:22.800 --> 00:43:29.360 Django go. And then maybe another dozen more, and that drops off to, you know, one-offs. So as 00:43:29.360 --> 00:43:35.360 as robust as it is, it really relies on a lot of these unsung heroes, largely doing it unpaid. 00:43:35.360 --> 00:43:40.680 And so it's, it's a little scary, but it also is, you know, humanizes it. And you realize these are 00:43:40.680 --> 00:43:44.440 people doing it because they want to, to be helpful and people contribute in different ways. I mean, 00:43:44.440 --> 00:43:48.300 I think about, you know, how can I most contribute? Like there's certain things I'd love to do some 00:43:48.300 --> 00:43:53.380 core contributions, but I think doing the teaching I'm doing now is also important and, you know, 00:43:53.380 --> 00:43:56.620 you can only do so much, but yeah, that's for sure. So people should go to conferences. 00:43:56.620 --> 00:43:58.300 They're not scary. People are really nice. 00:43:58.300 --> 00:44:03.280 Yeah. Some of my favorite times of the year are actually going to a PyCon and other, 00:44:03.280 --> 00:44:07.500 other events like that. So people, if they're out there listening and they haven't gone, 00:44:07.500 --> 00:44:11.240 you should definitely look into going if you at all can. It's really a great experience. 00:44:11.240 --> 00:44:15.960 Yeah. And they, they do try to have financial support, you know, you have to apply, but they 00:44:15.960 --> 00:44:20.320 try to make it as welcoming as they can. So try not to be scared off by the sticker price. 00:44:20.320 --> 00:44:26.600 Yeah, for sure. So we talked about your books and some of the techniques in there and just the, 00:44:26.600 --> 00:44:31.520 ideas about teaching programming and Django and so on, what are maybe some of the other 00:44:31.520 --> 00:44:34.400 resources for learning Django you'd like to put out there for people? 00:44:34.400 --> 00:44:39.900 So there's websites. There's Vitor does simple is better than complex, which is a fantastic site. 00:44:39.900 --> 00:44:44.260 He's also started doing videos on YouTube. I think he has two series, which are fantastic. 00:44:44.260 --> 00:44:50.000 Michael Herman, who was one of the original founders of real Python has a site testdriven.io. 00:44:50.000 --> 00:44:56.320 It's not Django, but it's Python, Flask, React, Docker. And he has like, I have a Docker Stripe 00:44:56.320 --> 00:45:01.060 tutorial on, on test driven. That's a great resource. Nige has a, you know, there's only, 00:45:01.320 --> 00:45:05.300 there's only three books updated to 2.1 in Django and I've written two of them. 00:45:05.300 --> 00:45:10.580 The other one is by Nige, building your first websites. That's fantastic. So yeah, the, the, 00:45:10.580 --> 00:45:15.060 the usual stuff, I don't think there's, you know, there isn't a Django screencast. Well, 00:45:15.060 --> 00:45:19.400 there's GoPro or go Django. Yeah. I think there should be more stuff, but those are, I guess those 00:45:19.400 --> 00:45:23.760 are my greatest hits for stuff. There's, you know, two scoops book. Yeah. I'm curious for you, 00:45:23.760 --> 00:45:28.340 like, what do you, are there, you know, you're in Python, but maybe not as deep in Django as I am. 00:45:28.340 --> 00:45:32.120 What, what, you know, when someone says, I don't want to learn Django, like, where do you point them? 00:45:32.120 --> 00:45:37.400 Yeah. I honestly, it's, it's a bit of a challenge as well. I've, there's a couple of like playlist 00:45:37.400 --> 00:45:45.980 courses on, on YouTube. Yeah. The, the two scoops book is pretty good from Danny, but yeah, I don't 00:45:45.980 --> 00:45:51.000 have a ton of resources. I point people at actually. Yeah. Yeah. Corey Schaefer has a really good YouTube 00:45:51.000 --> 00:45:56.260 series. It's new. I guess I understand more now why it's hard to keep up with it, but I sometimes think, 00:45:56.260 --> 00:46:00.100 you know, millions of people use this. Why isn't there more out there? It is interesting, 00:46:00.100 --> 00:46:04.080 right? I mean, I know the answer, the answer is it's crass to say, but the answer is money 00:46:04.080 --> 00:46:08.940 is because you make more as a programmer than you do as a teacher. So, you know, I think you have to 00:46:08.940 --> 00:46:13.000 really, really want it or really take a hit to commit yourself to a teaching career. There, 00:46:13.000 --> 00:46:18.160 there are people who are the outliers, but you don't need, you know, 30 Django teachers, 00:46:18.160 --> 00:46:22.900 right? You really need like two. That's true. Once there's two or three top resources in a thing, 00:46:22.900 --> 00:46:26.920 it's kind of, that's, that's kind of solved the problem. And we were touching on this before we 00:46:26.920 --> 00:46:33.420 hit record, but to be a developer requires one set of skills to be a teacher requires a second set of 00:46:33.420 --> 00:46:40.180 skills to be a teacher doing independent content on the internet, either in book form or video form 00:46:40.180 --> 00:46:46.000 requires like a third set of skills. And I would say, you know, the farther you go down that path, 00:46:46.000 --> 00:46:50.060 the more it requires skills that most developers don't have, which is marketing. 00:46:50.060 --> 00:46:50.900 Yes. 00:46:50.900 --> 00:46:55.780 Not in the dirty, gross marketing sense, but you, you have to be able to get the word out to people 00:46:55.780 --> 00:47:01.780 because it, it almost doesn't matter how good it is. There's this layer of, you have to let people 00:47:01.780 --> 00:47:04.780 know, or it just doesn't matter, which is unfortunate, but that's how it is. 00:47:04.780 --> 00:47:07.660 Yeah. You have to let people know and you have to keep doing it for a long time. 00:47:07.660 --> 00:47:12.300 I'm guilty of, you know, email marketing. I don't do any, you know, I give away the, 00:47:12.400 --> 00:47:16.720 the online versions, the first couple of chapters, I should definitely throw up and require an email. 00:47:16.720 --> 00:47:21.200 It's challenging. I mean, you know, I'm doing the podcast, so that's marketing for me anyways, 00:47:21.200 --> 00:47:26.400 speaking as marketing, but it is, it does. Yeah. It feels dirty to a lot of developers. I mean, 00:47:26.400 --> 00:47:29.540 but I look at it like, you know, your stuff is good. You need to tell people about it, right? Like 00:47:29.540 --> 00:47:35.860 you think about a movie star, they spend more time marketing a movie than they do making it. And 00:47:35.860 --> 00:47:41.100 it's gone in a couple of weeks. So when I think of that versus, you know, a course that has to be 00:47:41.100 --> 00:47:46.040 updated or a book has to be updated every year. It doesn't sound so bad, but I think that the 00:47:46.040 --> 00:47:49.040 challenge is that marketing doesn't feel as good as coding or teaching. 00:47:49.040 --> 00:47:54.760 Yeah. And it's something most people just have no experience in, right? So you're an expert in this 00:47:54.760 --> 00:48:00.760 one thing and you need to use this other skill to make it successful. And this other skill you have 00:48:00.760 --> 00:48:05.480 no experience in. And I think it's a little bit of a, I think it's intimidating as well. 00:48:05.660 --> 00:48:10.040 Yeah. But I think you just have to put out good stuff or my, you know, my personal goal for next 00:48:10.040 --> 00:48:15.240 year is to do more with less. Like I feel like I've, you know, this year is almost three books, 00:48:15.240 --> 00:48:21.100 DjangoCon talk, major project, a couple dozen articles on my personal site that get some traffic. 00:48:21.100 --> 00:48:26.760 I've just been pumping content out and I need to personally, you know, figure out email marketing. 00:48:26.760 --> 00:48:33.100 I need to keep my stuff up to date and just be smarter about it. I'm aware of that. I'm actually 00:48:33.100 --> 00:48:36.800 kind of looking forward to it as a little bit of a break, but yeah, that's the number one, 00:48:36.800 --> 00:48:41.480 the number one challenge for developers who want to make a career doing stuff is, is content. And I 00:48:41.480 --> 00:48:45.660 could list a number of people I think are amazing teachers and they just don't have a heart for doing 00:48:45.660 --> 00:48:47.920 marketing and that's why they're not able to do more of it. 00:48:47.920 --> 00:48:51.780 Yep. Absolutely. So I did want, it took me a moment to look it up, but did want to come up, 00:48:51.780 --> 00:48:57.020 but you talked about the core developers and there not being that many people who are actually 00:48:57.020 --> 00:49:01.240 contributing day to day in Django and that makes sense, but it's, you know, it's kind of standard 00:49:01.240 --> 00:49:06.480 open source. I mean, 12 people, that's actually a lot compared to many open source projects. 00:49:06.480 --> 00:49:09.820 I was going to say, double check, double check my numbers. I know, you know, Carlton went over, 00:49:09.820 --> 00:49:12.700 I know it was a half dozen that really do it and something like that. Yeah. 00:49:12.700 --> 00:49:18.060 Yeah. Yeah. Sure. At least the scale sounds pretty right to me, but there was a post by James 00:49:18.060 --> 00:49:25.020 Bennett called core no more, which is about restructuring the core developer relationship 00:49:25.020 --> 00:49:32.400 and definition to try to bring more people in to contribute to Django and really the impression 00:49:32.400 --> 00:49:38.120 of having core developers and other developers, it means a lot of times the other developers don't 00:49:38.120 --> 00:49:44.080 feel worthy or have the power to actually make changes or start contributing. So the Django team 00:49:44.080 --> 00:49:48.400 is trying to reorganize how they're doing this to help break down some of those barriers. And I think 00:49:48.400 --> 00:49:53.400 that's pretty interesting. So I'll, I'll throw his article into the show notes as well. 00:49:53.400 --> 00:49:57.580 Yeah. I think, you know, so a couple of the keynotes were from, you know, non-traditional 00:49:57.580 --> 00:50:03.300 background location developers. Django is very aware of it. They're working hard. It's still, I think 00:50:03.300 --> 00:50:09.820 all six are white males like you and me. So it's, and you know, from, you know, Australia, 00:50:10.040 --> 00:50:14.640 North America, Europe. So yeah, they're very aware of it. Just the representation, even though 00:50:14.640 --> 00:50:19.700 there's huge communities that use it outside of those places and the core distinction. Yeah. It's, 00:50:19.700 --> 00:50:23.420 it's a hurdle. I mean, I haven't done a contribution to core Django. I mean, I'll be honest, it's a little 00:50:23.420 --> 00:50:26.920 bit intimidating for me, right? Like who am I to, yeah, to change something? 00:50:26.920 --> 00:50:33.100 Well, and it's such a long running, highly polished piece of software that it's not like, 00:50:33.180 --> 00:50:37.300 oh, we're just going to, yeah, obviously does this wrong. We'll fix that. Right. Like a lot of 00:50:37.300 --> 00:50:42.140 the super low hanging fruit has been picked. I've thought a lot about this. There's really two 00:50:42.140 --> 00:50:47.960 types of things you can do. One is to fix like a highly technical problem. Like for example, 00:50:47.960 --> 00:50:53.400 Django switching over to async. That's what it's 2.1. It'll be 2.2 next year. And then 3.0, 3.0, 00:50:53.400 --> 00:50:57.240 we'll start a switch over to async. So there's a lot of work to be done there. That's technical. 00:50:57.240 --> 00:51:00.560 And that's true. That's a, that's a fresh path sort of, right? 00:51:00.780 --> 00:51:05.140 Yeah. But that's like a technical challenge, but then there's all these gray areas, you know? So 00:51:05.140 --> 00:51:10.540 for example, when you start a new Django project, I think you should automatically default the user 00:51:10.540 --> 00:51:16.000 into using a custom user model. Why do we have to configure it? And actually I talk, spoke online 00:51:16.000 --> 00:51:19.500 with Tom Christie, the creator of Django rest framework. And he, that was his suggestion. I 00:51:19.500 --> 00:51:23.140 was saying, why don't we go under the hood and change it? And he said, well, why don't we just 00:51:23.140 --> 00:51:27.420 change the start project command, which is the command that you use to run a new Django project? 00:51:27.800 --> 00:51:31.920 That's a great idea. I should probably do that. But you know, that's an example of that's not 00:51:31.920 --> 00:51:37.840 changing what's under the hood. That's changing kind of how it's used. And that's potentially a 00:51:37.840 --> 00:51:43.880 bigger benefit to the community, but that's a harder thing to get buy-in on because people have mixed 00:51:43.880 --> 00:51:48.540 feelings. Whereas, you know, oh, let's make it async. That's a little more binary. So those are these, 00:51:48.540 --> 00:51:53.140 these two big buckets of, you know, kind of gray areas that Django people can agree would, 00:51:53.140 --> 00:51:58.660 could be better maybe. And then there's more pure technical challenges. And I think the latter are 00:51:58.660 --> 00:52:01.220 actually a little bit easier to solve for that reason. 00:52:01.220 --> 00:52:06.400 Sure. You know, some of these changes, they sound really easy, but they have far ranging consequences. 00:52:06.400 --> 00:52:11.740 And so there's always like, sure, you could change the template to just generate this model. And it 00:52:11.740 --> 00:52:16.120 would, I could do that this afternoon. Like, why don't we just do that? But then all the documentation 00:52:16.120 --> 00:52:20.260 has to be written. All the screenshots got to be retaken. All the tutorials have got to be, 00:52:20.260 --> 00:52:22.360 I mean, just like, you know what I mean? There's- 00:52:22.360 --> 00:52:23.620 Well, for you and me, yeah. 00:52:23.620 --> 00:52:30.340 Yeah, yeah. There's this sort of knock-on effect of, it looks like a small feature, 00:52:30.340 --> 00:52:33.720 but then it becomes major. And I'm not saying it's not worth doing it. I'm just saying it, 00:52:33.720 --> 00:52:41.840 a lot of times they look much simpler and quicker than the full-on externalities of it. You know, 00:52:41.840 --> 00:52:44.060 like it's knock-on effect across the community. 00:52:44.060 --> 00:52:47.780 Right. And that's why you need newcomers who don't know and don't care about that. And we'll go ahead 00:52:47.780 --> 00:52:51.460 and do a patch and like get this started because, you know, the core developers are well aware of 00:52:51.460 --> 00:52:56.620 these, some of these issues. And if someone just came in and said, boom, here it is, I think a lot 00:52:56.620 --> 00:53:00.820 of them will be solved. You get a little bit of fatigue, I think, with some of the same issues over 00:53:00.820 --> 00:53:03.240 time. So you need, that's why new blood is really important. 00:53:03.240 --> 00:53:04.020 Yeah, for sure. 00:53:04.020 --> 00:53:08.100 If you ask to a person, if you ask, you know, the Django core team, do they feel like amazing 00:53:08.100 --> 00:53:12.640 developers? Almost none of them would say yes. They would all have their own version of imposter 00:53:12.640 --> 00:53:17.440 syndrome, which I think is something beginners don't really realize is that everyone feels this. 00:53:17.440 --> 00:53:20.760 It's just how it is in our field. And it's not unique. 00:53:20.760 --> 00:53:25.100 Well, there's just too much to know. Like 20 years ago, you could pretty much know all of C++, 00:53:25.100 --> 00:53:30.560 but try to know all of the packages on PyPI, right? You just, you just can't, right? 00:53:30.560 --> 00:53:34.020 And this is a programming thing. Like I live in Boston, I'm surrounded by doctors. You know, 00:53:34.020 --> 00:53:37.720 nobody says, oh, you're a, you're a pediatrician. Why don't you go do heart surgery? 00:53:38.140 --> 00:53:43.360 Right. But it's like, oh, you're a PHP programmer. Why don't you go do Golang? Like the expectation 00:53:43.360 --> 00:53:47.520 is, is there. And I think partly it's, we put it upon ourselves because we're all self-taught and 00:53:47.520 --> 00:53:52.040 we love doing it. We're like, well, I could learn that. But the reality is, you know, even Python, 00:53:52.040 --> 00:53:57.320 right? Like a lot of readers of my stuff have never done web before, even if they're, I'm sure, 00:53:57.320 --> 00:54:01.780 much better at Python than I am. It's just a different realm. But yeah, it'd be nice. You know, 00:54:01.780 --> 00:54:06.080 it'd be nice if those, those lines were a little more clearly defined. So we didn't beat ourselves 00:54:06.080 --> 00:54:09.280 off about, you know, cause there's a progression of learning where you say, okay, I'll build a 00:54:09.280 --> 00:54:15.580 website. Okay. HTML, CSS. Okay. Now what now JavaScript. Okay. Now, now deployment. Okay. 00:54:15.580 --> 00:54:20.940 Now web framework. Oh, I gotta go learn Python or Ruby. Okay. Learn that. Okay. Now I gotta learn 00:54:20.940 --> 00:54:25.060 Django. Okay. Now I gotta learn testing. Like it just, oh, I gotta build, oh, and then you build Django 00:54:25.060 --> 00:54:29.680 and you find out, Hey, guess what? Everything is about APIs. Nobody cares about monolithic web stack. 00:54:29.680 --> 00:54:33.200 You go, oh, okay. Now I gotta learn API. You know, it just never ends. 00:54:33.200 --> 00:54:38.300 Yeah. So yeah, the web is especially hard though, because you're usually programming in four or five 00:54:38.300 --> 00:54:44.920 different languages at once. You're doing Python or some other server side framework language. You're 00:54:44.920 --> 00:54:49.360 doing probably some kind of data access. So SQL or Mongo query language, something like that. 00:54:49.360 --> 00:54:54.080 You're doing CSS, you're doing HTML, you're doing JavaScript, and then you have the infrastructure. 00:54:54.080 --> 00:54:58.940 You have all these things. It's not just, you know how to program in Python and you're good. 00:54:58.940 --> 00:55:04.000 Right. And I think also I realized at DjangoCon is that, you know, most people who do professional Django, 00:55:04.000 --> 00:55:09.060 they just do Django. You know, I was kind of shocked that they didn't know JavaScript very well, 00:55:09.060 --> 00:55:13.480 but it should make sense, right? Like they, they don't do JavaScript, right? Like all those things 00:55:13.480 --> 00:55:16.240 you mentioned, when you start off, when you say, I want to build my first web application, 00:55:16.240 --> 00:55:19.940 you think you have to do everything. If you go join a company, nobody wants a generalist, 00:55:19.940 --> 00:55:24.220 unless you're, you know, the software architect, they, you get very specialized very fast, 00:55:24.220 --> 00:55:27.920 but the challenge, right, is that the world doesn't change around you. So even if you're doing right, 00:55:27.920 --> 00:55:32.300 Django for Django APIs for three years, you know, it's Angular to view to react when you want to go 00:55:32.300 --> 00:55:36.560 build your side project. You, I think there's enough people who will say I'd pay 50 bucks to have 00:55:36.560 --> 00:55:42.600 someone like you explain to me how to use this thing rather than waste all this time. But yeah, 00:55:42.600 --> 00:55:47.060 so that, again, that was another humanizing thing for me being like, oh, wow. Like I just assume 00:55:47.060 --> 00:55:51.740 everyone, you know, knew 12 languages, like the back of their hand, including JavaScript. But you know, 00:55:51.740 --> 00:55:56.840 there's, that's not the case, right? People are human. Yeah, absolutely. Definitely interesting 00:55:56.840 --> 00:56:01.020 conversation. I guess we should probably leave it there. We're probably running a little low on time. 00:56:01.020 --> 00:56:07.540 Cool books. Nice talking to you about teaching and learning. I think those are two sides of the 00:56:07.540 --> 00:56:11.500 same coin, which is pretty interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me on. Yeah, you bet. 00:56:11.500 --> 00:56:15.760 Now, before we get out here, there's the final two questions I always ask people. So if you're going 00:56:15.760 --> 00:56:21.160 to write some Django code, what editor do you use? I hate this question, actually. I think it's a 00:56:21.160 --> 00:56:26.020 question that interests you and me and it's incredibly off-putting to beginners. I use VS Code 00:56:26.020 --> 00:56:30.180 because it's free. I was just in a university that's using my book and they're using PyCharm, 00:56:30.180 --> 00:56:35.480 which I don't know very well. And I was blown away at how awesome PyCharm is, but also kind of worried 00:56:35.480 --> 00:56:39.060 that they don't know how to use Terminal because it's all built in and they don't have to worry about 00:56:39.060 --> 00:56:44.340 virtual environments. So that's the trade-off you make. So, you know, I think I probably would use PyCharm 00:56:44.340 --> 00:56:48.720 if it was just me, but because I teach and I want to keep it accessible, I use VS Code. And, 00:56:48.720 --> 00:56:52.040 you know, if you get your plugins right, you can mimic a lot of the functionality. 00:56:52.040 --> 00:56:57.480 Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, VS Code's coming on super strong. And then notable PyPI packages? 00:56:57.480 --> 00:57:01.200 So Django, well, PyPI packages. Yeah, Django REST. 00:57:01.200 --> 00:57:02.560 They can be Django ones, that's fine. 00:57:02.560 --> 00:57:08.980 Django REST framework is not part of Django. People don't realize that. It's a separate thing. I guess 00:57:08.980 --> 00:57:13.420 the big one I would say is Django all off for user registration in Django, which we didn't really 00:57:13.420 --> 00:57:17.780 touch upon, but is somewhat complicated. If you want to dig in and do it yourself, that's great. 00:57:17.780 --> 00:57:24.020 If you want to just get up and going with user registration, Django all off is a popular and I 00:57:24.020 --> 00:57:26.100 think great place to start with that. 00:57:26.100 --> 00:57:30.860 Yeah, that sounds really cool. I guess I do want to throw out just this one package that I ran across 00:57:30.860 --> 00:57:35.620 recently. I think we'll maybe help some folks called Django Hunter. Are you familiar with that? 00:57:35.700 --> 00:57:36.980 Yeah, yeah. Please mention this. Yeah. 00:57:36.980 --> 00:57:43.540 Yeah. So it's easy, especially as a beginner, you're trying to juggle 5,000 things in your head. 00:57:43.540 --> 00:57:48.480 Okay, is Linux set up right? Am I logged into this? Have I got the database connection right? Is the 00:57:48.480 --> 00:57:55.520 firewall set correctly for that? That you might accidentally push out some feature of Django 00:57:55.520 --> 00:58:00.140 turned on that you don't actually want turned on, like having a full on debug mode, but also 00:58:00.140 --> 00:58:05.200 other settings as well. So there's this project called Django Hunter that will go and look 00:58:05.200 --> 00:58:09.300 at your project and tell you if any of those things are happening to it, which seems pretty 00:58:09.300 --> 00:58:09.540 helpful. 00:58:09.540 --> 00:58:14.920 Yeah, absolutely. And actually, that whole toy app to production is what my third book is on, 00:58:14.920 --> 00:58:18.760 and it's really not a straight line at all. So it's fantastic to have tools like that. 00:58:18.760 --> 00:58:22.880 Yeah. And when is that coming out? Well, how about this? What's the title? 00:58:22.880 --> 00:58:29.300 I know, I'm happy to answer that. So initially, I took pre-orders for it for the first time. And I just 00:58:29.300 --> 00:58:32.800 yesterday, I'm laughing because just yesterday, I emailed a couple hundred people and said, 00:58:33.140 --> 00:58:36.900 look, I'm just not going to hit the deadline. It's causing me anxiety. It's going to be done 00:58:36.900 --> 00:58:41.840 when it's done. And I felt better, but also kind of bad about that. But I got so many nice emails 00:58:41.840 --> 00:58:47.720 from people just humanizing for me that people are supportive. So April, I can't see how it would 00:58:47.720 --> 00:58:52.400 take that long, but I'm now saying April. But the short answer is it'll be done when it's done. And 00:58:52.400 --> 00:58:56.140 I don't recommend authors assign deadlines to their projects. 00:58:56.140 --> 00:58:56.800 Sure. 00:58:57.100 --> 00:58:57.860 What's the title? 00:58:57.860 --> 00:58:59.000 Django for Professionals. 00:58:59.000 --> 00:59:03.100 Okay, cool. It sounds like another good project. I'm sure it'll be excellent. All right. So final 00:59:03.100 --> 00:59:07.360 call to action. People are excited to learn Django or teach Django. What will you tell them? 00:59:07.360 --> 00:59:11.680 Check out my books. There's a lot of good books out there, really. Any of the ones that are up to 00:59:11.680 --> 00:59:16.280 date are probably pretty good. Personal site, wsvincent.com has a lot of articles. I mean, 00:59:16.280 --> 00:59:22.000 if you want just an overview of Django, there's an awesome Django repo that I maintain with links to 00:59:22.000 --> 00:59:25.640 lots of stuff that I personally think is good. Yeah, that's what I'd say. I wish there were an 00:59:25.640 --> 00:59:31.000 easier answer, right? I wish you of all people, Michael, could say, here's where you go. Because 00:59:31.000 --> 00:59:34.040 it's somewhat telling that even you struggle a little bit with Django. 00:59:34.040 --> 00:59:40.300 It's true. It's true. All right. Well, thank you so much for being on the show, Will. It was great 00:59:40.300 --> 00:59:43.180 to chat with you and fun to bounce these ideas around. 00:59:43.180 --> 00:59:44.080 Great. Thanks for having me. 00:59:44.080 --> 00:59:51.340 This has been another episode of Talk Python To Me. Our guest on this episode was Will Vincent. 00:59:51.340 --> 00:59:55.180 And it's been brought to you by us over at Talk Python Training. 00:59:55.180 --> 01:00:00.820 Want to level up your Python? If you're just getting started, try my Python Jumpstart by Building 01:00:00.820 --> 01:00:06.620 10 Apps course. Or if you're looking for something more advanced, check out our new async course that 01:00:06.620 --> 01:00:11.020 digs into all the different types of async programming you can do in Python. And of course, 01:00:11.020 --> 01:00:15.340 if you're interested in more than one of these, be sure to check out our Everything Bundle. It's like 01:00:15.340 --> 01:00:19.940 a subscription that never expires. Be sure to subscribe to the show. Open your favorite 01:00:19.940 --> 01:00:24.860 podcatcher and search for Python. We should be right at the top. You can also find the iTunes feed at 01:00:24.860 --> 01:00:31.700 /itunes, the Google Play feed at /play, and the direct RSS feed at /rss on talkpython.fm. 01:00:31.700 --> 01:00:36.360 This is your host, Michael Kennedy. Thanks so much for listening. I really appreciate it. 01:00:36.580 --> 01:00:38.120 Now get out there and write some Python code. 01:00:38.120 --> 01:00:59.520 We'll see you next time.