WEBVTT 00:00:00.001 --> 00:00:01.740 Let's talk about running Django in production. 00:00:01.740 --> 00:00:05.460 On this episode, you'll meet Michael Herman, who used to work on realpython.com, 00:00:05.460 --> 00:00:07.580 and today is running testdriven.io. 00:00:07.580 --> 00:00:12.220 We'll cover some of the trade-offs between a set of microservices and a monolith, 00:00:12.220 --> 00:00:14.140 and a round-trip journey between them as well. 00:00:14.140 --> 00:00:19.060 This is Talk Python To Me, episode 206, recorded February 19th, 2019. 00:00:19.060 --> 00:00:35.480 Welcome to Talk Python To Me, a weekly podcast on Python, 00:00:35.480 --> 00:00:38.540 the language, the libraries, the ecosystem, and the personalities. 00:00:38.540 --> 00:00:40.480 This is your host, Michael Kennedy. 00:00:40.480 --> 00:00:42.620 Follow me on Twitter, where I'm @mkennedy. 00:00:42.620 --> 00:00:46.360 Keep up with the show and listen to past episodes at talkpython.fm, 00:00:46.360 --> 00:00:48.860 and follow the show on Twitter via at Talk Python. 00:00:49.860 --> 00:00:51.080 Michael, welcome to Talk Python. 00:00:51.080 --> 00:00:51.640 Thank you. 00:00:51.640 --> 00:00:52.500 It's great to have you here. 00:00:52.500 --> 00:00:55.100 You've been doing so many cool things in the community 00:00:55.100 --> 00:00:57.860 and creating all these community projects 00:00:57.860 --> 00:01:01.180 and really helping a lot of people learn Python and programming. 00:01:01.180 --> 00:01:04.900 So I'm excited to have you on the show and dig into all of those things and more. 00:01:04.900 --> 00:01:07.960 But before we do, before we get to them, let's start with your story. 00:01:07.960 --> 00:01:09.200 How did you get into programming in Python? 00:01:09.200 --> 00:01:09.880 Sure, yeah. 00:01:09.880 --> 00:01:12.880 So I started programming back in, say, seventh grade. 00:01:12.880 --> 00:01:14.560 I think that was like 96, 97. 00:01:14.560 --> 00:01:17.620 And it was really to compete with my best friend, Derek, 00:01:17.620 --> 00:01:22.180 who started a very popular PlayStation website called PlayStation Fan. 00:01:22.180 --> 00:01:27.080 Started out in GeoCities and then eventually moved to a domain name. 00:01:27.080 --> 00:01:31.440 But yeah, just started off with HTML and CSS and a bit of JavaScript. 00:01:31.440 --> 00:01:31.960 Wow. 00:01:31.960 --> 00:01:32.900 That's really interesting. 00:01:32.900 --> 00:01:33.600 GeoCities. 00:01:33.600 --> 00:01:36.340 That's something I haven't thought about for a while. 00:01:36.340 --> 00:01:40.060 But for younger people, like that was the WordPress of the day, 00:01:40.060 --> 00:01:41.640 the WordPress.com of the day or whatever. 00:01:41.640 --> 00:01:43.720 You could just go and click a button and make your site. 00:01:43.900 --> 00:01:45.600 They were often quite cheesy, right? 00:01:45.600 --> 00:01:45.900 Yeah. 00:01:45.900 --> 00:01:46.640 Yeah, definitely. 00:01:46.640 --> 00:01:54.880 Yeah, I started with a PlayStation website as well, PlayStation Extreme, and then moved on to Final Fantasy. 00:01:54.880 --> 00:02:00.420 Got really big into Final Fantasy VII and then started a Final Fantasy VIII enthusiast website, 00:02:00.560 --> 00:02:06.040 the FIFOF8.org, and sort of paid the bills around that with ModChip advertising. 00:02:06.040 --> 00:02:09.140 I don't know if you remember ModChips, but it basically allowed you to... 00:02:09.140 --> 00:02:10.220 No, I don't know that at all. 00:02:10.220 --> 00:02:10.500 No. 00:02:10.500 --> 00:02:11.020 Yeah. 00:02:11.020 --> 00:02:12.460 You solder them onto your PlayStation. 00:02:12.460 --> 00:02:17.940 You can play or you could play games that were outside the U.S. 00:02:18.080 --> 00:02:18.620 Oh, interesting. 00:02:18.620 --> 00:02:23.420 So a little bit of a side loading, like get around the restrictions of the PlayStation there. 00:02:23.420 --> 00:02:26.940 So did they get pretty popular or were they just sort of hobby things? 00:02:26.940 --> 00:02:28.020 They did get pretty popular. 00:02:28.020 --> 00:02:30.040 I had a lot of companies like SendMeGames. 00:02:30.040 --> 00:02:31.480 They wanted me to review. 00:02:31.480 --> 00:02:38.260 And I think sort of with the Final Fantasy VIII website, I had like an early bootleg copy of it. 00:02:38.260 --> 00:02:42.220 Of course, it was in Japanese and being an RPG, couldn't really do much with it. 00:02:42.220 --> 00:02:45.960 But yeah, I did get a lot of early copies of games and whatnot to review. 00:02:46.160 --> 00:02:46.820 Wow, that's really cool. 00:02:46.820 --> 00:02:51.820 So maybe if that was today, you would be doing a Twitch channel at that age or something like that. 00:02:51.820 --> 00:02:54.160 But back then it was the website. 00:02:54.160 --> 00:02:54.460 Yeah. 00:02:54.460 --> 00:02:55.020 Yeah. 00:02:55.020 --> 00:02:55.380 Yeah. 00:02:55.380 --> 00:02:56.240 Interesting. 00:02:56.240 --> 00:02:59.740 So there's not a whole lot of programming there per se, though, is there? 00:02:59.740 --> 00:03:02.860 I mean, that's like kind of getting you started in the web world. 00:03:02.860 --> 00:03:05.740 But where'd you really get like into programming for real? 00:03:05.740 --> 00:03:09.600 So then I learned a bit of the LAMP stack, mostly the M and the P. 00:03:10.240 --> 00:03:17.960 And then I really started looking at VBulletin and sort of the message forums of the day. 00:03:17.960 --> 00:03:23.460 And got really good into adding just like tweaks and hacks to them. 00:03:23.460 --> 00:03:29.240 In high school, I took a basic in Pascal and then a C++ class. 00:03:30.120 --> 00:03:35.720 And that was sort of my sophomore year of high school or freshman and sophomore year. 00:03:35.720 --> 00:03:42.480 And then my junior and senior year, I actually went half days at high school and half days at a vocational tech program. 00:03:42.480 --> 00:03:45.120 And with the hardware side, got A-plus certified. 00:03:45.120 --> 00:03:48.500 And that was back in the day with desktops. 00:03:49.040 --> 00:03:52.120 So I don't think it means anything these days. 00:03:52.120 --> 00:03:55.920 You don't get too many recruiters reaching out to you for that? 00:03:55.920 --> 00:03:56.540 No, no. 00:03:56.540 --> 00:04:00.700 No, that's a super cool thing that you can do at high school, though, right? 00:04:00.700 --> 00:04:04.140 I mean, there's so many classes you take that are kind of fluffy. 00:04:04.140 --> 00:04:07.460 Just you got to do something for the day at high school. 00:04:07.460 --> 00:04:09.000 That sounds really constructive and useful. 00:04:09.000 --> 00:04:09.840 Did you enjoy it? 00:04:09.840 --> 00:04:10.100 Yeah. 00:04:10.100 --> 00:04:11.240 Yeah, it was very practical. 00:04:11.240 --> 00:04:16.600 Gave me a lot of skills and learned quite a bit about the hardware side of things. 00:04:16.780 --> 00:04:19.160 Also got a Cisco certified. 00:04:19.160 --> 00:04:22.260 I think it was the CCNA network administrator. 00:04:22.260 --> 00:04:25.120 That might mean something a little bit more now, but not sure. 00:04:25.120 --> 00:04:31.120 Yeah, still, it sounds like a really cool project, especially for when you're in high school. 00:04:31.120 --> 00:04:31.420 Yeah. 00:04:31.420 --> 00:04:32.640 Would you get a CS degree from there? 00:04:32.640 --> 00:04:33.480 No. 00:04:33.480 --> 00:04:37.160 So in college, I ended up starting in computer science. 00:04:37.160 --> 00:04:40.460 I took a philosophy class that steered me into philosophy. 00:04:40.460 --> 00:04:45.860 My dad was subsidizing most of my education, so I ended up with a practical business degree. 00:04:45.860 --> 00:04:46.540 Yeah, that's cool. 00:04:46.620 --> 00:04:50.580 He's like, look, you can take these philosophy classes, but you can't live on philosophy very 00:04:50.580 --> 00:04:52.140 easily, so go get a regular degree. 00:04:52.140 --> 00:04:52.460 Right. 00:04:52.460 --> 00:04:55.560 Basically, unless you're going to law school, you're going to do something different. 00:04:55.560 --> 00:04:58.100 Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. 00:04:58.100 --> 00:05:03.160 Philosophy is really fun, but it's a hard job to have, I think, unless you just want to be 00:05:03.160 --> 00:05:03.680 a teacher. 00:05:03.680 --> 00:05:04.020 Yeah. 00:05:04.020 --> 00:05:04.700 Yeah, for sure. 00:05:04.700 --> 00:05:07.200 Okay, so a lot of interesting background there. 00:05:07.200 --> 00:05:08.200 How did you get to Python? 00:05:08.200 --> 00:05:14.860 So after my undergrad, I ended up moving to New York and was working in a sort of a sales 00:05:14.860 --> 00:05:21.200 support, sales operation type role for Yahoo, and sort of got back into coding there. 00:05:21.360 --> 00:05:26.400 I was doing a lot of Excel, doing a lot of VBA, writing little macros here and there. 00:05:27.040 --> 00:05:31.240 And eventually, that led me to San Francisco and started working at startups, started wearing 00:05:31.240 --> 00:05:32.360 multiple hats. 00:05:32.360 --> 00:05:39.860 And so sort of my finance and Excel experience led to a Python because I found I could do things 00:05:39.860 --> 00:05:45.680 a lot quicker and do things a lot more efficient with Python and having that control Excel over 00:05:45.680 --> 00:05:46.120 VBA. 00:05:46.320 --> 00:05:47.320 Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. 00:05:47.320 --> 00:05:51.340 And that sort of debate and functionality is still raging today. 00:05:51.340 --> 00:05:57.120 We've got that user voice issue where everyone's trying to get Python into Excel and Microsoft 00:05:57.120 --> 00:05:59.180 has kind of put their head in the sand and ignored it. 00:05:59.180 --> 00:06:02.760 But every couple of days, there's a new person who goes, what a great idea. 00:06:02.760 --> 00:06:04.340 Like thousands and thousands of votes. 00:06:04.340 --> 00:06:05.700 But yeah, we'll see. 00:06:05.700 --> 00:06:07.460 I think a lot of people go on that path. 00:06:07.460 --> 00:06:11.660 So when you got to San Francisco, was this like the dot-com heyday or was it after that? 00:06:11.660 --> 00:06:12.300 It was after that. 00:06:12.300 --> 00:06:15.640 This was 2008, 2009. 00:06:15.640 --> 00:06:15.980 Yeah. 00:06:16.260 --> 00:06:18.640 I would have been wild to be there, 98, 99. 00:06:18.640 --> 00:06:19.760 Yeah. 00:06:19.760 --> 00:06:21.140 At that time, it would have been crazy. 00:06:21.140 --> 00:06:22.680 But I wasn't there either. 00:06:22.680 --> 00:06:24.240 So all right. 00:06:24.240 --> 00:06:25.720 So that was your history. 00:06:25.720 --> 00:06:26.900 How about today? 00:06:26.900 --> 00:06:27.880 What are you doing day to day? 00:06:27.880 --> 00:06:33.440 So these days, I'm spending about 50% on a startup that I started called TestDriven.io. 00:06:33.440 --> 00:06:38.840 So we're developing the platform, doing content marketing, course development, and then 50% 00:06:38.840 --> 00:06:39.720 on freelance. 00:06:39.720 --> 00:06:40.100 Okay. 00:06:40.100 --> 00:06:41.140 That sounds really fun. 00:06:41.140 --> 00:06:46.160 You know, you get to control quite a bit of what you do and always building. 00:06:46.200 --> 00:06:48.140 These new platforms, these new products. 00:06:48.140 --> 00:06:49.600 It's so exciting, right? 00:06:49.600 --> 00:06:49.940 Yeah. 00:06:49.940 --> 00:06:52.620 So I went back to freelance, let's say, a couple weeks ago. 00:06:52.620 --> 00:06:58.200 So I've been free from a day job for about two weeks. 00:06:58.200 --> 00:06:59.020 Yeah. 00:06:59.020 --> 00:07:01.240 Are you having like cubicle withdrawal or anything like that? 00:07:01.240 --> 00:07:01.660 Are you okay? 00:07:01.820 --> 00:07:02.180 I'm fine. 00:07:02.180 --> 00:07:02.480 I'm fine. 00:07:02.480 --> 00:07:02.500 I'm fine. 00:07:02.500 --> 00:07:02.700 Yeah. 00:07:02.700 --> 00:07:05.400 Nice. 00:07:05.400 --> 00:07:06.420 Yeah. 00:07:06.420 --> 00:07:06.860 How's it going? 00:07:06.860 --> 00:07:07.400 Are you enjoying it? 00:07:07.400 --> 00:07:07.580 Yeah. 00:07:07.580 --> 00:07:08.480 The commute is a lot better. 00:07:08.480 --> 00:07:08.880 Yeah. 00:07:08.880 --> 00:07:11.160 So we get up, roll out of bed right there. 00:07:11.160 --> 00:07:11.400 Yeah. 00:07:11.400 --> 00:07:11.980 That sounds great. 00:07:11.980 --> 00:07:14.280 We're definitely going to talk a lot about TestDriven. 00:07:14.440 --> 00:07:19.820 And I feel like TestDriven is, it's got a lot of parallels to what you did before. 00:07:19.820 --> 00:07:24.140 Even going back to your story that you already told, you know, about starting like the Final 00:07:24.140 --> 00:07:29.460 Fantasy and the PlayStation sites, and then moving on to something that you're pretty well 00:07:29.460 --> 00:07:31.760 known for is starting real Python, right? 00:07:31.760 --> 00:07:33.820 This is like the next generation of that maybe? 00:07:34.000 --> 00:07:34.040 Yeah. 00:07:34.040 --> 00:07:38.840 So I've definitely been drawn towards tech education and teaching in general. 00:07:38.840 --> 00:07:41.040 I taught at a bootcamp for a number of years. 00:07:41.040 --> 00:07:43.700 I was full stack JavaScript, so we won't talk about that. 00:07:43.700 --> 00:07:48.220 But I've definitely, I'm a programmer first and I'm a teacher second. 00:07:48.220 --> 00:07:50.660 So that's why I'm not teaching right now. 00:07:50.660 --> 00:07:55.380 But yeah, there's definitely a lot of parallels between real Python and TestDriven. 00:07:55.380 --> 00:07:59.780 I would say that TestDriven, targeting a little different audience, starting in the intermediate 00:07:59.780 --> 00:08:04.440 to advanced level web developers, whereas Python was all targeting just the basics. 00:08:04.440 --> 00:08:05.880 Yeah, I'm sure that makes a lot of sense. 00:08:05.880 --> 00:08:11.200 You know, I feel like you said you're a little bit more of a developer than a teacher, but 00:08:11.200 --> 00:08:12.040 also a teacher. 00:08:12.040 --> 00:08:20.060 And I feel like really to be a proper teacher who teaches developers, you have to have your, 00:08:20.060 --> 00:08:21.740 you have to get your hands dirty, right? 00:08:21.740 --> 00:08:22.860 You have to write this code. 00:08:22.860 --> 00:08:25.420 Like, it's not enough to just know it works this way. 00:08:25.420 --> 00:08:28.420 You have to know, actually, I tried it that way. 00:08:28.980 --> 00:08:30.680 And that seemed like it was going to work. 00:08:30.680 --> 00:08:32.200 But in practice, it was really painful. 00:08:32.200 --> 00:08:36.280 And it's other like, you need to have those scars to like help people along, I think. 00:08:36.280 --> 00:08:36.620 Right. 00:08:36.620 --> 00:08:40.940 And that's one of the things that the boot camp that I worked for struggled with how to 00:08:40.940 --> 00:08:46.520 continually scratch that itch for those developers first that really wanted to get back into the 00:08:46.520 --> 00:08:46.820 field. 00:08:46.820 --> 00:08:51.440 And I don't really think there's a correct or right answer there for that. 00:08:51.440 --> 00:08:53.880 But it was definitely something that they struggled with. 00:08:53.880 --> 00:08:55.700 It's definitely something I struggle with as well. 00:08:55.960 --> 00:08:58.580 But yeah, I enjoy working freelance jobs. 00:08:58.580 --> 00:09:01.200 And I also enjoy working on the test driven platform. 00:09:01.200 --> 00:09:05.360 That's one of the reasons why I decided to build a platform was so actually I had something 00:09:05.360 --> 00:09:09.140 there, something that can actually work on something I can actually scale on whatnot. 00:09:09.140 --> 00:09:09.500 Yeah. 00:09:09.500 --> 00:09:11.040 I'll be interested to hear your thoughts on this. 00:09:11.040 --> 00:09:16.320 But for me, a lot of times when I look out there and I'm like, I need something to solve 00:09:16.320 --> 00:09:17.000 some kind of problem. 00:09:17.100 --> 00:09:21.400 And I could grab something off the shelf and use it or I could build it myself. 00:09:21.400 --> 00:09:22.980 There's always that. 00:09:22.980 --> 00:09:26.860 Does it make sense for me to put that time and effort into it versus just grab something 00:09:26.860 --> 00:09:29.300 and it won't be quite the perfect fit, but it'll be good enough. 00:09:29.300 --> 00:09:35.480 But for me, another thing I've always got going in the back of my mind is if I did have to or 00:09:35.480 --> 00:09:39.560 went down the path of building this myself, would it give me something really interesting to 00:09:39.560 --> 00:09:42.480 learn and teach other people? 00:09:42.620 --> 00:09:48.120 Maybe I could just get some teaching platform, but if I built my own, hey, maybe I could use 00:09:48.120 --> 00:09:51.960 the lessons learned from there to actually create courses or create interviews and things like 00:09:51.960 --> 00:09:52.200 that. 00:09:52.200 --> 00:09:54.020 Do you think about stuff that way as well? 00:09:54.020 --> 00:09:56.700 Yeah, definitely the build versus buy type thing. 00:09:56.700 --> 00:10:01.480 I think a lot of educators out there that are on the internet, they use a lot of the existing 00:10:01.480 --> 00:10:06.760 platforms and maybe they're more teachers, maybe they're more into building content and whatnot. 00:10:06.760 --> 00:10:08.720 I'm a doer, I'm a hacker. 00:10:08.720 --> 00:10:11.640 And so, yeah, I definitely like having that platform there. 00:10:12.140 --> 00:10:14.760 Somebody is like, hey, I will promote your courses. 00:10:14.760 --> 00:10:19.160 If you have this little tweak in there, I can go in there and just add that little tweak. 00:10:19.160 --> 00:10:23.320 Whereas if I'm using some other platform, then I'm at the whim of the developers there. 00:10:23.320 --> 00:10:26.920 Yeah, it's usually more painful up front, but often in the end, you're like, I'm so glad 00:10:26.920 --> 00:10:29.280 I get to completely control this experience, right? 00:10:29.280 --> 00:10:29.500 Right. 00:10:29.500 --> 00:10:29.740 Yeah. 00:10:29.740 --> 00:10:31.440 So a bit of a time shift. 00:10:31.440 --> 00:10:36.540 By the time this episode comes out, I will have released a show with Ned Batchelder and a 00:10:36.540 --> 00:10:39.140 couple of other folks called Beginners and Experts. 00:10:39.320 --> 00:10:41.980 But that hasn't been released yet, so you have no chance to have heard it. 00:10:41.980 --> 00:10:43.940 So I'll just tell you real quick. 00:10:43.940 --> 00:10:47.840 We talked about a lot of the challenges that beginners and experts had. 00:10:48.720 --> 00:10:53.120 And it seemed like, you know, the syntax people could learn pretty well and other things they 00:10:53.120 --> 00:10:53.980 could follow along. 00:10:53.980 --> 00:11:00.220 But the real challenge is looking at a problem and going, this is how I break down that problem. 00:11:00.220 --> 00:11:01.160 These are the steps. 00:11:01.160 --> 00:11:03.600 Like, okay, this needs this type of database. 00:11:03.780 --> 00:11:06.620 Like, that's better as a web app versus as a command line app. 00:11:06.620 --> 00:11:11.140 Like, just these quick analyses that you do with experience that when you're new, you're 00:11:11.140 --> 00:11:13.060 like, I don't even know what tools to bring to bear. 00:11:13.060 --> 00:11:15.100 Like, once I knew that, I could probably do it pretty well. 00:11:15.100 --> 00:11:17.680 But I don't know what to start with. 00:11:18.300 --> 00:11:22.760 And that comes back to this sort of the scars and the boot camp story you're telling me. 00:11:22.760 --> 00:11:29.100 Like, you know, how do you think that people can at least speed up that learning process to 00:11:29.100 --> 00:11:30.520 sort of get that experience? 00:11:30.520 --> 00:11:31.360 Do you have any shortcuts? 00:11:31.360 --> 00:11:33.720 We didn't have any great options, honestly. 00:11:33.720 --> 00:11:36.080 I mean, maybe reading other people's code and stuff. 00:11:36.080 --> 00:11:39.140 But really, like, how do I decide how to attack a problem? 00:11:40.020 --> 00:11:40.980 Do you have any advice there? 00:11:40.980 --> 00:11:44.020 I don't have any real advice in terms of speeding things up. 00:11:44.020 --> 00:11:45.640 I think that just, you know, takes time. 00:11:45.640 --> 00:11:50.040 And yeah, I mean, it is about being able to break a problem up into manageable pieces. 00:11:50.040 --> 00:11:52.780 I think really focusing on information retrieval skills. 00:11:52.780 --> 00:11:57.360 I think that was one thing that I always, like, told my classes is the one thing that differentiates 00:11:57.360 --> 00:12:01.340 myself from you all is, like, I'm a better, way better Googler. 00:12:01.340 --> 00:12:07.580 I can find Stack Overflow questions or answers to Stack Overflow questions, that sort of thing 00:12:07.580 --> 00:12:11.720 within the first three or four pages or whatever, like, when I Google something. 00:12:11.720 --> 00:12:15.540 And I'd always tell them, if you're, like, on that, like, end of the second page, end of 00:12:15.540 --> 00:12:19.820 the third page of, like, your Google results, you probably need to recraft your query. 00:12:19.820 --> 00:12:20.140 Yeah. 00:12:20.140 --> 00:12:24.500 And part of that is, like, filtering it out, going, no, irrelevant, irrelevant, irrelevant. 00:12:24.500 --> 00:12:25.860 This is the one, right? 00:12:25.860 --> 00:12:29.560 But when you're new, it's hard to go, these are irrelevant, right? 00:12:29.560 --> 00:12:29.760 Yeah. 00:12:29.760 --> 00:12:31.480 I think that's part of the challenge as well. 00:12:31.480 --> 00:12:34.560 Yeah, I do have a Master's of Science in Information Science. 00:12:34.920 --> 00:12:37.840 And for a bit there, I was thinking about going the librarian route. 00:12:37.840 --> 00:12:43.600 And I see a lot of parallels between web developers and librarians. 00:12:43.600 --> 00:12:46.220 Whereas librarians are not subject matter experts. 00:12:46.220 --> 00:12:50.160 They're just able to connect with information quickly. 00:12:50.160 --> 00:12:54.940 And I think a lot of web developers, sort of the jack of all trades, master of none, have 00:12:54.940 --> 00:12:58.540 that same sort of philosophy that they can pick up things really fast. 00:12:58.540 --> 00:13:03.120 They might not be an expert in any one particular area, but they can wear many hats and go up and 00:13:03.120 --> 00:13:03.740 down the stack. 00:13:03.960 --> 00:13:08.020 Yeah, especially if you're a JavaScript developer, because whatever you know is out of date five, 00:13:08.020 --> 00:13:09.480 you know, six months later, right? 00:13:09.480 --> 00:13:10.280 Right. 00:13:10.280 --> 00:13:11.780 The new framework is not the one. 00:13:11.780 --> 00:13:12.280 Yeah. 00:13:12.280 --> 00:13:14.640 The new shiny comes along really quick in that space. 00:13:14.640 --> 00:13:15.080 Definitely. 00:13:15.080 --> 00:13:19.500 So since we're on the topic of boot camps, let me ask you just a couple of questions about 00:13:19.500 --> 00:13:19.700 that. 00:13:19.700 --> 00:13:27.160 Like, do you, putting aside whether it's JavaScript or Python or whatever the subject is being taught 00:13:27.160 --> 00:13:28.700 at the boot camp, do you think they're a good value? 00:13:28.700 --> 00:13:33.640 Do you see people getting like lots of success, maybe relative to a CS degree or relative to 00:13:33.640 --> 00:13:36.300 just like, hey, I bought some books and took an online course? 00:13:36.300 --> 00:13:37.780 Do you think it's worth a while? 00:13:37.780 --> 00:13:40.240 They're pretty expensive, but you know, maybe it's worth it. 00:13:40.240 --> 00:13:41.360 I definitely think it's worth it. 00:13:41.360 --> 00:13:44.060 A lot of times it depends on the type of jobs that you're looking for. 00:13:44.260 --> 00:13:50.200 If you're looking to build an Angular type framework, you probably need a CS degree. 00:13:50.200 --> 00:13:56.580 If you're looking to leverage Angular to build your own type of products, then you're probably 00:13:56.580 --> 00:13:58.540 fine with just going to a boot camp. 00:13:58.540 --> 00:13:59.560 I definitely agree with that. 00:13:59.560 --> 00:14:04.200 Like, there's a lot of times you're in a CS degree and those more formal programs, you're 00:14:04.200 --> 00:14:09.880 taught way more theory and like deeper level stuff than you probably need to know. 00:14:09.880 --> 00:14:13.160 You probably have to take differential equations as a CS degree. 00:14:13.160 --> 00:14:18.160 You probably have to like learn how to like create an operating system and those kinds. 00:14:18.160 --> 00:14:22.980 And like all that stuff is good to know, but you could be a completely competent functional 00:14:22.980 --> 00:14:27.920 web developer or whatever kind of developer, unless, you know, you really are building an 00:14:27.920 --> 00:14:28.580 OS or something. 00:14:28.580 --> 00:14:32.940 Just knowing like the APIs and a little bit of a little bit of theory, which seems like a 00:14:32.940 --> 00:14:34.040 lot of that you could get at a boot camp. 00:14:34.040 --> 00:14:34.300 Right. 00:14:34.300 --> 00:14:35.160 Yeah, definitely. 00:14:35.160 --> 00:14:35.540 Yeah. 00:14:35.540 --> 00:14:35.860 Cool. 00:14:36.480 --> 00:14:39.060 Were you there helping people get jobs afterwards? 00:14:39.060 --> 00:14:41.120 Like what was that side of the thing? 00:14:41.120 --> 00:14:44.760 Was that, that was probably like a big celebration, like somebody who just got a job who recently 00:14:44.760 --> 00:14:45.920 graduated or something like that. 00:14:45.920 --> 00:14:46.120 Yeah. 00:14:46.120 --> 00:14:47.980 The placement rates of the program were pretty high. 00:14:47.980 --> 00:14:52.420 I mean, they were in the nineties, which you think of, you know, college and you think 00:14:52.420 --> 00:14:56.820 of some of those degrees, like, do you, like that's why they don't post the placement rates. 00:14:56.820 --> 00:15:02.780 But yeah, I was, even though I wasn't like a formally part of sort of that transition to the job 00:15:02.780 --> 00:15:06.660 market, it was like, you know, I had that double edged sword where it was like, I think I cared a 00:15:06.660 --> 00:15:07.500 little bit too much. 00:15:07.500 --> 00:15:12.540 And so, you know, I was like all in and kind of like lost myself a little bit in teaching. 00:15:12.540 --> 00:15:16.820 But yeah, I was definitely there, you know, helping students interview, connecting students 00:15:16.820 --> 00:15:18.440 with people I knew in the community and whatnot. 00:15:18.440 --> 00:15:18.780 Yeah. 00:15:18.780 --> 00:15:19.040 Cool. 00:15:19.040 --> 00:15:23.040 Real quick, single piece of advice for people trying to get a job coming out of a boot camp. 00:15:23.040 --> 00:15:23.660 What would you tell them? 00:15:23.660 --> 00:15:24.960 Ooh, yeah. 00:15:24.960 --> 00:15:26.340 So, so many. 00:15:26.340 --> 00:15:31.140 Keep coding, I guess, you know, there's just too many. 00:15:31.140 --> 00:15:34.080 Keep coding, go to meetups, keep connecting with people. 00:15:34.080 --> 00:15:35.100 It's difficult. 00:15:35.100 --> 00:15:39.360 I don't think there is a single piece of advice, but definitely keep coding, go to meetups, connect 00:15:39.360 --> 00:15:39.740 with people. 00:15:39.740 --> 00:15:40.040 Awesome. 00:15:40.040 --> 00:15:40.420 Yeah. 00:15:40.420 --> 00:15:40.960 Sounds good. 00:15:40.960 --> 00:15:41.240 All right. 00:15:41.240 --> 00:15:45.220 So let's bring it back to a little bit more of what we were going to talk about originally. 00:15:45.220 --> 00:15:45.480 Sure. 00:15:45.480 --> 00:15:49.820 I want to definitely talk about testdriven.io and what you're doing there and some of the lessons 00:15:49.820 --> 00:15:50.380 you've learned. 00:15:50.380 --> 00:15:53.020 But let's start at the beginning on that side of the thing. 00:15:53.020 --> 00:15:57.500 So as I said before, you founded realpython.com. 00:15:57.500 --> 00:16:00.060 And did you do it alone or did you do it with some other folks? 00:16:00.300 --> 00:16:00.400 Yeah. 00:16:00.400 --> 00:16:02.260 So there were two other co-founders. 00:16:02.260 --> 00:16:09.040 So Fletcher, the original co-founder or the original founder founded it in, I want to say 00:16:09.040 --> 00:16:09.860 2010. 00:16:09.860 --> 00:16:14.840 And he did the original Kickstarter for the first real Python course. 00:16:14.840 --> 00:16:16.940 And I actually wasn't involved in it then. 00:16:16.940 --> 00:16:17.180 Okay. 00:16:17.240 --> 00:16:21.440 I came after that and I can't remember who contacted who, but we were talking about, hey, 00:16:21.440 --> 00:16:28.700 how can we take sort of the philosophy of real Python, the learning by doing and apply it to 00:16:28.700 --> 00:16:29.500 web development? 00:16:29.500 --> 00:16:29.840 Yeah. 00:16:29.840 --> 00:16:30.500 That's really cool. 00:16:30.980 --> 00:16:33.500 So it was started as a Kickstarter, huh? 00:16:33.500 --> 00:16:34.620 Started as a Kickstarter. 00:16:34.620 --> 00:16:36.520 Each of the courses were Kickstarted. 00:16:36.520 --> 00:16:40.220 I was heavily involved in the second and the third Kickstarters. 00:16:40.220 --> 00:16:43.960 But we really started it because there were just no beginner courses out there. 00:16:45.020 --> 00:16:49.780 And now it's like kind of a dime a dozen, which sort of leads to testdriven.io. 00:16:49.780 --> 00:16:53.940 But yeah, we started it because there was just nothing really practical out there. 00:16:53.940 --> 00:16:54.220 Yeah. 00:16:54.220 --> 00:16:55.120 It's super interesting. 00:16:55.120 --> 00:16:57.300 I don't think I saw the original Kickstarter. 00:16:57.300 --> 00:17:02.740 I probably saw your last Kickstarter that you did, that you all did. 00:17:02.740 --> 00:17:04.660 And I was really impressed. 00:17:04.660 --> 00:17:06.680 I mean, you guys, you ran it well. 00:17:06.680 --> 00:17:08.000 It was super successful. 00:17:08.000 --> 00:17:13.220 I was, it was actually a big inspiration to me as I was thinking about starting my own teaching 00:17:13.220 --> 00:17:14.320 platform, right? 00:17:14.320 --> 00:17:15.500 Training.talkpython.fm. 00:17:15.500 --> 00:17:21.620 And I was sort of exploring the, like, how am I going to get the word out about this? 00:17:21.620 --> 00:17:22.620 What is the right way? 00:17:22.620 --> 00:17:25.720 Should I just talk about the podcast or, you know, what should I do? 00:17:25.720 --> 00:17:25.900 Right. 00:17:25.900 --> 00:17:31.400 And I came across your Kickstarter thinking like, wow, there's actually like a real need 00:17:31.400 --> 00:17:31.580 here. 00:17:31.580 --> 00:17:33.160 People seem to be really into this. 00:17:33.160 --> 00:17:35.080 And it was, it was well done. 00:17:35.080 --> 00:17:35.460 Good job. 00:17:35.460 --> 00:17:35.720 Yeah. 00:17:35.720 --> 00:17:36.060 Thank you. 00:17:36.060 --> 00:17:38.000 I actually wrote a blog post. 00:17:38.000 --> 00:17:42.760 I don't remember if it was after the second or the third Kickstarter, but it's on segment.com 00:17:42.760 --> 00:17:43.800 or something like that. 00:17:43.800 --> 00:17:49.000 But it's on how to use Kickstarter to model sort of like the lean philosophy. 00:17:49.000 --> 00:17:53.060 So how can you get something out there real quick just to see if you can get product market 00:17:53.060 --> 00:17:53.420 fit? 00:17:53.420 --> 00:17:56.620 And I was really into the lean philosophy at the time and still am. 00:17:56.620 --> 00:17:59.280 So I think you can use Kickstarter for that. 00:17:59.280 --> 00:17:59.800 I do too. 00:17:59.800 --> 00:18:04.860 I think Kickstarter is a little bit of a challenge because you have to have a little bit of an 00:18:04.860 --> 00:18:09.080 audience or you've got to have a really good marketing team or you have to be lucky. 00:18:09.080 --> 00:18:09.320 Right. 00:18:09.320 --> 00:18:09.640 Right. 00:18:09.640 --> 00:18:13.220 Like you already had maybe a little bit of an audience around the real Python stuff. 00:18:13.360 --> 00:18:16.160 So it was enough to get it rolling, right? 00:18:16.160 --> 00:18:16.480 Yeah. 00:18:16.480 --> 00:18:21.440 You really want to get to your hundred percent level really within the first couple of days 00:18:21.440 --> 00:18:23.200 because it's really the popularity bias. 00:18:23.200 --> 00:18:24.900 Kickstarter will start promoting it. 00:18:24.900 --> 00:18:28.480 People want to invest and be part in something that's popular. 00:18:28.480 --> 00:18:33.060 So really getting to that hundred percent of your goal within the first couple of days. 00:18:33.060 --> 00:18:36.720 And that was really what I really focused on at first. 00:18:36.860 --> 00:18:42.100 So like if you need $5,000, maybe actually put it at $2,000 so that way you get up there 00:18:42.100 --> 00:18:42.980 much quicker. 00:18:42.980 --> 00:18:44.240 I absolutely agree. 00:18:44.240 --> 00:18:48.500 And anyone who is out there thinking about having a Kickstarter, it's absolutely about 00:18:48.500 --> 00:18:53.020 getting to your goal as quick as possible, even if that's not your real goal. 00:18:53.020 --> 00:18:53.540 Right. 00:18:53.540 --> 00:18:59.140 Because like you said, the way Kickstarter, I launched my first course on Kickstarter as 00:18:59.140 --> 00:19:01.920 well, and it was funded in 12 hours. 00:19:01.920 --> 00:19:07.160 And then it spent like three weeks, the number one Kickstarter on software on Kickstarter. 00:19:07.160 --> 00:19:08.280 Yeah. 00:19:08.280 --> 00:19:15.140 And it's, I could have put $20,000 for it and may, I probably would have funded maybe, but 00:19:15.140 --> 00:19:19.940 I put like, I don't remember what I put like three or something silly, like something small 00:19:19.940 --> 00:19:21.640 because I was going to do it anyway. 00:19:21.640 --> 00:19:23.000 I was going to write the course anyway. 00:19:23.000 --> 00:19:27.960 So it's, it's not like it was hardware and I would have to invest in like a bunch of CNC 00:19:27.960 --> 00:19:31.180 machines and dyes and like, I'm going to do it anyway. 00:19:31.180 --> 00:19:34.040 And I don't exactly need the money to pay to do it. 00:19:34.040 --> 00:19:39.860 All the money would really help basically take the edge off of the nervousness of like quitting 00:19:39.860 --> 00:19:40.680 your job and doing that. 00:19:40.680 --> 00:19:40.940 Right. 00:19:40.940 --> 00:19:41.460 Right. 00:19:41.460 --> 00:19:44.500 But it's, yeah, it's, it's super important to get it funded quick. 00:19:44.500 --> 00:19:44.760 Yeah. 00:19:44.760 --> 00:19:45.400 Yeah. 00:19:45.400 --> 00:19:46.760 I mean, we would have done it anyway too. 00:19:46.760 --> 00:19:49.800 It was just, you know, an extra way to bring in a little bit of revenue. 00:19:50.160 --> 00:19:54.160 And then, yeah, it was just also sort of the popularity around that. 00:19:54.160 --> 00:19:56.400 We got our name out a little bit more with Kickstarter. 00:19:56.400 --> 00:19:57.080 Yeah, absolutely. 00:19:57.080 --> 00:20:01.820 You know, one thing that was really surprising to me was I thought like the vast majority of 00:20:01.820 --> 00:20:06.460 the funders of the Kickstarter would be people that I would somehow tell about either on social 00:20:06.460 --> 00:20:09.240 media or on the podcast or some other way. 00:20:09.240 --> 00:20:09.480 Right. 00:20:10.260 --> 00:20:14.360 And 40% came just from Kickstarter, not from me. 00:20:14.360 --> 00:20:14.440 Yeah. 00:20:14.440 --> 00:20:15.640 It was really surprising. 00:20:15.640 --> 00:20:17.280 So I think that was quite a good deal. 00:20:17.280 --> 00:20:17.520 Yeah. 00:20:20.040 --> 00:20:22.960 This portion of Talk Python To Me is brought to you by Linode. 00:20:22.960 --> 00:20:26.680 Are you looking for hosting that's fast, simple, and incredibly affordable? 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00:21:08.240 --> 00:21:10.940 Just visit talkpython.fm/Linode. 00:21:10.940 --> 00:21:14.440 So you had these three courses originally. 00:21:14.440 --> 00:21:15.840 Do you remember what they were, the names? 00:21:15.840 --> 00:21:19.160 So it was real, I mean, it was basically real Python 1, 2, and 3. 00:21:19.160 --> 00:21:24.360 We didn't really have like, you know, names for it, but real, you know, the first real Python 00:21:24.360 --> 00:21:26.520 course was just the Python fundamentals. 00:21:26.520 --> 00:21:30.140 The second one was web development and I guess unofficially Flask. 00:21:30.140 --> 00:21:34.380 And then the third one was just more of a little bit more of an advanced course. 00:21:34.380 --> 00:21:35.820 And that was all Django based. 00:21:35.820 --> 00:21:36.760 Yeah, that's really cool. 00:21:36.820 --> 00:21:40.040 How long did it take for you to write the courses? 00:21:40.040 --> 00:21:45.360 So I'm the author of the second course and I want to say six months. 00:21:45.360 --> 00:21:46.000 Yeah. 00:21:46.000 --> 00:21:47.340 Sounds about right. 00:21:47.340 --> 00:21:49.860 How long is it for the students to take the course? 00:21:49.860 --> 00:21:52.440 Oh gosh, there is so much content there. 00:21:52.440 --> 00:21:55.460 There's way, way too much content. 00:21:55.520 --> 00:22:00.000 Yeah, I would probably say it's like six or 700, you know, pages of content there. 00:22:00.000 --> 00:22:05.640 And it goes into web fundamentals, you know, it goes into HTTP, goes into web scraping. 00:22:05.640 --> 00:22:09.100 And then you sort of build a CGI based framework. 00:22:09.100 --> 00:22:11.020 And then you go into Flask. 00:22:11.020 --> 00:22:13.420 And then I do a little bit of Web 2 Pie. 00:22:13.420 --> 00:22:17.740 Oh, and then actually at the end of the course, there is a bit of Django that sort of leads 00:22:17.740 --> 00:22:19.200 into the last course. 00:22:19.300 --> 00:22:20.460 Yeah, that's a lot of content. 00:22:20.460 --> 00:22:25.720 You got to get yourself in the right mindset to work on something that's going to be six 00:22:25.720 --> 00:22:27.840 months out before you know whether it's successful. 00:22:27.840 --> 00:22:33.000 And, you know, just work on something that long before you figure out whether it was a good 00:22:33.000 --> 00:22:33.260 idea. 00:22:33.260 --> 00:22:39.680 Yeah, it takes a lot of planning, a lot of discipline, a lot of pain, a lot of lonely 00:22:39.680 --> 00:22:40.120 nights. 00:22:40.120 --> 00:22:42.080 But it's rewarding in the end, right? 00:22:42.080 --> 00:22:42.860 Yes, yes. 00:22:42.860 --> 00:22:44.040 I think so. 00:22:44.040 --> 00:22:47.700 Although I would say like, if you actually want to make money, don't write a book. 00:22:47.700 --> 00:22:49.620 But I keep writing books. 00:22:49.620 --> 00:22:52.360 So I should probably actually listen to my own advice here. 00:22:52.360 --> 00:22:53.560 Yeah, someday maybe, right? 00:22:53.560 --> 00:22:54.420 Right. 00:22:54.420 --> 00:22:55.240 That's funny. 00:22:55.240 --> 00:22:56.180 Another life. 00:22:56.180 --> 00:22:56.880 Yeah, for sure. 00:22:56.880 --> 00:23:02.160 So RealPython now, realpython.com now has more than just those three courses, right? 00:23:02.160 --> 00:23:03.940 There's like a ton of content. 00:23:03.940 --> 00:23:08.340 And when I throw it into the various analytics systems, that'll tell me like the amount of 00:23:08.340 --> 00:23:10.800 traffic going to realpython.com and stuff. 00:23:10.800 --> 00:23:12.600 It's pretty seriously impressive. 00:23:12.600 --> 00:23:19.440 You guys show up or that site that you built rather shows up quite high on a lot of Google 00:23:19.440 --> 00:23:20.920 searches for anything to do with Python. 00:23:20.920 --> 00:23:22.400 Yeah, it's pretty, pretty incredible. 00:23:22.400 --> 00:23:24.320 I don't own RealPython anymore. 00:23:24.320 --> 00:23:26.300 Dan Bader actually took that over. 00:23:26.300 --> 00:23:32.060 But yeah, he has done an amazing job of really kind of creating a sort of like New Yorker-esque 00:23:32.060 --> 00:23:34.020 type magazine for Python. 00:23:34.020 --> 00:23:38.120 He hired somebody to do all the graphic design. 00:23:38.120 --> 00:23:43.460 And each individual article has its own like unique sort of graphic to it. 00:23:43.460 --> 00:23:45.460 And then, yeah, there's more courses on there now. 00:23:45.460 --> 00:23:48.480 So it's really incredible just to see what he has done. 00:23:48.480 --> 00:23:50.900 Yeah, I'm super impressed with what Dan has done. 00:23:50.900 --> 00:23:53.420 And he's really turned the knob up a little bit more. 00:23:53.420 --> 00:23:55.940 And he's got a lot of people participating. 00:23:56.460 --> 00:24:00.620 And whenever there's an article on there, it's not just one of these, you know, like three 00:24:00.620 --> 00:24:05.760 paragraph and then a bunch of like weird, unrelated other articles at the bottom. 00:24:05.760 --> 00:24:08.860 Those are like little mini books almost, right? 00:24:08.860 --> 00:24:11.640 Like those are serious articles that Dan's putting together. 00:24:11.800 --> 00:24:15.360 Yeah, his articles focus a little more on the Python basics or fundamentals. 00:24:15.360 --> 00:24:17.660 So they'll probably stand the test of time a little bit more. 00:24:17.660 --> 00:24:19.420 I like I enjoyed the website. 00:24:19.420 --> 00:24:23.400 And so I focused a little bit more on like the practical sort of tutorials. 00:24:23.400 --> 00:24:27.600 And those are out of date within, you know, could be within hours, you know, depending on 00:24:27.600 --> 00:24:28.100 what happens. 00:24:28.100 --> 00:24:34.140 But yeah, I mean, they definitely don't stand the test of time quite as well as the fundamentals. 00:24:34.140 --> 00:24:36.160 Yeah, that's definitely a challenge for sure. 00:24:36.160 --> 00:24:41.020 So I think Dan is doing a super job with RealPython, but why did you guys sell it? 00:24:41.020 --> 00:24:42.860 Well, I mean, different opportunities came our way. 00:24:42.860 --> 00:24:45.660 We wanted to focus on other things. 00:24:45.660 --> 00:24:51.280 The original founder, Fletcher Heisler, he was getting into security and he actually started 00:24:51.280 --> 00:24:53.340 a company called Hunter 2. 00:24:53.340 --> 00:24:58.100 And he went through Y Combinator and I believe he's still working on that. 00:24:58.100 --> 00:25:02.860 Jeremy ended up, he had a software testing business. 00:25:02.860 --> 00:25:06.080 He lived abroad in Malaysia for a number of years. 00:25:06.080 --> 00:25:10.660 He moved his wife and his family to Cambridge and got a job at Harvard. 00:25:10.660 --> 00:25:14.580 And yeah, I wanted to focus a little bit more on teaching. 00:25:14.580 --> 00:25:20.500 And also I wanted to focus on sort of teaching more intermediate to advanced level developers, 00:25:20.500 --> 00:25:23.820 just those that could already build sort of a crud up. 00:25:23.820 --> 00:25:26.600 And so that transitions us into test revenue. 00:25:26.600 --> 00:25:27.660 Yeah, absolutely. 00:25:27.660 --> 00:25:29.820 That sounds totally normal, right? 00:25:29.820 --> 00:25:33.480 Like you have a couple of people working on stuff and they just kind of start to drift 00:25:33.480 --> 00:25:34.360 in different directions. 00:25:34.360 --> 00:25:40.340 And working on something like RealPython.com, it takes a lot of not just effort, but like 00:25:40.340 --> 00:25:41.540 enthusiasm, right? 00:25:41.540 --> 00:25:45.120 You're like, okay, you know, you have to wake up and go, okay, there's this great new topic 00:25:45.120 --> 00:25:47.020 I want to write this article about. 00:25:47.100 --> 00:25:51.320 And if you're just distracted with other things that are more, you know, seem more valuable 00:25:51.320 --> 00:25:53.500 to you at the moment, then it's hard to do that, right? 00:25:53.500 --> 00:25:54.100 Yeah. 00:25:54.100 --> 00:25:57.740 Do you think it would have been different if just one person ran it? 00:25:57.740 --> 00:26:00.000 Like let's say if it was just you running it by yourself? 00:26:00.000 --> 00:26:01.400 I think I would have burned out quicker. 00:26:01.400 --> 00:26:03.780 I think I would have moved on quicker. 00:26:03.780 --> 00:26:04.400 Interesting. 00:26:04.620 --> 00:26:04.860 Yeah. 00:26:04.860 --> 00:26:06.180 I don't know. 00:26:06.180 --> 00:26:07.220 That's difficult to say. 00:26:07.220 --> 00:26:11.960 But yeah, I think if it may have just been my baby, I may have like stuck with it and, 00:26:11.960 --> 00:26:12.880 you know, seen it through. 00:26:12.880 --> 00:26:19.040 But since it was, you know, all three of ours, we just kind of were both at a point or all 00:26:19.040 --> 00:26:22.060 of us were at a point where it's like, hey, this is a good time to transition. 00:26:22.060 --> 00:26:22.820 Yeah, that makes sense. 00:26:22.820 --> 00:26:27.280 I couldn't guess really whether it would mean like you'd be done with it sooner or with you 00:26:27.280 --> 00:26:31.120 would have like, you know, had a little more like, I'm just going to guide it my way. 00:26:31.260 --> 00:26:31.380 Yeah. 00:26:31.380 --> 00:26:31.860 Interesting. 00:26:31.860 --> 00:26:32.640 All right. 00:26:32.640 --> 00:26:34.560 So yeah, you mentioned test driven. 00:26:34.560 --> 00:26:36.020 Let's talk about test driven. 00:26:36.020 --> 00:26:43.060 So your current project is test driven.io and it looks somewhat similar to the way you 00:26:43.060 --> 00:26:45.100 described the origin of real Python itself. 00:26:45.100 --> 00:26:45.460 Yeah. 00:26:45.460 --> 00:26:50.640 So test driven really came from a similar origin as real Python. 00:26:50.640 --> 00:26:53.360 Whereas real Python, there are no beginner courses on the market. 00:26:53.360 --> 00:26:58.420 Test driven came about because there were basically too many beginner courses on the market and 00:26:58.420 --> 00:27:00.920 there are not enough intermediate to advanced level courses. 00:27:00.920 --> 00:27:07.220 And also I was sort of transitioning from, I'd say, application development more towards 00:27:07.220 --> 00:27:08.920 infrastructure platform development. 00:27:08.920 --> 00:27:11.620 I kind of wanted to write a little bit more about that. 00:27:11.620 --> 00:27:16.680 Microservices, Docker, Kubernetes, you know, all the latest buzzwords these days. 00:27:16.680 --> 00:27:17.020 Yeah. 00:27:17.020 --> 00:27:17.260 Yeah. 00:27:17.260 --> 00:27:19.540 We'll definitely talk about that a little bit. 00:27:19.540 --> 00:27:24.060 It sounds to me a little bit like some of these courses are coming from your experience 00:27:24.060 --> 00:27:28.480 of running things like real Python and other consulting projects that you're doing. 00:27:28.480 --> 00:27:31.380 kind of like I mentioned before, the build versus buy story. 00:27:31.380 --> 00:27:31.740 Yeah. 00:27:31.740 --> 00:27:32.080 Yeah. 00:27:32.080 --> 00:27:34.920 They definitely come from a real world experience. 00:27:34.920 --> 00:27:40.480 Just at my last couple of, you know, full-time gigs, just moving a little bit more towards 00:27:40.480 --> 00:27:45.100 DevOps side of things or platform, you know, developments and helping companies transition 00:27:45.100 --> 00:27:47.360 into more of like a DevOps-y type mindset. 00:27:47.360 --> 00:27:47.780 Yeah. 00:27:47.780 --> 00:27:48.240 Yeah. 00:27:48.240 --> 00:27:48.700 That's really cool. 00:27:49.080 --> 00:27:54.200 So right now it looks like you have microservices with Docker, Flask and React and real-time apps 00:27:54.200 --> 00:27:55.820 with Django channels and Angular. 00:27:55.820 --> 00:28:02.520 And they definitely have this flavor of Python on the back end and rich JavaScript front-end 00:28:02.520 --> 00:28:04.720 frameworks like React or Angular. 00:28:04.720 --> 00:28:05.040 Yeah. 00:28:05.120 --> 00:28:06.840 Is that kind of your vibe these days? 00:28:06.840 --> 00:28:08.140 How you like to build web apps? 00:28:08.140 --> 00:28:08.580 Yeah. 00:28:08.580 --> 00:28:08.920 Yeah. 00:28:08.920 --> 00:28:13.620 The stacks that I work on are usually Django or Flask on the back end. 00:28:13.620 --> 00:28:19.220 And then, you know, some sort of single-page application type framework like React, Angular 00:28:19.220 --> 00:28:20.800 Vue on the client side. 00:28:20.800 --> 00:28:21.100 Nice. 00:28:21.180 --> 00:28:24.300 I've been doing some stuff with Vue lately and I'm really enjoying it. 00:28:24.300 --> 00:28:26.240 What's your favorite front-end framework these days? 00:28:26.240 --> 00:28:27.600 I like Vue too. 00:28:27.600 --> 00:28:29.360 You can move a little bit faster with Vue. 00:28:29.360 --> 00:28:33.540 You do get the two-way binding with Vue that you don't get from Angular and React. 00:28:33.540 --> 00:28:36.280 So just spinning up forms is so much easier. 00:28:36.280 --> 00:28:39.360 I don't know as much about Vue at scale, though. 00:28:39.360 --> 00:28:42.900 I don't know if you can lock down two-way binding back down to one-way binding. 00:28:42.900 --> 00:28:46.020 But I definitely like the Vue way of doing things. 00:28:46.020 --> 00:28:46.700 Yeah, I do too. 00:28:46.700 --> 00:28:47.700 It's quite nice. 00:28:48.040 --> 00:28:51.240 testdriven.io itself, is this built on Python? 00:28:51.240 --> 00:28:52.680 Like, how are you running that site? 00:28:52.680 --> 00:28:54.760 So yeah, it's a Django back end. 00:28:54.760 --> 00:28:59.700 I am using server-side templating because I don't think single-page applications are for 00:28:59.700 --> 00:29:02.740 everything, especially when you're a single-person development team. 00:29:02.740 --> 00:29:05.880 So I can move a little bit faster with server-side templating. 00:29:05.880 --> 00:29:09.300 And then I just use just vanilla JavaScript on the client. 00:29:09.300 --> 00:29:11.240 That's always an interesting tension, isn't it? 00:29:11.240 --> 00:29:16.960 Of having just a full-on JavaScript front-end type of app versus, you know, like you said, 00:29:16.960 --> 00:29:17.840 a server-side app. 00:29:17.840 --> 00:29:18.240 Yeah. 00:29:18.240 --> 00:29:18.640 I don't know. 00:29:18.640 --> 00:29:20.780 I'm still a little bit partial to the server-side stuff. 00:29:20.780 --> 00:29:23.200 I feel like the SEO is a little simpler a lot of times. 00:29:23.200 --> 00:29:25.660 There's less compatibility to worry about. 00:29:25.660 --> 00:29:29.900 Like, if I send the HTML, I know that's the HTML they got, not like what kind of JavaScript 00:29:29.900 --> 00:29:33.620 platform are they running, like some crappy old browser or something like that. 00:29:33.620 --> 00:29:33.880 Right. 00:29:33.880 --> 00:29:34.080 Yeah. 00:29:34.080 --> 00:29:38.700 If you're using a single-page application, then yeah, you have to actually guide the search 00:29:38.700 --> 00:29:43.460 engine to crawl through the, kind of trick the search engine almost to like crawl all 00:29:43.460 --> 00:29:43.960 the pages. 00:29:44.300 --> 00:29:46.820 So you get SEI out of the box with server-side templating. 00:29:46.820 --> 00:29:51.920 Also, I'm not maintaining a lot of state between views on the client side, so it just made sense 00:29:51.920 --> 00:29:53.680 to keep, to stick with server-side templating. 00:29:53.680 --> 00:29:53.980 Yeah. 00:29:53.980 --> 00:29:54.300 Right. 00:29:54.300 --> 00:29:58.600 If you're going to pull down a bunch of data and continually work with it, like Gmail or Google 00:29:58.600 --> 00:30:00.060 Maps or something like that, right? 00:30:00.060 --> 00:30:02.380 Then like all of a sudden it makes a lot more sense perhaps. 00:30:02.380 --> 00:30:02.720 Yeah. 00:30:02.820 --> 00:30:03.060 Okay. 00:30:03.060 --> 00:30:03.560 Cool. 00:30:03.560 --> 00:30:04.920 So people can check that out. 00:30:04.920 --> 00:30:06.860 That's definitely a nice project. 00:30:06.860 --> 00:30:12.480 And I think maybe let's dig into some of the philosophies or steps that kind of got you to running 00:30:12.480 --> 00:30:13.460 that on Django. 00:30:13.460 --> 00:30:18.520 Originally, were you working with Flask and then got converted over to Django? 00:30:18.520 --> 00:30:19.120 Is that right? 00:30:19.340 --> 00:30:19.640 Yeah. 00:30:19.640 --> 00:30:24.740 So, I mean, we fast or we go back, you know, five or six years, something like that. 00:30:24.740 --> 00:30:26.180 And I was entirely Django. 00:30:26.180 --> 00:30:30.340 Well, and somewhere along the way, it was like, oh, Flask is really cool. 00:30:30.340 --> 00:30:32.020 So let's work with Flask. 00:30:32.020 --> 00:30:37.740 I can sort of rebuild Django in the way that I see fit for that particular application. 00:30:38.120 --> 00:30:42.200 And then I was talking to my friend William Vincent over the summer. 00:30:42.200 --> 00:30:44.340 And he's a big Django guy. 00:30:44.340 --> 00:30:50.800 He wrote a couple of Django courses or Django books, Django for Beginners and API development 00:30:50.800 --> 00:30:51.800 one for Django. 00:30:51.800 --> 00:30:53.240 The name is escaping me right now. 00:30:53.240 --> 00:30:53.540 Yeah. 00:30:53.540 --> 00:30:54.840 I just had him on the show, actually. 00:30:54.840 --> 00:30:55.360 Yeah. 00:30:55.360 --> 00:31:01.380 And he convinced me to move to Django and he wanted to hack on the application as well. 00:31:01.380 --> 00:31:05.820 And so it was an opportunity to look back at Django and pick that up. 00:31:05.820 --> 00:31:06.840 So just ran with it. 00:31:06.840 --> 00:31:07.300 Yeah, it's cool. 00:31:07.400 --> 00:31:09.620 It feels like Django is definitely still going strong, right? 00:31:09.620 --> 00:31:14.760 They just did their 2.0 release and dropped Legacy Python support and are talking about 00:31:14.760 --> 00:31:17.940 the async future as whatever that might be. 00:31:17.940 --> 00:31:19.620 But it seems like things are going well there. 00:31:19.620 --> 00:31:19.940 Yeah. 00:31:19.940 --> 00:31:20.280 Yeah. 00:31:20.280 --> 00:31:21.360 I'm really impressed. 00:31:21.360 --> 00:31:22.940 Django 2.2 is coming out here soon. 00:31:22.940 --> 00:31:24.540 That's the next LTS release. 00:31:24.540 --> 00:31:28.800 And then Django 3 at the end of the year should have a bunch of async madness in it. 00:31:28.800 --> 00:31:29.040 Yeah. 00:31:29.040 --> 00:31:30.960 Actually, that'll be really fun. 00:31:30.960 --> 00:31:36.580 I think async is interesting because it's something that most people don't really need, but it's often 00:31:36.680 --> 00:31:43.440 something that people feel like, oh, I can't use Python for this because it doesn't have this amazing async support on the server or whatever. 00:31:43.440 --> 00:31:50.520 In practice, most of the time, people don't actually have the problem that they feel like they're trying to avoid or get out of. 00:31:50.520 --> 00:31:53.700 I mean, sometimes they do, but it will be great to have async on the server. 00:31:53.700 --> 00:31:55.060 And there are some already, right? 00:31:55.120 --> 00:31:56.300 Like we have court. 00:31:56.300 --> 00:31:57.420 We have Sanic. 00:31:57.420 --> 00:31:59.880 We have responder from Kenneth Reitz. 00:31:59.880 --> 00:32:06.600 There's certainly some options, but it'll be cool to have these more mainstream, really popular frameworks. 00:32:06.600 --> 00:32:08.980 Just get this feature, right? 00:32:08.980 --> 00:32:09.320 Yeah. 00:32:09.320 --> 00:32:13.520 I see actually async.io more and more in code bases these days. 00:32:13.520 --> 00:32:15.720 Just little things here and there. 00:32:15.960 --> 00:32:22.480 But yeah, it will be exciting to have that full potential, the full async capabilities in the Django views. 00:32:22.720 --> 00:32:23.060 Yeah, absolutely. 00:32:23.060 --> 00:32:23.440 All right. 00:32:23.440 --> 00:32:31.180 So another thing that I think was interesting is this whole monolith versus microservices debate, right? 00:32:31.200 --> 00:32:37.080 Like you can have a little bit more complicated, big monolith application where everything works together and fits together. 00:32:37.080 --> 00:32:38.840 And the complexity is kind of in the code. 00:32:38.840 --> 00:32:44.020 Or you can say, let's break it into a bunch of little pieces or a bunch of little simple services that work together. 00:32:44.020 --> 00:32:48.000 And then the complexity kind of shifts to the infrastructure a little bit, right? 00:32:48.000 --> 00:32:53.880 I got to keep them all running and like talking and like what happens if one goes down and the other is not and all that. 00:32:53.880 --> 00:32:55.700 And I think it's a really great way of looking at it. 00:32:55.720 --> 00:33:02.300 You're sort of shifting the complexity around so it's not so much in the application like code base. 00:33:02.300 --> 00:33:06.440 And then it's more on sort of the infrastructure or the DevOps sort of people. 00:33:06.440 --> 00:33:09.040 So you should, in theory, have smaller code bases. 00:33:09.040 --> 00:33:12.140 Smaller code bases, you should have less bugs in them. 00:33:12.140 --> 00:33:14.460 You can throw juniors on them easier. 00:33:14.460 --> 00:33:14.800 Exactly, yeah. 00:33:14.800 --> 00:33:16.320 You should be able to move a little bit faster. 00:33:16.320 --> 00:33:21.940 Yeah, which is interesting because if you're like a big company and you've got some big site, you can break in little pieces. 00:33:21.940 --> 00:33:26.980 And like you said, you can throw some junior folks to maintain this part, this little microservice. 00:33:26.980 --> 00:33:30.380 And that you don't have to understand the whole giant thing, right? 00:33:30.380 --> 00:33:35.380 So you can sort of have each person divvy up the work in a more clear, simple way. 00:33:35.380 --> 00:33:37.540 And if you have a lot of people working on it, that's great. 00:33:37.540 --> 00:33:42.900 But, you know, I feel like a lot of folks want to say, well, I need to have all these microservices. 00:33:42.900 --> 00:33:46.440 But really, they're just like one or two devs on that project. 00:33:46.440 --> 00:33:50.100 You know, it's like, well, does that really help? 00:33:50.100 --> 00:33:51.460 You know, is that really a good idea? 00:33:51.460 --> 00:33:51.940 What do you think? 00:33:51.940 --> 00:33:53.020 Definitely not a great idea. 00:33:53.020 --> 00:33:59.740 I think with microservices, I think too many folks tend to focus on sort of the technology side. 00:33:59.740 --> 00:34:04.060 So learning Kubernetes or learning Docker, you know, learning whatever it is. 00:34:04.060 --> 00:34:05.500 It's always fun to learn these things, right? 00:34:05.500 --> 00:34:08.060 You're like, oh, this will be my chance to like learn this way. 00:34:08.060 --> 00:34:12.040 And then microservices, then on pods, and we're just going to scale it and it'll be beautiful, right? 00:34:12.040 --> 00:34:12.340 Right. 00:34:12.340 --> 00:34:13.880 But I think it's more of a culture shift. 00:34:13.980 --> 00:34:20.600 I think you have to focus more on top-down culture shift where you can't just take your normal like siloed teams. 00:34:20.600 --> 00:34:32.700 So maybe a back-end team, front-end team, QA, operations, and sort of introduce microservices in an environment where each team is siloed and just tossing artifacts over the fence to the next team. 00:34:32.820 --> 00:34:48.380 So you sort of have to look at the culture, maybe introduce feature teams, but start bringing in folks, bringing in teams that can start product inception all the way to delivery and introduce that type of change in your organization before introducing microservices. 00:34:48.380 --> 00:34:52.220 Yeah. 00:34:52.220 --> 00:34:56.480 Well, also, I think, you know, it makes a lot of sense to play to your strengths, right? 00:34:56.480 --> 00:35:06.200 If your strengths are running the infrastructure and Kubernetes and all of these things, microservices are probably the right way to go because you can balance that really well. 00:35:06.200 --> 00:35:15.260 But if you just learn Django and you're thinking, well, I need to get my app out there, you're probably better off focusing on just like, well, let's just push it to Heroku or something like that. 00:35:15.260 --> 00:35:15.780 Yeah, exactly. 00:35:15.780 --> 00:35:16.260 Interesting. 00:35:16.880 --> 00:35:23.800 So on Python Bytes, other podcasts, we spoke about this a while ago about how you're not Google, you're not Facebook, you're not LinkedIn. 00:35:23.800 --> 00:35:30.400 And a lot of engineers will see the really cool stuff, like let's say Instagram is doing with Django. 00:35:30.400 --> 00:35:32.700 And they're like, well, that's how you do it, right? 00:35:32.700 --> 00:35:34.360 I want my app to be good and professional. 00:35:34.360 --> 00:35:36.600 So it's going to be like that, right? 00:35:36.600 --> 00:35:45.020 But their app gets, you know, 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 visitors a day, not per second, right? 00:35:45.020 --> 00:35:47.860 And so there's not 20, 30, 50 people working on it. 00:35:47.860 --> 00:35:57.280 And so I think in the industry, there's a lot of sort of admiration of the big successful applications and then trying to model that. 00:35:57.280 --> 00:35:57.560 Right. 00:35:57.560 --> 00:36:06.040 And a lot of times I think that can be, it's like a little bit like the code level equivalent of premature optimization where you're like, oh, this has got to be super fast. 00:36:06.080 --> 00:36:07.560 You're like, you know what, make it right. 00:36:07.560 --> 00:36:09.800 We're not making it fast when it matters, right? 00:36:09.800 --> 00:36:10.620 What do you think? 00:36:10.620 --> 00:36:12.860 Well, yeah, you definitely have to pick and choose your battles. 00:36:12.860 --> 00:36:14.300 You can't do everything. 00:36:14.300 --> 00:36:26.020 So if you're a single person team or, you know, you have two or three developers, you probably want to focus a little bit more on the application rather than the infrastructure, unless the infrastructure is sort of your bread and butter. 00:36:26.020 --> 00:36:33.440 But yeah, you just really need to think from a product standpoint, you know, what is differentiating my product from the market? 00:36:33.440 --> 00:36:38.220 Is it the actual, you know, what's in the application or is it something to do with the infrastructure? 00:36:41.360 --> 00:36:47.620 This portion of Talk Python To Me is brought to you by StellarS, the AI-powered talent agent for top tech talent. 00:36:47.620 --> 00:36:50.620 Hate your job or feeling just kind of meh about it? 00:36:50.620 --> 00:36:55.120 StellarS will help you find a new job you'll actually be excited to go to. 00:36:55.120 --> 00:36:59.520 StellarS knows that a job is much more than just how it sounds in a job description. 00:36:59.520 --> 00:37:03.760 So they built their AI-powered talent agent to help you find the ideal job. 00:37:03.760 --> 00:37:08.780 StellarS does all the work and screening for you, scouting out the best companies and roles 00:37:08.780 --> 00:37:13.420 and introducing you to opportunities outside your network that you wouldn't have otherwise found. 00:37:13.420 --> 00:37:19.560 Combining deep AI matching with human support, StellarS pairs things down to a maximum of five opportunities 00:37:19.560 --> 00:37:26.220 that tightly match your goals, like compensation, work-life balance, working on products you're passionate about, and team chemistry. 00:37:26.220 --> 00:37:33.180 They then facilitate warm intros, and there's never any pressure, just opportunities to explore what's out there. 00:37:33.180 --> 00:37:38.960 To get started and find a job that's just right for you, visit talkpython.fm/StellarS. 00:37:38.960 --> 00:37:44.100 That's talkpython.fm/S-T-E-L-L-A-R-E-S. 00:37:44.100 --> 00:37:46.900 Or just click the link in your show notes in your podcast player. 00:37:48.820 --> 00:38:02.000 Generally, the rule probably should be, if whatever the thing is, the part you're talking about, is not your core business, like, outsource that, get a package that does that, or, like, find some easy way to just make that get solved, you know? 00:38:02.000 --> 00:38:03.900 And focus on what's really important, right? 00:38:03.900 --> 00:38:04.640 What makes you special. 00:38:04.640 --> 00:38:04.940 Right. 00:38:04.940 --> 00:38:06.800 You don't have to reinvent the wheel for everything. 00:38:06.800 --> 00:38:07.300 Yeah, yeah. 00:38:07.300 --> 00:38:09.660 There's always an awesome Python you can go look up and find. 00:38:09.660 --> 00:38:11.340 Probably something right there. 00:38:11.340 --> 00:38:12.280 Yeah. 00:38:12.280 --> 00:38:12.900 Yeah. 00:38:12.900 --> 00:38:15.080 So how are you deploying testdriven.io? 00:38:15.080 --> 00:38:16.120 Are you, how's it running? 00:38:16.120 --> 00:38:16.900 Is it a monolith? 00:38:16.900 --> 00:38:17.600 Is it a microservice? 00:38:17.600 --> 00:38:18.820 Does it, where does it run? 00:38:18.820 --> 00:38:21.920 So it's a monolith, and yeah, I just did the easy thing. 00:38:21.920 --> 00:38:23.540 I just deployed it right directly to Heroku. 00:38:23.540 --> 00:38:24.600 Okay, nice. 00:38:24.600 --> 00:38:26.660 Yeah, I don't have that much experience with Heroku. 00:38:26.660 --> 00:38:29.440 More work with the virtual machines and stuff. 00:38:29.440 --> 00:38:33.000 But the people who I know who do use it, they seem to really like it. 00:38:33.000 --> 00:38:34.280 Like, what do you like about Heroku? 00:38:34.440 --> 00:38:37.560 Well, I guess first off, yeah, I am using a monolith and I am using Heroku. 00:38:37.560 --> 00:38:42.120 So it feels, it feels a little bit old school, even though these tools and technologies, you 00:38:42.120 --> 00:38:45.400 know, they're not that old, like 2005 or, you know, something like that. 00:38:45.400 --> 00:38:49.320 But it does feel dirty saying like, yeah, test driven is a monolith. 00:38:49.320 --> 00:38:53.720 Well, I think that just speaks to like some of this culture that I was talking about, right? 00:38:53.720 --> 00:38:59.740 Like, it's so easy to look and go, well, this is the way, you know, these big web apps 00:38:59.740 --> 00:39:01.660 are run and yours didn't like that. 00:39:01.660 --> 00:39:02.500 So it must be wrong. 00:39:02.560 --> 00:39:06.980 It's like, no, it's like, it's totally a different calculation when one or two or three 00:39:06.980 --> 00:39:10.760 people work on something versus a whole group or whole sets of teams, right? 00:39:10.760 --> 00:39:11.620 Yeah, definitely. 00:39:11.620 --> 00:39:12.000 Yeah. 00:39:12.000 --> 00:39:12.560 Interesting. 00:39:12.560 --> 00:39:15.160 So what features over at Heroku are you using? 00:39:15.160 --> 00:39:17.100 Like, are you using Postgres? 00:39:17.100 --> 00:39:17.980 What else? 00:39:17.980 --> 00:39:18.380 Tell me about it. 00:39:18.380 --> 00:39:21.800 Yeah, I think the powerful thing about Heroku is the add-on system. 00:39:21.800 --> 00:39:22.400 Okay. 00:39:22.400 --> 00:39:27.280 So instead of, you know, having to build a number of different tools and services and 00:39:27.280 --> 00:39:31.780 link them all together, you really just, you know, pop Gunicorn on there, pop Django on 00:39:31.780 --> 00:39:32.040 there. 00:39:32.040 --> 00:39:37.940 And then you can focus on using the Heroku add-on system for sort of like your remainder 00:39:37.940 --> 00:39:39.880 of tools that you need. 00:39:39.880 --> 00:39:48.020 So yeah, I use Postgres, Redis, use SendGrid, use Sentry, use Log Entries as my log aggregator. 00:39:48.020 --> 00:39:49.120 And then I use New Relic. 00:39:49.120 --> 00:39:52.460 And those are all just, they all come from the add-on system. 00:39:52.680 --> 00:39:54.860 So it takes minutes to basically set up. 00:39:54.860 --> 00:39:59.040 So now I can just focus, you know, 100% of my time on the actual application. 00:39:59.040 --> 00:39:59.360 Yeah. 00:39:59.360 --> 00:40:03.900 That's kind of the opposite of focusing on the microservices and juggling the infrastructure. 00:40:03.900 --> 00:40:06.400 That's like, just let them handle all that. 00:40:06.400 --> 00:40:07.640 Here's my code. 00:40:07.640 --> 00:40:08.840 Make it go. 00:40:08.840 --> 00:40:09.480 Yeah. 00:40:09.480 --> 00:40:12.660 And I mean, again, it depends on what you want to focus your time on. 00:40:12.660 --> 00:40:17.920 And yeah, I love tinkering with infrastructure and whatnot, but I did not want to do that for 00:40:17.920 --> 00:40:21.600 testdriven.io because I just wanted to get it up out the door. 00:40:22.120 --> 00:40:24.920 And yeah, maybe I'll start scaling out some bits and pieces of it. 00:40:24.920 --> 00:40:28.460 Like there's a separate service in there, or there's a couple of separate services that 00:40:28.460 --> 00:40:32.740 I want to actually break out or a couple of separate pieces of the app that I want to break 00:40:32.740 --> 00:40:33.880 out into separate services. 00:40:33.880 --> 00:40:36.660 So maybe I'll look in doing that here soon. 00:40:36.660 --> 00:40:41.680 But you know, the backlog is just full of bugs and features and stuff that I need to tackle 00:40:41.680 --> 00:40:43.740 first before I start looking at the fun stuff. 00:40:43.740 --> 00:40:46.140 It's more important to just like get content out there. 00:40:46.140 --> 00:40:46.460 Yeah. 00:40:46.460 --> 00:40:50.480 Once you have something working, then it is to like get some cool feature refactored. 00:40:50.480 --> 00:40:50.780 Yeah. 00:40:50.780 --> 00:40:51.200 Whatever. 00:40:51.560 --> 00:40:52.000 Interesting. 00:40:52.000 --> 00:40:52.740 Okay. 00:40:52.740 --> 00:40:54.660 Well, it sounds like that's working out really well for you. 00:40:54.660 --> 00:40:57.440 And like I said, people I've talked to also said the same thing. 00:40:57.440 --> 00:40:58.480 That's cool. 00:40:58.480 --> 00:41:02.240 Now, another thing that you have going on that I want to make sure we get a chance to talk 00:41:02.240 --> 00:41:04.800 about before we run out of time is Pi Colorado. 00:41:04.800 --> 00:41:05.780 Yeah, sure. 00:41:05.780 --> 00:41:06.100 Yeah. 00:41:06.100 --> 00:41:07.400 So what's the story? 00:41:07.400 --> 00:41:10.600 This is one of the local regional PyCons, right? 00:41:10.600 --> 00:41:12.820 In Colorado, I would guess, given the name there. 00:41:12.820 --> 00:41:13.160 Yeah. 00:41:13.300 --> 00:41:14.960 So basically, Pi Colorado. 00:41:14.960 --> 00:41:15.320 Yeah. 00:41:15.320 --> 00:41:17.260 It's going to be a regional PyCon. 00:41:17.260 --> 00:41:23.700 It's going to be the 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th of September of 2019. 00:41:23.700 --> 00:41:30.560 And it really just came about because Denver seems to get overlooked right now in terms of 00:41:30.560 --> 00:41:31.800 tech conferences and whatnot. 00:41:31.800 --> 00:41:34.040 And there's really a lot happening here. 00:41:34.180 --> 00:41:35.400 There's a lot of Python developers. 00:41:35.400 --> 00:41:36.880 There's a lot of JavaScript developers. 00:41:36.880 --> 00:41:38.780 I run a meetup in the area. 00:41:38.780 --> 00:41:40.140 I've ran it since 2013. 00:41:40.140 --> 00:41:41.900 But there's really a lot going on here. 00:41:41.900 --> 00:41:43.580 You also have the Boulder market here, too. 00:41:43.580 --> 00:41:46.680 So a lot of tech companies are moving their second headquarters here. 00:41:46.680 --> 00:41:48.500 Slack just moved their second headquarters. 00:41:48.500 --> 00:41:51.080 A couple, Quizlet as well, a couple other companies. 00:41:51.080 --> 00:41:53.140 But yeah, there's a lot going on here. 00:41:53.140 --> 00:41:56.280 And so we just felt like we needed some Python representation. 00:41:56.280 --> 00:41:56.960 That's nice. 00:41:56.960 --> 00:41:58.140 So you're involved with this, right? 00:41:58.140 --> 00:42:03.160 And so basically, it's one of these stories of, well, why isn't there this conference here? 00:42:03.280 --> 00:42:06.160 Like, well, maybe you just have to be the change you want to see in the world, right? 00:42:06.160 --> 00:42:06.520 Right. 00:42:06.520 --> 00:42:06.980 Yeah. 00:42:06.980 --> 00:42:07.460 Yeah. 00:42:07.460 --> 00:42:09.700 So I'm on the education side of things. 00:42:09.700 --> 00:42:11.460 So I'm going to be putting workshops together. 00:42:11.460 --> 00:42:15.040 So I think I'm officially the education chair of Pi Colorado. 00:42:15.040 --> 00:42:15.480 Okay. 00:42:15.480 --> 00:42:16.460 Nice. 00:42:16.460 --> 00:42:19.320 How, I know the tickets are not even on sale yet. 00:42:19.320 --> 00:42:21.920 So that's, no, maybe they are at the time of the release. 00:42:21.920 --> 00:42:23.860 But at the time of the recording, they're not yet on sale. 00:42:23.860 --> 00:42:28.900 So how big are you aiming for in terms of number of people? 00:42:28.900 --> 00:42:30.980 What are you expecting and things like that? 00:42:31.160 --> 00:42:36.240 I think it's somewhere between three and 400 people are what we're shooting for. 00:42:36.240 --> 00:42:40.100 And that includes like volunteers and whatnot, but three to 400 people. 00:42:40.100 --> 00:42:45.520 And so, yeah, tickets will be going on sale on March 4th, which, but yes, by the time that 00:42:45.520 --> 00:42:47.480 this airs, they will already be on sale. 00:42:47.480 --> 00:42:50.720 So the call for proposal and ticket sales do open March 4th. 00:42:50.940 --> 00:42:54.540 And then the CFP and ticket sales close on May 9th. 00:42:54.540 --> 00:42:54.680 Yeah. 00:42:54.680 --> 00:43:00.140 So if you're anywhere near Colorado or you want to go to Colorado, because, you know, 00:43:00.140 --> 00:43:02.040 Denver and Boulder, those are some of my favorite cities. 00:43:02.040 --> 00:43:03.240 Those are really nice places. 00:43:03.240 --> 00:43:03.660 Yeah. 00:43:03.660 --> 00:43:08.240 We'll probably put together like some like hikes and, you know, whatnot the, you know, days 00:43:08.240 --> 00:43:11.680 before, you know, days after a lot of breweries out here. 00:43:11.680 --> 00:43:15.520 It's just a lot of like cool, you know, type things that are happening right now in Colorado. 00:43:15.700 --> 00:43:15.820 Yeah. 00:43:15.820 --> 00:43:16.400 That's awesome. 00:43:16.400 --> 00:43:17.060 Yeah. 00:43:17.060 --> 00:43:18.300 So people could check that out. 00:43:18.300 --> 00:43:19.560 Is there a website they can go to? 00:43:19.560 --> 00:43:20.020 Yes. 00:43:20.020 --> 00:43:21.180 PyColorado.org. 00:43:21.180 --> 00:43:21.540 All right. 00:43:21.540 --> 00:43:21.820 Perfect. 00:43:21.820 --> 00:43:23.360 I'll put that in the show notes as well. 00:43:23.360 --> 00:43:24.320 But yeah. 00:43:24.320 --> 00:43:29.320 So if people want to speak there, a call for proposal should be open now by the time due 00:43:29.320 --> 00:43:32.700 to the magic of time shifting and podcasting that, that this releases. 00:43:32.700 --> 00:43:34.140 So they can check that out. 00:43:34.140 --> 00:43:35.400 If not, it should be like any day. 00:43:35.400 --> 00:43:35.620 Yeah. 00:43:35.620 --> 00:43:35.760 Yeah. 00:43:35.760 --> 00:43:36.040 Cool. 00:43:36.040 --> 00:43:42.840 So you said you're the education chair and I've been to the education summit at the main 00:43:42.840 --> 00:43:43.920 PyCon in North America. 00:43:45.020 --> 00:43:46.900 And I felt it was a little interesting. 00:43:46.900 --> 00:43:51.260 So like, I feel like I'm in education more or less in the Python space, right? 00:43:51.260 --> 00:43:53.860 With the podcasts and with the training courses and so on. 00:43:53.860 --> 00:43:58.460 And that feels like education to me, but I didn't feel exactly like that's what the focus 00:43:58.460 --> 00:44:01.840 of the education summit at PyCon was. 00:44:01.840 --> 00:44:06.820 It felt that was more a little bit towards like teachers at regular like high schools or 00:44:06.820 --> 00:44:09.740 working on projects with students that live in that space. 00:44:09.740 --> 00:44:11.120 Like what's the focus here? 00:44:11.340 --> 00:44:11.420 Yeah. 00:44:11.420 --> 00:44:16.100 So really the education chair, what I'm supposed to say, I'm like still like forming, you know, 00:44:16.100 --> 00:44:18.900 what it means, but it's really just going to be workshops. 00:44:18.900 --> 00:44:21.600 So we're going to have three different tracks for workshops. 00:44:21.600 --> 00:44:26.040 We're going to have Python, web development, and then data science. 00:44:26.040 --> 00:44:28.360 And the Python one is just going to be generic Python. 00:44:28.360 --> 00:44:32.660 And then from that, we'll have a beginner track and then have an intermediate to advanced level 00:44:32.660 --> 00:44:38.440 tracks where I am modeling it sort of after the PyCon workshops where they're a little bit 00:44:38.440 --> 00:44:38.820 longer. 00:44:38.820 --> 00:44:40.400 They are on a separate day. 00:44:40.400 --> 00:44:44.900 Some of the regional Python conferences, they do workshops, but they kind of stick them into 00:44:44.900 --> 00:44:46.220 like the other like talks. 00:44:46.380 --> 00:44:50.980 So I did a tutorial slash workshop at a regional conference. 00:44:50.980 --> 00:44:55.400 And I would say 90% of the people that came to it didn't even realize it was a workshop. 00:44:55.400 --> 00:45:01.100 So I'm just trying to do a good job of differentiating between, hey, this is a workshop and these are 00:45:01.100 --> 00:45:02.060 actually talks. 00:45:02.060 --> 00:45:02.400 Right. 00:45:02.400 --> 00:45:07.060 Like you should probably bring your laptop and prepare to be participating in a way, right? 00:45:07.060 --> 00:45:07.700 Yeah. 00:45:07.880 --> 00:45:12.940 So it sounds to me like your plan is this is like education for people to learn stuff 00:45:12.940 --> 00:45:19.060 about Python more than it is a separate segment for educators of Python. 00:45:19.060 --> 00:45:19.500 Is that right? 00:45:19.500 --> 00:45:19.820 Yeah. 00:45:19.820 --> 00:45:24.400 And we have been talking about maybe doing some sort of education summit similar to PyCon, 00:45:24.400 --> 00:45:29.120 maybe a little bit different, not targeting so much like high school and university type 00:45:29.120 --> 00:45:31.180 teachers, maybe targeting more people like yourself. 00:45:31.180 --> 00:45:36.400 But for right now, I am focusing most of my time on the workshop aspect of it. 00:45:36.400 --> 00:45:36.980 Oh, that's cool. 00:45:36.980 --> 00:45:39.500 Well, it sounds like it's going to be a great conference. 00:45:39.500 --> 00:45:43.840 I'm sure you're going to be worn out by the time September 10th arrives. 00:45:43.840 --> 00:45:44.960 Oh, I'm already worn out. 00:45:44.960 --> 00:45:47.500 It's a lot of work. 00:45:47.500 --> 00:45:48.000 It has. 00:45:48.000 --> 00:45:48.180 Yeah. 00:45:48.180 --> 00:45:48.460 Yeah. 00:45:48.460 --> 00:45:48.860 That's cool. 00:45:48.860 --> 00:45:53.380 I'm sure people will love it, but it's, there's so much stuff that happens behind the scenes 00:45:53.380 --> 00:45:55.060 and like not glorious stuff. 00:45:55.060 --> 00:45:55.260 Right. 00:45:55.260 --> 00:45:58.720 And not necessarily that you're doing, but like, who's going to make sure there are napkins? 00:45:58.720 --> 00:46:01.320 Who's going to make sure that there's food and proper food choices? 00:46:01.320 --> 00:46:04.380 And like, just, you know, what happens if this hotel sells out, right? 00:46:04.380 --> 00:46:05.980 There's just so much logistics, right? 00:46:06.080 --> 00:46:06.220 Yeah. 00:46:06.220 --> 00:46:07.260 We do have a napkin chair. 00:46:07.260 --> 00:46:09.120 Nice. 00:46:09.120 --> 00:46:09.900 Joking, joking. 00:46:09.900 --> 00:46:13.900 There is a chair just about for everything else though, but. 00:46:13.900 --> 00:46:14.440 Yeah. 00:46:14.440 --> 00:46:16.760 That's funny. 00:46:16.760 --> 00:46:17.460 Cool. 00:46:17.460 --> 00:46:17.800 All right. 00:46:17.800 --> 00:46:21.700 Well, it's like I said, it sounds like a cool conference and, you know, maybe I'll see if 00:46:21.700 --> 00:46:23.120 I can get out to Colorado as well. 00:46:23.120 --> 00:46:23.680 I don't know yet. 00:46:23.680 --> 00:46:25.780 It's a ways out, but it definitely sounds fun. 00:46:25.780 --> 00:46:26.960 I'm so glad you're doing that. 00:46:26.960 --> 00:46:27.180 It's cool. 00:46:27.180 --> 00:46:27.700 All right. 00:46:27.700 --> 00:46:32.680 Well, Michael, I think we should probably leave it there for all the main topics because 00:46:32.680 --> 00:46:34.220 we're getting short on time. 00:46:34.220 --> 00:46:38.240 But let me ask you the final two questions before we call it a day. 00:46:38.240 --> 00:46:43.620 If you're going to write some Python code or other code, even what editor do you use? 00:46:43.740 --> 00:46:44.560 I like VS Code. 00:46:44.560 --> 00:46:49.760 I typically, you know, go back and forth between front end JavaScript and back in Python. 00:46:49.760 --> 00:46:53.040 So VS Code provides a nice balance for me. 00:46:53.040 --> 00:46:53.320 Yeah. 00:46:53.320 --> 00:46:55.360 Visual Studio Code's pretty nice these days. 00:46:55.360 --> 00:47:01.040 And I hear when I started this podcast, there was a lot of them sort of answers and then a 00:47:01.040 --> 00:47:01.960 sprinkling of other. 00:47:01.960 --> 00:47:05.840 And I would say VS Code is probably the most popular choice these days. 00:47:05.840 --> 00:47:06.860 It's pretty impressive. 00:47:06.860 --> 00:47:07.260 Yeah. 00:47:07.260 --> 00:47:07.980 Yeah. 00:47:07.980 --> 00:47:13.600 I moved away from them when I started teaching because I wanted to use an editor that sort 00:47:13.600 --> 00:47:16.880 of students understood when they saw me like coding in front of them. 00:47:16.880 --> 00:47:20.340 And so I moved to move back to Sublime, moved to Atom. 00:47:20.340 --> 00:47:22.140 And now I am on VS Code. 00:47:22.140 --> 00:47:22.440 Yeah. 00:47:22.440 --> 00:47:27.260 Do you think it's interesting that Microsoft made Visual Studio Code? 00:47:27.260 --> 00:47:30.320 Do you feel like they had to like overcome a little bit of resistance? 00:47:30.320 --> 00:47:32.420 People going, oh, I don't want to use this thing from Microsoft. 00:47:32.420 --> 00:47:33.440 Like, what are they up to? 00:47:33.440 --> 00:47:34.980 Or do you think it was per se that way? 00:47:34.980 --> 00:47:38.300 Microsoft is like a different company today than it was five years ago. 00:47:38.300 --> 00:47:43.160 So, I mean, they have, it seems like they're, they got, you know, GitHub, they got VS Code, 00:47:43.160 --> 00:47:47.100 probably a number of other tools and technologies I can't think of now. 00:47:47.100 --> 00:47:47.580 That's right. 00:47:47.580 --> 00:47:49.080 They're just a very different company. 00:47:49.080 --> 00:47:53.520 I mean, I think pretty soon they're probably going to have the developer, you know, ecosystem. 00:47:53.520 --> 00:47:53.980 Yeah. 00:47:53.980 --> 00:47:55.840 It seems like what they're definitely going for. 00:47:55.840 --> 00:47:57.740 And, you know, I think that's kind of the heart of the company. 00:47:57.740 --> 00:47:59.800 So it's not that surprising, right? 00:47:59.800 --> 00:48:00.080 Yeah. 00:48:00.080 --> 00:48:00.360 All right. 00:48:00.360 --> 00:48:04.680 So notable PyPI packages, maybe not the most popular, but something you're like, 00:48:04.740 --> 00:48:05.680 people should know about this. 00:48:05.680 --> 00:48:06.460 I saw it the other day. 00:48:06.460 --> 00:48:06.920 It was awesome. 00:48:06.920 --> 00:48:08.340 So I use a lot of Django RQ. 00:48:08.340 --> 00:48:12.420 So that's Django flavor of Redis Q. 00:48:12.420 --> 00:48:16.000 Just allows you to use Redis Q a little bit easier inside of Django. 00:48:16.000 --> 00:48:16.720 That's cool. 00:48:16.720 --> 00:48:21.680 Is that to like kick off background work or for caching or what is it? 00:48:21.680 --> 00:48:22.060 Yeah. 00:48:22.060 --> 00:48:23.100 It's for kicking off. 00:48:23.100 --> 00:48:23.700 Yeah. 00:48:23.700 --> 00:48:23.920 Yeah. 00:48:23.920 --> 00:48:25.160 It's a task queue. 00:48:25.160 --> 00:48:26.580 So just kicking off background work. 00:48:26.580 --> 00:48:28.180 So it's like, it's an alternative to Celery. 00:48:28.180 --> 00:48:29.940 It's a little bit easier to use than Celery. 00:48:29.940 --> 00:48:30.240 Yeah. 00:48:30.240 --> 00:48:32.620 I get the sense that Redis might be a little simpler than Celery. 00:48:32.620 --> 00:48:33.580 Okay, cool. 00:48:33.580 --> 00:48:34.200 Got any more? 00:48:34.200 --> 00:48:36.880 Or you have a couple here on this list that you were sharing? 00:48:36.880 --> 00:48:37.340 Oh, yeah. 00:48:37.340 --> 00:48:38.720 I use Flake 8 a lot. 00:48:38.720 --> 00:48:40.320 I mean, every single day. 00:48:40.320 --> 00:48:41.900 I mean, that's running in the background. 00:48:41.900 --> 00:48:43.580 So that's just a linter. 00:48:43.580 --> 00:48:47.380 And then Hypothesis, which I use for hypothesis testing. 00:48:47.380 --> 00:48:49.180 Hypothesis testing is interesting. 00:48:49.180 --> 00:48:51.920 Or property-based testing is quite interesting, right? 00:48:51.980 --> 00:48:54.760 Like, you know, we'd covered that on the show quite a long time ago. 00:48:54.760 --> 00:48:58.100 I had the founder or the creator of that on. 00:48:58.100 --> 00:49:01.580 And it was, it's an interesting way to do tests, right? 00:49:01.580 --> 00:49:06.760 It's like, well, it takes a number and a string and just go make some numbers and strings and 00:49:06.760 --> 00:49:09.120 figure out what the right ones to put in here are, right? 00:49:09.120 --> 00:49:09.360 Yeah. 00:49:09.360 --> 00:49:13.800 I mean, if you're really focusing on testing that contract between functions, between, 00:49:13.800 --> 00:49:18.620 you know, modules, you know, whatever it is, Hypothesis definitely really, it works 00:49:18.620 --> 00:49:20.060 really, really well for that. 00:49:20.060 --> 00:49:20.620 Yeah, it's cool. 00:49:20.760 --> 00:49:21.960 Definitely a cool project. 00:49:21.960 --> 00:49:22.740 All right. 00:49:22.740 --> 00:49:24.020 So final call to action. 00:49:24.020 --> 00:49:27.580 People are excited about what you're doing over Test Driven or maybe the conference. 00:49:27.580 --> 00:49:29.140 What do you say to folks? 00:49:29.140 --> 00:49:32.920 Yeah, definitely check out testdriven.io and also check out PyColorado. 00:49:32.920 --> 00:49:34.340 So two call to actions there. 00:49:34.340 --> 00:49:37.360 But yeah, I really appreciate you having me on the show. 00:49:37.360 --> 00:49:40.340 Yeah, it's great to have you on the show and get a chance to catch up with you. 00:49:40.340 --> 00:49:42.880 So thanks for being here and sharing the history of real Python, 00:49:42.880 --> 00:49:45.580 what you're doing today and some of your other thoughts as well. 00:49:45.580 --> 00:49:46.180 Yeah, likewise. 00:49:46.180 --> 00:49:46.620 Thank you. 00:49:46.620 --> 00:49:46.900 You bet. 00:49:46.900 --> 00:49:47.100 Bye. 00:49:47.100 --> 00:49:47.320 Bye. 00:49:48.280 --> 00:49:50.980 This has been another episode of Talk Python To Me. 00:49:50.980 --> 00:49:55.180 Our guest on this episode was Michael Herman, and it's been brought to you by Linode and Stellaris. 00:49:55.180 --> 00:49:59.120 Linode is your go-to hosting for whatever you're building with Python. 00:49:59.120 --> 00:50:02.660 Get four months free at talkpython.fm/Linode. 00:50:02.660 --> 00:50:04.540 That's L-I-N-O-D-E. 00:50:05.480 --> 00:50:10.580 Find the right job for you with Stellaris, the AI-powered talent agent for the top tech talent. 00:50:10.580 --> 00:50:14.500 Visit talkpython.fm/Stellaris to get started. 00:50:14.500 --> 00:50:19.380 That's talkpython.fm/S-T-E-L-L-A-R-E-S. 00:50:19.380 --> 00:50:20.040 Stellaris. 00:50:20.040 --> 00:50:22.540 Want to level up your Python? 00:50:22.540 --> 00:50:27.400 If you're just getting started, try my Python Jumpstart by Building 10 Apps course. 00:50:27.660 --> 00:50:35.540 Or if you're looking for something more advanced, check out our new async course that digs into all the different types of async programming you can do in Python. 00:50:35.540 --> 00:50:40.220 And of course, if you're interested in more than one of these, be sure to check out our Everything Bundle. 00:50:40.220 --> 00:50:42.100 It's like a subscription that never expires. 00:50:42.100 --> 00:50:44.400 Be sure to subscribe to the show. 00:50:44.400 --> 00:50:46.820 Open your favorite podcatcher and search for Python. 00:50:46.820 --> 00:50:48.040 We should be right at the top. 00:50:48.040 --> 00:50:57.020 You can also find the iTunes feed at /itunes, the Google Play feed at /play, and the direct RSS feed at /rss on talkpython.fm. 00:50:57.020 --> 00:50:59.120 This is your host, Michael Kennedy. 00:50:59.120 --> 00:51:00.620 Thanks so much for listening. 00:51:00.620 --> 00:51:01.680 I really appreciate it. 00:51:01.680 --> 00:51:03.440 Now get out there and write some Python code. 00:51:03.440 --> 00:51:24.020 I'll see you next time. 00:51:24.020 --> 00:51:54.000 Thank you.