JD's Journal
Everyone we know has experienced their unique journey of life, and along the way they have had their share of success and failure. Each of us have learned important lessons and gathered valuable resources that have allowed us to survive and thrive. This podcast is a place for sharing our stories and our resources for the benefit of others. It's a celebration of the resilience and tenacity of people in all walks of life, our local heroes.
Welcome aboard!
JD's Journal
From Corporate Chains to Entrepreneurial Freedom: Julian Sequeira's Journey
Take a journey with Julian Sequeira as he shares the raw, unfiltered reality of leaving his corporate Amazon career to build PyBites, a Python education company now making waves globally.
This conversation captures the entrepreneurial rollercoaster – from the freedom of working beachside to the late nights questioning everything. Julian candidly describes how his purpose has evolved from broadly helping people learn Python to specifically targeting underrepresented communities who would never otherwise have access to coding education. Through strategic partnerships with companies like AWS and Microsoft, PyBites is breaking cycles of limited opportunity in communities worldwide.
What makes PyBites stand out in the crowded coding education space? Julian explains their focus on real-world applications rather than abstract concepts, addressing both technical skills and the mindset challenges that hold developers back. Their innovative community-building approaches, including "focus and accountability sessions," create connection in a field often marked by isolation.
The discussion takes a fascinating turn when exploring AI's impact on coding education. While many predict AI will eliminate coding jobs, Julian offers a nuanced perspective on why human oversight remains essential. He shares a powerful partnership sending PyBites team members to Puerto Rico to deliver Python training where no curriculum previously existed – potentially transforming lives through technology education.
Whether you're considering entrepreneurship, interested in coding education, or curious about technology's future, Julian's journey offers valuable insights on persistence, purpose, and creating meaningful impact. Connect with him on LinkedIn if you know anyone in corporate social responsibility who might help extend PyBites' reach to more underserved communities.
For more information on PyBites or to contact Julian directly:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliansequeira/
https://pybitesdevelopermindset.com/
The book recommendation was the Scarecrow series by Australian author, Matthew Reilly:
https://matthewreilly.com/
Hi folks and welcome back to the JD's Journal podcast. As always, it's fantastic to have you here. Today is a bit of a bit of a watershed moment actually for the podcast. I'm doing something today that I've never done before. So Julian Sequeira was one of my very, very first guests in the very beginning of the podcast back in April 2024, as we were just kind of getting it kind of wound up, and he's the first guest that I've invited back for a second episode. I'm not sure what I was thinking actually, but I'm actually excited to see what Julian's been up to.
JD:So, going back to 2024 in April, when he was one of these first guests, I introduced him based on his role at Amazon. You know as well as the kind of side hustle that he had going on with a company called PyBytes, where he and Bob Beldeboss had been developing and marketing a learning academy for budding Python developers. We recorded that episode actually within days of him saying farewell to Amazon and becoming a full-time entrepreneur dedicated to that venture, and that's going to be the primary focus of this episode. I've been following him and watching what's going on and I was so keen to kind of get him back and talk about what it's like to be really dedicated to this venture, and so forth. So with that, julian, welcome back. I'm going to hand it to you and I really want you to describe what you do today, what your job description is today, if you like, and what does an average day look like for Julian these days.
Julian :Nice Well, thanks, john. I'm absolutely stoked to be back and to be your first guinea pig when it comes to inviting someone back on the podcast. I assume your day looks very much like mine. You were clearly drinking when you made that decision, so that's what the day-to-day looks like for me, but I'm joking, I'm joking.
Julian :I'm joking, no, look, I'm so happy to be here and so much has changed. Like when you reached out and said, you know, april 2024, I'm like, oh my God, that was a year and a half ago and it feels like yesterday, since you know that notification from Amazon and then walking out the door and it's just, it feels like yesterday, but it has been, you know, 16, 18 months. It's wonderful. So, yeah, look, everyone listening, you know. Thank you again, john, for having me here. I'm Julian Squira. I am the co-founder and director for having me here. I'm Julian Squira. I am the co-founder and director I have to say director now, because of Australian stuff apparently Got to put that stuff in there but co-founder and director of PyBytes, and we are an education company at our core.
Julian :We believe in lifting people up through Python education. So we teach people about snakes, about poison no, I'm joking. We teach people about coding in the Python programming language and, yeah, it's just this wonderful experience. It grew completely organically from a blog back in 2016. And it is now this vibrant business. We have coaches around the world and we're doing all sorts of weird and wonderful things to try and shake it up a bit. Especially and we'll dive into this, I'm sure, john.
Julian :But just the changes in the industry of the past couple of years with AI and all that stuff, yeah, john, just the typical day-to-day these days it does have that entrepreneurial vibe to it, you know, and this week was the perfect example. It felt like the first day of spring this week through the end of last week, and so on monday, kids are at school, uh, daughters at daycare. My wife was at work. I went, you know what? I'm home alone. It's beautiful, it's sunny. I went and worked from the beach and I sat at a cafe overlooking mcmasters and just had a coffee and worked on the laptop for a good hour and then one of the other dads in the group said hey, where are you.
Julian :And I said I'm at the cafe and he showed up and came down for a coffee and a chat. So that's just obviously, that's peak perfection. But my days are very fluid and I can duck and weave with the punches that life throws, but I'm able to do the work and it's just wonderful. I just spend my days, ironically, doing less coding than before but doing a lot of the sales, the marketing, the business growth, business development and then all the kind of admin, finance and director work you'd expect from a company that's starting to grow and having to deal with an Australian taxation office.
JD:So yeah, it's good. So, first of all, isn't it amazing to be able to take the time and be yourself and impulsively go and sit in a beautiful place and work like that? I think that's pretty cool and very different, I'm sure, from what a day was like in your, in your previous situation yes, of course significantly yeah, um, you know, I think it's.
JD:It's interesting in terms of setting up a business and making that your full-time business here in australia. I think you're right. I'm going through that process right now myself and so I'm I'm uh definitely aligning with you right now, but can you kind of give us, like said it's been like 18 months since we talked last time what's that journey been like over the last 18 months? You know what's that experience been in terms of resetting and restructuring your thought processes and your operational models and so forth so forth.
Julian :Well, you know, if we're trying to think metrics in a way, what I'd like to do is go back to that podcast episode from 2024 and see how many gray hairs I had then compared to how many gray hairs I have now. I think that is a great measure of how stressful this year has been.
JD:So I just want to point out I think that's kind of rude because I think on this particular podcast want to point out I think that's kind of rude because I think on this particular podcast I had the lion's share of great hair.
Julian :I didn't want to say anything, but you know, we'll let that one, let that one go. Um, no, look it, it hasn't been sunshine and rainbows, you know, and I don't want to be a downer and I don't want to stress people out and make people think I should, should, not do this, uh, but I don't want to sugarcoat it either, right? So there's this whole picture of vision sitting by the beach and working. It's great. You have to make it happen, right. You have to have the time, make the time to do it. So one of the reasons I was able to do it on Monday was because my first two meetings in the morning got cancelled, right, so I was able to do it, but those meetings were there my Monday morning, bang 9am, I had meetings, right, and so, yeah, this year has been very much a roller coaster of peaks and troughs, right, there are high points where I'm like this is working, this is fantastic. Every minute of work has been worth it, and there have been points where I've had the lows has been worth it. And there have been points where I've had the lows and I've actually said, you know, oh man, is this working In some aspects, you think to yourself it would be so much easier to just get a job.
Julian :And when I say get a job, go back to an office at a building in the city and work nine to five or nine till midnight, as some of these jobs require, right? But then the thing is is that if there's one trait from this year that I've really believed in and I've lectured my clients and on my podcast I've lectured about this extensively persistence, grit, determination, whatever you want to call it. If you can persist through those lows, the trough is the, the peak is right around the corner, right, you never know what happens the next day, and that's probably the lesson I've taken, that even bob and I and we have to remind ourselves of this and we're so fortunate to have the two of us this year we've had to remind ourselves consistently and constantly. You never know what comes tomorrow. And I would say, if there's anything to sum up this past year is just keep working for tomorrow, just keep your head down and working, and I'll get.
Julian :There's a quote at the very end. I'll share, but I'll save it for then. But just keep working, just keep pushing.
JD:Yeah, I love that, the notion of one step after the other, and some of those steps are rocky or more challenging, but you take the next step and the next step and the next step. I think that makes a ton of sense and it's very consistent with what I hear from others as well. So when I had you on as a guest, one of the things that I always ask my guests is about greater purpose. It's always interesting to me to understand the motivations of people. What kind of gets them the fuel in their systems to keep doing this? And back at the time, you and I were very similar in a sense that we'd had the epiphany, that we thought we were geeks, we thought we were technocrats, and the reality was that our motivation was people caring about them, helping them grow and seeing them evolve. And I'm curious, you know, given the journey you've been on, given the move to full-time entrepreneurship, has your purpose changed? Has it evolved, and in what way?
Julian :Yeah, that's interesting. So, by the way, this is all candid responses. Nothing here is prepped, so let me think. So I think and this goes back to the first question is that you can have your values and your purpose as much as you want, but there are some things that kind of drag you down. And as much as I have value and purpose, I still need to put food on the table, right. My kids still need to go through school. I still need to feed them at least once a day, right, but I still need to go through school. I still need to feed them at least once a day, right, um? But? But I still need to do that. I have to be a dad. I have to provide for my family, as in partnership with my wife, right. So there are certain things. As much as I want to carry out some of the activities that lead to the purpose that keeps me grinding through every day, there are some activities I have to do that sometimes make me think, yeah, you know, this isn't what I want to spend my day doing, right, like writing copy and doing some of the marketing and stuff. It's just not my jam.
Julian :But, that said, the purpose hasn't shifted, it's actually just grown. It's grown and had more focus, so it's gotten bigger but much more focused. So, for example, my purpose and the drive for people is still there. But who? Who specifically right? And so last year you know where we were at with PyBytes and all of that. A lot of my purpose was around just taking people who wanted to learn Python and helping them show that they can be better versions of themselves, learn to code, improve their careers and all of that.
Julian :But you know, through the work we used to do, john, at AWS, as part of InCommunities, the community branch CSR program that AWS runs, I really started to see communities that were underrepresented and I'm not talking about the stereotypes you hear in the news and stuff. I'm talking about people in lower socioeconomic neighborhoods, people who are from families that have gone through this cycle of abuse and what have you, and helping them learn a skill that they otherwise would never have the opportunity to learn Like. It's just not there in front of them. It's never an option. And so what I've started doing over this past year, I've really started to use my platform like my actual coding platform not just my privilege, but my coding platform to help those communities. So the who has become heavily targeted now and so I am actually going.
Julian :One of the tasks that I've had to teach myself, talking about the processes changing over the past year, is how do I market to companies like AWS, microsoft, google, but even smaller companies you don't necessarily think of.
Julian :How do I market to them and say, hey, you should be investing in my platform, going into these communities, right, because I can't just give it away for free, of course not.
Julian :So having these companies back these programs that these communities otherwise wouldn't be able to afford themselves or wouldn't even consider imagine being able to come up to these kids that would never have a chance to learn Python and say, hey, look, you know, I don't know, microsoft has just sponsored 50 licenses to come into your school. Here you go. It makes everyone look good in the process, which I know is important sometimes in these situations the optics but at the end of the day, the kids get the education that they need, especially in this climate. So my purpose has grown, but it's now laser focused on what I'm trying to achieve personally. Me, obviously, I do the other stuff with the business, our coaching programs, but for me, where my value and what keeps me going at 11 pm at night working is that when we can hit people at that scale, just the difference we can make in their lives is unimaginable. It's great.
JD:Yeah, I love. I mean you and I know each other well enough to know that we both have this passion around that work, that community work and the sense of possibility it's always been. The thing that's always gotten to me is that when you can go into a community where that generation doesn't feel like there's possibility and suddenly introduce them or break the cycle and create that sense that things can be different, I can break through, I can have a different future, and we've done that, you know, through investments and so forth. I love that. You've identified the intersection between that effort that's funded by large corporates and what you're doing, and I think that you know that's a very powerful opportunity, I think, to come together and often I know, you know, when we've been sitting down talking about community outreach or CSR, we've been a little bit perplexed in terms of what is the thing that we can do that's going to make a big difference, and you might be the answer to that. So I think that's incredibly exciting. I love that and I'm super keen to see where that goes in the long term, julian, because I think it can make a massive difference.
JD:Um, I'm going to ask you a somewhat maybe more challenging question. That is, you know, I want. I'm like, given your purpose hasn't changed, but but what you do now has changed substantially. Um, how is it manifesting how? How is that being made real tacitly? How are you doing that and how do you really measure that you're delivering on your purpose? How do you know you're delivering on your purpose?
Julian :Yeah, I think that's a really tricky question because I don't have cold hard metrics around this like we would have had back in the day, right, and it hasn't been going long enough for me to have metrics, like I do for my my regular coaching program around measuring from a typical perspective. But for me right now, the success is awareness, right, showing people that it's out there, and also one of the things I've been doing a lot is connecting with CSR professionals, so corporate social responsibility professionals and just showing them what we've got. And some of them, you know, they've come back and they've nicely said you know, look, our company doesn't do STEM initiatives science, tech, engineering, maths, right, we're more in the environment or whatever it is. But the fact that they, when they hear what we're doing, and then love it and say I wish we could do this, this is actually fantastic, what you're doing. That, to me, is the current measure of success.
Julian :So, because this initiative to get into communities like this and CSI is quite new, it's quite new for us. We haven't been doing this for six, 10 years, whatever. I just need to validate the idea. I need people going yes, this is what is useful and this is something that could work and we're getting that validation. Over the past few months, we've been having many meetings where they say this is fantastic, talk to us when the new fiscal year comes around, talk to us when budget comes up, these kinds of things. So we've got some really good opportunities there to make a difference.
Julian :But I think that's just how I'm measuring. It's the interest for the moment, but, yeah, the energy for it is what is driving it. If I just had a PDF file with this information and just flicked it to people by email, I think I'd get crickets, because there's a million people doing that. But when they chat with me and they see the energy and the excitement and the desire to make a difference, I think that is the majority of the sale, right? They want someone who's going to do that and have a passion for it.
JD:I think that's so spot on and I agree with you. I think we're inundated with people with their offers and their magical cures and God knows whatever else is coming out every day. I think that's the dialogue and I can imagine that's quite. Even though it's not a metric. I can imagine it's quite rewarding to have those conversations and so forth. So I think that makes sense. I think maybe you've got an opportunity to convince the people who are thinking about the environment that what you're doing in fact is environmentally conscious, because I think what we can do is to start to to think about the impact that we can have through automation and tracking and so forth. But that's your challenge to solve, I'm gonna write that one down.
JD:I'll leave you I'll leave you with that one. So, again, I think the the curiosity that I have is that you know again, this was a side hustle for you when I was talking to you last. This was something that you did and you had a proper income coming in and, to some degree, I think that gave you maybe the luxury that you could do some pro bono work or you could do this part-time. But now this is it, this is your bread, um, and so how is it changing what you've been able to achieve and, and what do you, what accomplishments you're most proud of over the last 18 months?
Julian :well it's. I think the cool thing is that I get to work on it 24, 7 now, without any any strings attached. No chains, gloves are off, right, I don't have to worry about what I say. I mean, of course, you worry about what you say, but I don't have to worry that what I'm saying represents Amazon or someone else. Right, I can just be as blunt as I want in my communication and have whatever stance I want on anything. And it's wonderful, right, that's our brand, right, it's our transparency and all of that. So I think the impact of being on this full-time has been so beneficial. Just on that alone, it's been worth it.
Julian :But, that said, just being able to invest the hours you know there's so many hours in the day that you need to be putting into your own business. There's countless activities. And I was just telling Bob this morning you know I have Bob's, my business partner, right, and I said I've got four different places I need to be checking in for messages from people, and it's not from a lack of organization or just poor planning, it's. But I've got LinkedIn, I've got email, I've got a centralized email account account and this other thing that we use as well. Um, I just said oh, man, and not to mention our community, right, we have this python community, right, and uh, it's just. There's so many different places I'm engaging with people. So, yeah, the time in the day, being able to invest all that time, is super value, but, per the norm, there's never enough hours in the day to get everything done. So the impact has been it very easily fills up my day beyond what I should be letting it fill up.
JD:Well, that's a fantastic segue, Julian, because you know, one of the things that I respect about you and that we talked about during the last episode was the hard boundaries that you had set when it comes to time that you dedicate to your kids and your wife. And you know, you blocked time in your mornings to spend time with the kids, you blocked dinner, you blocked time to do your study, and you know I was always amazed by that, because I don't have that discipline. I wish I had the discipline that you had, but, as you just said, like setting up a new business and dedicating yourself to it's like a 24 by seven thing. So I'm I'm curious how well have you been able to maintain those boundaries? And you know how. How have you done that? How have you stayed true to that, that commitment that you made?
Julian :so I like to talk to all of my clients about setting boundaries and and having finite times on things, setting alarms, all the typical productivity things, and in this case I'm going to say do as I say, not as I do, because it has been hard, man. It's been really, really challenging because, as you said in the previous question, you know, working in a full-time job, you have this guaranteed paycheck. You know, if you kind of take a half day, whatever, no one's going to notice. And you, you know, whatever right, you get paid, regardless of what you put out, of course, unless you're terrible at your job. But in this, if I don't work, I don't get paid. I need to constantly be doing what we do as part of our process to bring in new customers, to keep building the company awareness. All that stuff, all those activities take a lot of time and you need to do it every day. As I said on LinkedIn, last week I wrote a post about sowing the seed. Right, you have to keep sowing seeds, keep planting them for the next opportunity to come. But that means you could work all day and still feel like it's not enough. So for me it has been a challenge because I can get to say 5 pm and do the whole. Yes, I'm with the family now until bedtime, but me going. Well, if I keep working, I could plant some more seeds and that could be the next big thing or whatever, right? So that's been the real challenge. Now that I've full skin in the game.
Julian :It is very difficult sometimes to tell yourself it is okay to switch off, especially in those troughs where things aren't going so well, but you need it, and so what I've done is my calendar is still heavily blocked. Mornings are still sacred. Kids get full time. But also, what's really helped as well is my wife's gone back to work for the first time in you know a few years. I stayed home, mum, all of that stuff, um. So she's gone back to, you know, working in the finance industry. So she's out of the house four days a week and I'm still working from home.
Julian :So, yeah, the kids in the morning um, all afternoon after school, cooking, cooking dinner, cleaning up you know these things and getting them ready for bed, and then my wife gets home around that time. These are all things that need me to be there. Rain, hail or shine the kids, it doesn't matter if I'm in the middle of putting an important presentation together or whatever. So I had to intentionally block that calendar and stick to that. Now that means some of my other boundaries have to slip.
Julian :So my boundary in the evening of once the kids go to bed only work for an hour or something. That needs to slip because I put in that hour, the relaxed hours, into the kids. So if there's anyone suffering this year from a burnout perspective, it would be my personal time. So being able to sit there and read a book for an hour in the evening, so play a game with my mates or go for a jog or something like that, those are the things that I've had to sacrifice the most this year, and even spending time with my wife sitting there in the evening. So weekends are generally completely sacred. I do nothing on the weekends, but weeknights I'm trying to be a little bit better, but yeah, it's a weird tough balance, man, it's really hard.
JD:Yeah, but I'm not surprised by the response. You know, I think it's again. It's consistent with anybody building a small business. It takes a commitment with a long-term vision that you get back to normalcy as you stabilise your business and build sustainability into the business. But to me that makes perfect sense. It does sound like you are maintaining the boundaries that you can maintain and making the trade-offs that you can make.
Julian :But yeah, I think you also have to take it when you can. So, like in the troughs, I'm going to put in more hours, but when it's peaking and things are looking good, I'm like you know what I'm taking the day off. Yeah, I'm going to go do this with the kids or my wife or whatever. So, yeah, you pick and choose. You can do that, which is good whatever.
JD:So, yeah, you, you, you pick and choose, you can do that, which is good. So maybe that's a good, a good segue to this question, which is you know that if anybody today is about to embark on this journey of setting up, you know their themselves as an entrepreneur what recommendations do you?
Julian :have. Don't do it. No, I'm joking Absolutely do it, it's.
JD:It's one of the most exciting things. No.
Julian :I'm joking, absolutely do it. It's one of the most exciting things. I mean. I know I just talked about the stress of it, but what keeps you coming back right? It's the most rewarding thing you'll ever do If you can put your foot down and do something that you're passionate about, put those skills that you've learned and developed and have a passion for over the years and then actually start doing something that helps people or whatever it is that you're trying to do right, gives back in whatever way.
Julian :I often find that a lot of people who want to move into entrepreneurial endeavors are trying to give back in some way, shape or form. Right, Similar to your coaching ventures, john right. So, whether it's to the environment, whether it's to your community, to the elderly, to whatever community it happens to be, if you can build your business around that, then you will have infinite energy for it. You'll have infinite energy for it, which you need because it's not easy. But, man, is it satisfying, like when I see some of the things people say after they finish their coaching program with us, or the delight on kids faces as you know, a pythonic topic just suddenly clicks and makes sense. Or them holding their little certificates, saying they got their little badge on the platform or something like you're changing lives and you're helping really helping people, and so what if things get tough? Then you just get into it.
Julian :So I think my recommendation for anyone is do something that you really will enjoy doing on your lowest of low days. Right um, temper yourself in advance, knowing that it's going to be a slog, because it's not going to be easy. This whole stuff, you see, about people, angel investing I just closed round A funding for $10 million. That came with years of hard work and stress and late nights and pitching and writing and doing things that you're not trained or skilled on, and you have to learn all these new things. So it's not easy, but nothing beats it. I never got this feeling at any of my corporate jobs never uh, again, I I can relate to what you're saying.
JD:This is one of the reasons why I always ask about purpose. By the way, I'm always curious about people's purpose and I go back to Simon Sinek's Start With why. I think when you know the real, underlying, greater purpose of what you're doing, your ability to sustain yourself, your ability to face challenge, your ability to find the energy when you need it at the times when it's hard to find, is significantly different when you have a clarity around the reason that you're doing it, that your your purpose and so I I do. I always ask that question because I'm I'm curious about how grounded people are in understanding why they're getting up today and why they're going to do things.
JD:Um, won't feed you, uh, won't put food on the table, unfortunately, yeah, but it might give you the energy to do the work that's going to put food on the table. It might be the thing that you pull. You pull back on, and so you know. Maybe I asked you the question to share, but I think one of the recommendations I'd make to anybody going into this space is to is that, when you are down, is to go back to and think about why did I start this thing. Why was this important to me? Because I think just refreshing that in your own mind certainly helps you get that energy back to focus on it.
Julian :Absolutely and actually, on that note, you've heard of Scott Pape, the barefoot investor, yeah, so one of his things that always stuck with me is that when you want to go out and do an entrepreneurial endeavor, just think of like a trapeze artist in the circus. Right, You're on the trapeze. So you're currently in your current job. You're holding onto the trapeze, whatever it is right, the stick, and you're swinging through the air. The next trapeze that you have to grab is your entrepreneurial endeavor. But before you grab it and go full on it, you have to let go of the first one. So the pivotal point is when you're going to be holding onto both at the same time. So the trapeze artist doesn't let go of the first one the current job until they have their hands firmly placed, holding themselves on the second one. So your entrepreneurial endeavor. Before you fully quit, the first thing that's supporting you, make sure you have a firm grip and that things are looking good on that entrepreneurial endeavor.
Julian :I've always loved that analogy. It doesn't have to be perfect, but you got to have a grip. And even if your comfort zone is like a huge redundancy payment that will fund you for two years, don't get to the point where you only have a month left before you start looking for a job right to support you while you get your endeavor going. So yeah, my thing here is work hard. You're going to have to put in, sometimes be working two jobs at once. It's going to be tough at once it's going to be tough, but once you get a solid grip on that next job, on that entrepreneurial endeavor, you won't look back, You'll let that other trapeze fly backwards and you'll keep moving forwards.
JD:I think it's a tremendous metaphor. Actually, I like that a lot and I'd say one of the reasons why that's so important, and certainly how I feel different this time around with what I'm doing than I did previously, is that if you're in a panic, worrying about that next meal, it's very difficult to think strategically about what you do on the business side, and I think you need to have the comfort that you're in a safe place at least while you're envisioning and building the foundations of your business. You need to be able to do that without being in a panic state. So, again, I think that's a very good metaphor, but I also think it makes a ton of sense in terms of the approach to take. I want to bring it back to PyBytes. Right, we've talked a lot about you and a lot about your journey, and I'm sure we'll talk more about that. But, pybytes, you've talked a little bit about what you do, but let's enlarge on that. So what's a typical PyBytes customer look like and what's the value proposition that you bring to them?
Julian :Okay, that's a good one. I wasn't expecting that Nice. So, forgetting the corporate social responsibility I think we've talked about that. Typical customer would be someone trying to give back to the community. I can work about that. Typical customer would be someone trying to give back to the community. I can work with that.
Julian :From our current what we do day to day, what we've been doing for the past five years, is we've been coaching people one-to-one right. So our bread and butter is a coaching program that coaches people through building an application. Right. So they come in with an idea, we help them flesh out an idea and then over 12 weeks this is in our premium program they build that application. So they learn the code they need, they fill the gaps, they learn all the surrounding technologies and all of that.
Julian :So, to use an Amazon term, working backwards from that, the person who needs to know that they're generally tech professionals.
Julian :Right, they're generally people who already have some level of knowledge of Python code, of the ecosystem, and want to branch to a new type of Python, to a new level, get a promotion, move into a different kind of software developer role, move between these different types of positions right, those people come in, they have their gaps.
Julian :They have their knowledge of things, of the way they've done things before that historical aspect. We have to challenge them many times and many of them don't even realize that the biggest thing is mindset right. So a lot of these people have imposter syndrome. Some of them don't even want to call themselves developers because they're not in a traditional software development engineer role. So they say I can't call myself a developer. I'm like you're developing code right now. You're a developer. Let's take that gatekeeping off it right. There's a lot of mindset we have to work through with people on their confidence, and so they often come out of our program saying I came for the code, I stayed for the mindset right. They end up loving the confidence in themselves and how to push through challenging situations like a tricky code review where they've been criticized over code that they wrote or someone said well, that's just completely wrong or whatever.
Julian :So we talk them through that as well as talking them through hey here's how you write a function properly or something technical right, and it's just wonderful. So the typical person, they're just kind of stagnating, they're kind of stuck. They in tech but they don't know where to go next. They don't know how to get to that next stage there. And a common thing that happens for developers I'll just say this quickly is that when you're in a software development job, you're working on the specific language and technical stack of applications and just the stack really, that that company has said this is what we're using. So you get tunnel vision and you get stuck working on the same technology day in, day out and people start to stagnate. So that's another reason why people come to us because they say well, day to day I only get to do, say, python with network engineering or network automation. I never get to touch web applications or database and things like that. So then they come to us and we help them with that.
Julian :Now, that said, we have beginner coaching as well. So people like you, john, who don't know too much about Python have dabbled and you tried this, or maybe people who just had no zero technical skill on python or coding whatsoever. We have programs to help people. Come in for that too, and I don't want to go into the ai stuff just yet, but I'll just say that that's something that's really growing for us, because people are realizing oh crap, with ai everywhere, I should know some semblance of code. And so they're coming to us to learn and be coached for the six weeks on how to just learn the foundations of Python. So they can be dangerous. They can at least know that they have the expertise to. Hey, if there's a problem, I could actually figure this out with Python, and that's just that level of confidence we're trying to build. So they're the kinds of people we're trying to target at the moment.
JD:Thank you, and I love the fact that you took the opportunity to point out that I'm proof that over the last 30 decades, a person can fail at every single programming language that's ever been written.
Julian :Any chance I can take, I will take it.
JD:If there's one thing that I'm never going to be, it's an SDE or a software developer.
Julian :It's just not going to happen. You could be my greatest experiment, oh man.
JD:That won't turn out well at all. I would suggest you move on, but I have to presume. Having said that, I have to presume that some of the folks that sit in your customer space are people who are like me, who've attempted to self-teach themselves coding on Visual Basic or whatever over the years and have plotted their way through it and then wanna kind of get to the point of proficiency. I guess that's right, yeah.
Julian :Correct, and a lot of the I won't say failure, but a lot of that time that they spent on previous languages creates a bias that they will never be able to learn Python or anything else, and so it is what they tell themselves that matters. And then you often see people who finish that beginner program called PyBytes, developer, initialization that program. You often see people with the greatest just like oh my gosh, like just joy, because they started with nothing and now they've learned a bit of GitHub, a bit of Git. They can write just the fundamentals of Python down and they have the proof to show it. You know so.
JD:So when that penny drops, that penny really drops, at that point the foundation's there, right?
Julian :Yeah, yeah and so. So one of the pulls of Python I'll just say is that it's a very if you speak English, it's a very human readable language. If you're familiar with any kind of code, you could kind of read through someone else's code base and understand what it's doing, just because it's written in such a simplistic language language, and that's what makes it so beautiful and accessible to so many people and why it's the language of choice for everything these days, like machine learning, artificial intelligence you name it data analysis, everything.
JD:So if anybody listening is looking at acquiring some learning assets to support software development in their organization, what should they be looking out for? What questions should they be asking?
Julian :That's a good question. Obviously, scalability is the big thing that they'll be looking out for. What can I do in my company to provide my staff with a scalable, provide my staff with an opportunity to learn a fungible skill, a skill that can be used for multiple different things at scale.
Julian :So one thing I'll say with our coaching program is it's a premium product. You probably wouldn't send 10,000 employees through this one by one. We'd be coaching them for the next 20 years. But we have our coding platform as an example, and that's scalable. That platform can help you learn Python from zero, and we incorporate it in our coaching.
Julian :It's just you don't have that one-to-one coaching support, but something like that providing that as a perk to your staff to dabble and play far exceeds the platforms that are starting to find their way into companies as just a default perk, such as LinkedIn Learning, coursera, things like that that become just passive learning experiences. Hell, I remember we had LinkedIn Learning and I think I watched one or two videos. I just didn't have the time and it also didn't engage me. It's passive learning, right. So the other thing to look out for is what is something that you can implement in your company that is going to get your staff to take action on their learning, right? What's going to entice them to keep coming back and learning? And so that's why we have I don't mean to make this a pitch, but I totally do. I'm pitching my own product.
Julian :That's why we have like gamification, like coding streaks, and we keep it super simple. And then there's the ability to engage your technical staff with hackathons so your teams can compete against each other, and you have leader boards and all these different things to show people. Hey, we can engage you at a technical level at a way that's actually going to challenge you and be usable in the day job and beyond, because people are going to use it and then learn new skills that will help them grow into other careers, which is, if you really care about your employees, that's what you want, right? So, yeah, I would say those things. So what's going to keep them engaged? And um, co and doing this, learning the skill every day or every week and coming back, and then what's scalable I think that's the big thing is has to scale between everyone.
JD:Yep yeah, I think you know I've obviously you and I've talked about pybites before what you're doing. I think one of the things that stood out for me is that in all of my misadventures of trying to learn how to code, I think the biggest issue I've had is that coding for what purpose? You know there wasn't really a practical application I was trying to solve, I was just trying to learn how to write code, and I do think you know what you've described is that you don't go about it that way you identify a solution that is actually a solution the company needs, or an application the company needs, and then the learning process is built around that scenario, so it has practical application and relevance, which has to be a motivation to keep kind of plugging away at it.
Julian :Yeah, and that's it, like our exercises. There's plenty of coding platforms out there, right, there's HackerRank and oh geez, I can't even think of them right now CodeWars and things like that, but so many of them are based on these abstract ideas and things to just try and trip you up Like. These are brain teasers in a way. Right. So what we did with ours was well, let's just make the exercises based on what you're actually going to do on the job.
JD:Yeah.
Julian :So let's just make the exercises based on what you're actually going to do on the job. So let's do it about data manipulation. Let's use actual libraries that people would be using in the day job doing different things with Python, and so we often get people who use it and say I just did that exact thing in my job and your exercise helped me do it. I went back and referred to what I wrote two months ago and it helped me figure this out at work, and I'm like, oh, what I wrote two months ago and it helped me figure this out at work. And I'm like, oh, awesome man, you know. So that's why I think it has to be real world is what we call it, but it has to be relative to the actual experience.
JD:Well, you may have just answered the question I'm about to ask you, but you know, I'm sure there's a lot of competition out there, a lot of companies doing what you do. You know what's your blue ocean strategy? How do you differentiate pybytes from the rest of the of the the market?
Julian :yeah look it's exactly that. It's the real world part. I think I want to just say it's because we care, um, it's because of our job histories in corporate tech, it's because of all of that journey self-taught Python, everything I think that's what makes us unique. You know, in a way we're not just I'm not going to say everyone else does this, but you definitely see people doing stuff for a quick buck. You see people churning out the same thing over and over again. I think what makes us unique is that we really care about the results that people get and we want to do whatever we can, for an example, with our coaching.
Julian :No one else does Python coaching the way we do. And I don't just mean the way we do it, I mean in general. If you try and find Python coaching, you'll find the typical stuff, like if you want to get a mentor for your child going through university. You'll find that kind of thing. But there is almost nothing. And maybe don't Google it just yet. I should check this data now, but last time I looked there was nothing out there like this not a formal program, maybe just one random person doing a couple of things Right, but not a formal program or company doing it, and that's because it's not easy, because everyone learns differently. Everyone has a unique learning style and history and what they where their gaps are it's different per person, which means every person that we coach has a different experience. That makes it intrinsically difficult to replicate every time, but intrinsically difficult to replicate every time, and so that's what makes what we do so challenging but so damn rewarding, right? So that's the coaching and then the coding platform, which is hands-off and self-service and a monthly subscription thing.
Julian :As I was saying. Yeah, the main thing that makes that different is that it is based on the real world experience we had as developers and many of our communities. I don't know, not many people know this, but we have over 400 exercises that people can go through to learn, practice and play with Python. Some of them were made by our community. So we said they said, hey, I've got this expertise and we're like well, let's pay you to write those exercises. And then we paid them per exercise and they put them up. We tuned them to suit the platform and bang their entire learning parts that were written by people and credited to those people as, hey, this was written by so-and-so in our community. So it's this beautiful representation of what it's actually like to code in the day job, and I think that's what makes it super unique. And, of course, you've got us right. We're just cool, we're just awesome.
JD:Well, despite that, I think it's a great offering. So when you and I talked last week briefly, you know, about this episode, you talked about the fact that you'd just been in a forum where you get a bunch of developers together who just kind of share and ask questions and talk and so forth. Can you elaborate on how you help foster kind of communication in the community you've got there?
Julian :So, yeah, so we have a Python community and it's just. We use a platform called Circle that just allows people to join and you've got all your places and posting and things like that. It's not the same as Slack or Discord, it's actually. I really like it. It's much easier to find what you need. But anyway, that has been one of the most challenging and rewarding things that we do, because to run a community and build engagement with people is really difficult. But when you get people going and the steam, the momentum starts going, it becomes self-moving right, it takes care of itself. And so we now have people in our community that are doing things. They're coding every day. They go off and code together.
Julian :I had a call with one of our clients yesterday and he was telling me he's connected with someone else in the community. They've been talking about whatever that topic was and I said that's incredible. You know, like I don't know about that, I got a bit of FOMO and so it's really cool that they just take care of themselves. So your specific example I had. We call it the focus and accountability session. So I'm trying to do different weird and wonderful things in our community to really help people engage with each other, and what we've realized is that developers often code in a silo because they don't always have someone senior at work, they don't always have someone on their team that they can talk to, or they just may not like them right, or they're spread out across the planet in different time zones. So a lot of them are so hungry for community and engagement with other people. So we're trying to do more things in our community, have coding challenges and exercises. Last month we had the Summer of Code for the Northern Hemisphere summer and everyone was supposed to code and everyone was coding stuff solutions around the nasa api to try and pull in information about star systems and whatever and present it in whichever way they want, and it was really cool what people did. So now then we're iterating on that and doing different things.
Julian :So the focus and accountability session I held last week it's the very first one we had. It was just an hour in the calendar where we all just sat on mute, other than joining the call and me saying hey, everyone, good to see you. You know the kind of thing, or everyone go on mute. I don't want to hear a word. I don't hear a word from anyone. It's like talking to the kids and I just said, no, look, let's respect the call it's. If you need to chat, use the text chat. Let's stay on mute. Keep your cameras on if you're willing for accountability.
Julian :And the idea was we just sat there for an hour and just worked as if we were in an office, sitting at each other's desks or next to each other and just focus, work. And because it was in the calendar as a dedicated one hour session, you give it the same respect you would with distractions like I have right now with this call with you. My phone is away, my notifications are off, I'm not checking email. I'm focused on this mediocre discussion with you, right? This incredible discussion, this opportunity to chat with you and hang out with you, and so on this call, I had a guy from Texas who was on there. He was doing some Django coding stuff. I had a guy from San Diego there were only three of us on the call because it was the first one and time zones didn't suit, so there were lots of learning lessons from this but the guy from San Diego, he was doing some Python, I don't know what exactly, and I was working on writing documentation for our coding platform. So heads down, focus.
Julian :No one talked. We missed the end of the call, completely Went over time when I realized I'm like, oh sorry, guys, scared the crap out of both of them Because we're all just in this focus mode and we loved it. And then sharing those notes in the community, all these other people like I want to join that, I want to join that. Oh man, I'm so sorry I missed it. Oh, when's the next one? So we're bringing people together, we're coding, we're talking, we share experiences with each other and it's just. It's been really enlightening to me how much people need this and want that connection and how us putting this place together for people to hang out and spend time and some of them are beginners who don't know squat about Python to some people who could write their entire, an entire LLM right Large language model. But it's just wonderful. It's really cool to build that community and have people engage.
JD:What an interesting forum. So no speaking, basically just watching each other to make sure you're doing work. It's actually quite interesting because I know when I first started writing my book which I've never finished I started listening to a lot of authors and what they do around writing and procrastination and avoidance is a strategy for writers people who spend 20 years writing nothing because they just don't do anything. But the one thing that you always hear is force yourself, block your calendar, sit at your keyboard and don't move from the keyboard until that block of time is finished, and it's the same thing. It's a mechanism to stop you wandering and procrastinating and avoiding and so forth to move forward. And that's what that sounds like to me in terms of what you're doing. There is, you're holding each other accountable for that focused time. I love that. I think that's awesome.
JD:When you talked about developers working in isolation, I couldn't help myself. I immediately saw a whole bunch of C++ developers in a room with the lights turned off and Pink Floyd blaring. I had the whole image going on and there was truth in that. Back in the day, I remember the developers, don't disturb me, I'm in development mode. So I had that message. I love that I think that's a perfect example of trying new approaches, being courageous enough to do something radical to see if it succeeds. And again, in classic Amazonian fashion, it's a two-way door you try it, if it works, it works. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But I love it. I think the accountability thing makes a ton of sense and I think it's another differentiator in terms of what you're doing from anything else.
JD:I've seen um. You touched on ai very, very briefly and I think we're going to have a pretty interesting conversation on ai. Um, I've included ai in my question set for all guests now on the podcast because I think it's affecting everybody, uh, in a big way. But for you, I think it's really interesting and, and you know, I'm uh, I'm not a software developer, as we've all agreed, we've standardized on that um.
JD:But I have written some code recently. But I don't. I wrote that code by doing what all the other lazy people doing. I went into chat gpt and I said write me some some code to do xyz, and it went and I have no idea whether that code was good code, bad code or whatever it was, but but I do keep hearing that you know we are moving in the direction of zero code application development, where you'll basically tell the AI engine develop. You know a solution for me that does the following thing, has the following capabilities and so forth. And so you know, the big question for an organization like yours is is this fut futile? Is this all going to come, going to go away? Is coding going to stop being a thing, or uh, or do you have a future?
Julian :it's uh, yeah, well, look, I'm selling the house because, uh, we've got no, no, got no hope, no, I. I think there's a lot of sensationalism around it. I think there's pros and cons, right, and I think there is an essence of truth. Yeah, things will change and, not to make it as simplistic as this, but just like the industrial revolution, machines took jobs away right, but those jobs changed, and I know people have an argument around that, well, there's going to be fewer jobs than before. Things will be completely different. But also, I also want to say someone has to maintain the AI, someone needs to check what it's doing, and so we're seeing some developers and some companies become glorified babysitters, and that's not great. I think that, personally, I don't think that's great. Babysitters, right, and that's not great. I think that, personally, I don't think that's great. I think, yes, okay, you're there to.
Julian :You have metrics in some places around. How much code are you using AI to write? There are metrics in that, which I think is pretty poor. I don't like that. I think that's pretty crap. So, but even so, then the person's job is to sit there and look at the code that's spit out and, as you said, you don't know if it's good code or bad code. So you still have to have the education and the knowledge of how to write code to know if your fact checking is accurate. Right, are people just going to fall into complacency? They're just going to say, yeah, it's been right 90% of the time, so screw it. The odds are in my favor that this is fine 90% of the time, so screw it. The odds are in my favor that this is fine. I'll just flick it through and head down to the pub. Right, you're probably going to get people doing that and, I think, business owners.
Julian :I think what's happening right now this whole push to minimize development roles, to use AI everywhere I mean, it's just everywhere. It's almost it's burnout. It's disgusting now, and actually to that point, bob and I made the choice not to integrate AI or LLMs into our coding platform. It was on the roadmap. We took it off because we don't want people feeling like, oh, here's every time. You get an email every day from these services going, hey, we now have AI wrapped into how to you know, wipe your butt with toilet paper. You know what I mean. So it's just everywhere. So we don't want that.
Julian :And what I think will happen is, firstly, right now, a lot of this push is coming from the CXOs, right, that whole C-suite level and investors. I think my opinion is that if they can say we're harnessing AI for X, y, z, whatever we do, it pleases the investors and their stock price goes up, right. I don't see any of them doing it from a perspective of it's just better for business, it's better for our employees, it's better for humanity. I don't see it and I'm okay, I'm happy to make that judgment call right, I'm confident enough to do that. Um, then, on the flip side, we see Matt Garman, the CEO of AWS now, who just said in a podcast interview that you'd be foolish to get rid of junior developers and replace them with AI, because then he makes the valid argument they're the people who've learned to code with AI, who know how to use it well, and you need people skilled with the language that you're essentially outsourcing to AI, and if you don't, then you lose all of that historical knowledge, you lose all of that skill. And I'll finish off by saying the argument I constantly make is well, what happens when it breaks? What happens when the LLMs go offline? And some people said, oh, it's a pretty drastic example, but you and I have seen outages at Amazon that have taken down half the planet. So what happens when that happens? Right, if you're not knowledgeable about the infrastructure, about the code, about any of that, and you've outsourced everything to the network, to AI, and the network goes down, you're screwed right. So my advice to everyone is keep learning.
Julian :I really feel and I'm happy to be proven wrong or unhappy to be proven wrong in this instance I really do think that this is a bubble and that it will normalize. I think it's here to stay, but I think this peak of it being the be all end, all of everything will fade, I think, and we're starting to see things where some companies are walking back a little bit of their investment in AI and we can start seeing people being brought back in. You know, maybe I will go and ask this person right and like again, I've written code, experimented with AI and said build this app for me from the ground up, treat me like I'm a complete novice. And it got itself into a loop and couldn't fix itself, and I knew exactly where the fault was with what it asked me to do, because it had skipped one step of saving this file, opening a new one and putting the code in there, and it couldn't figure itself out right.
Julian :So things like that will happen, and if you don't have the know-how, then you're screwed and your stakeholders are going to suffer. Your company is going to suffer. What are the investors going to think then? So I do think people need to keep learning. Learn everything they can about artificial intelligence. Educate those around them on artificial intelligence especially the people who are more vulnerable to not knowing, like my parents, for instance and do what you can. Stay up to date, educate, learn, learn the skills. At the end of the day, you know we'll still be here and we still need people who know this stuff and we still need people who know this stuff.
JD:I think it's a great perspective, you know, and I liken it to a couple of things. I liken it to the early days, my early days at Microsoft, when I was hiring support engineers and I would see people coming in to interview. I had a lot of people in that period. I'd see people coming in with academic qualifications and I would test them through a role play process and I was also hiring people who are hobbyists at the time. This is back in the early 90s and without pretty much without exception, what I found was the academics couldn't work beyond what was written down. They couldn't. They didn't have good instincts. It was the people who were the hobbyists who made all the stupid mistakes. They had all the instincts that could solve a problem intuitively. And I do think there's a parallel there in what you're talking about.
JD:I was listening to Nate Jones, who's one of my favorites. I follow on TikTok and YouTube to talk about AI. If you're looking for somebody who's got some great insights on the industry of AI, nate Jones is a huge, huge recommendation. But he was talking the other day about the fact that there's a pattern now where corporations are eliminating the entry level roles around software development and their theory is that the entry level work can be done by AI and the senior SDEs can do the quality work or the checking or the troubleshooting that you're talking about, julian.
JD:But the point that Nate made, which I think you're making as well, is that at some point the old guard's going to retire and if you've gotten rid of the new talent coming in, then who has the tribal knowledge, who has the insights, who has the intuition to solve those issues? And we know that AI hallucinates, we know that AI is garbage in, garbage out, and so I agree with you. I think there's huge risk in any environment where you haven't got that human element that's overseeing what's going on from that perspective. So it will be interesting to see how this plays out. I'm curious if you had to define, like, if you had to try to describe the nirvana state of the coexistence between software development and ai, what would it look like for you, julian?
Julian :oh. So look, with AI being here to stay, I would say use it to help you learn. Try coding first. Get stuck, ask AI to help you out, right, it won't have the humanity and the nuance that say I could as a coach and the nuance that say you know I could as a coach, you know, but it can help you with the quick things, right. So, but I think there's a harmonious relationship to be had.
Julian :There are certain things that as you become more senior and you do in a job that just become and it's the same in the coding world that just become repetitive, and it's the same in the coding world that just become repetitive. So one example is starting out a web app project with Django. There's a template, there's a couple of commands you've got to run every time, whatever. Just get the AI to write it. Once you know it, once you know the stuff you've done 100 times, instead of going back and copying your code from previous projects, deleting stuff, whatever, just get the AI to write it, and then you know enough to go. Hang on, you screwed that up royally, mate. I'm going to redo it, please, but at least you know right. So that's where I see this being such a beneficial tool to people because there are a lot of repetitive tasks, right, and then using it to learn about options and opportunities that you didn't know existed. Right, that you didn't know was a thing in the language, in the coding language. That's where it's come in handy as well, and the last thing I'll say is that and this is going to lead to a little bit of a plug but I'm really proud of this Because I didn't answer the question before.
Julian :You said one of your proudest moments from this past year, but AI is a wonderful tool for people to use to bootstrap an idea. So, if you have an idea that you want to get off the ground and you have no idea and you've always said, no, I'm not going to try because I don't know how to code, or I need to pay $10 million to someone to build it for me, this is your chance to do it, and that's why platforms like lovable AI is so popular, because you can just write in plain text to an LLM and it will build you an application. Right? Just write in plain text to an LLM and it will build you an application, now how to fix it and make adjustments. That's where they make their money, because then if you want to ask another prompt, you've got to pay for it and you have to know how to do it. So there is that know-how, but at least to get the concept of the idea off the ground.
Julian :Is this going to work? Is this plausible? Super important, and this is the plug. This is going to enable people in lower socioeconomic parts of the world to build incredible things that they never thought possible. I'm really hoping this happens, but we will see incredible stuff coming out of parts of the world that were never able to deliver anything awesome before, and so my pride point for the past year is that we've partnered with a big company called Open Teams. I'm really proud because the founder of the company is the guy who invented NumPy and SciPy, which don't worry about what they are, but they're libraries that enabled machine learning and essentially, artificial intelligence to come into existence. Right, and his company. We're partnering with them to help deliver AI skills and Python skills in Puerto Rico or Puerto Rico, if I use the tongue the way Australian tongues are not meant to be spoken, not even close.
JD:Not even close.
Julian :Please don't hate me everyone but it's super cool because we're sending one of our team over there to help train people who never would have had. There is no curriculum being taught over there to help them learn AI skills and Python in this way, so we're participating in a program. There's a not-for-profit that's running everything, and one of our team, jeff, who I'm very, very proud of, is flying over there in a week or two to go and present on Python skills advanced Python skills, which is just incredible, and yeah, so the end goal is for these people to learn to build stuff that's going to benefit their communities and country and local businesses over there, which I'm just very proud of, and that's the kind of thing that gets me going through the night.
JD:Well, congratulations on that. Thank you, and thanks for coming back to that topic. Yes, you didn't answer that question before, so I'm glad you got around to answering that question. I knew you'd get there in the end. That's good, but no, it's a great win for you and a great win for them too. I think that's a tremendous opportunity for them and goes right back to the conversation we had about making a difference. It's awesome. So what about you in your average day in conducting the business of PyBytes, what role does AI?
Julian :play. I use it for as much as I can with automation. So, for example, I'll often be looking at data sets and stuff and instead of just writing it myself or even just going into Excel to do stuff and be like can you crunch this for me please? You know that kind of thing I use it a lot for. Sometimes I'll use it I've actually. So I used to use it a little bit in writing to come up with ideas for some newsletter ideas and different things like that, but I've completely stopped because I just really enjoy writing by myself. So there are things where, like I said, walking back from that full automation thing, so there's that.
Julian :There's actually not a lot that I use it for beyond just the little things or asking for clarification, asking about nuances with language and countries, sometimes as simple as going how do I pronounce this name? I want to respect this person, not have to just say how do you say your name. I want to try so little things like that that you sometimes wouldn't think about that's what I use it for. Sometimes I'll put ideas in there and say here's something I want to build for my community or whatever. What do you think about this? If you look at this curriculum. What do you think I've missed? The target audience is X, y, z, and sometimes it's actually come back and said oh yeah, you assume too much with this. So I use it a lot as a rubber duck to bounce ideas off, which is a coding concept, having rubber ducking. So have you heard that?
JD:before. I haven't heard rubber ducking in a coding context.
Julian :I went right back to Sesame Street straight away? No, no. So imagine a rubber duck from the kid's bathtub and there's a coding thing where you just place that on your desk and you talk to it and, by asking questions and explaining your code to to it, you find the gaps in your um, in your description or what it is that you're trying to do. So you rubber duck and so that's, that's how it starts, but you use people as the rubber duck.
JD:now I can honestly say I've never had a long conversation with a rubber duck, but I'll um, I'll take that talk to inanimate objects all the time you, you don't.
JD:Not a rubber duck, that's a new one on me. I'm going to have to look that one up. That'll be my next search. Well, that's great.
JD:I mean, I think the way you're describing your use of AI is pretty consistent with mine as well. I use it every day, there's no question about it. I use it as an automation aid as well when I'm doing things like the podcasts and and even coaching. It takes care of a lot of the administrative stuff for me, which is which is that kind of low value, high effort stuff, as much as like kind of offloading that stuff. But but you can't trust it.
JD:That's the thing I think I have in my mind all the time is, I have to double check everything. Um, because it doesn't. It gets things wrong, yeah, and so that's the human bit still required. It doesn't get, doesn't go away. Maybe one day we'll see, yeah, so, uh, again back in. I'm gonna go back to april, uh, and I I asked you to recommend a book and you came back with an entire trilogy of books his dark, dark Materials by Stuart Pullman, which is popular and somewhat controversial, I've learned subsequently, is that some people feel like there's some controversy around religious things and so forth associated with that. So I'm a little nervous to ask you this question, but do you have a new book recommendation today?
Julian :Okay. So I didn't know that about his dark materials when I read it as a kid and then I thought I was reading like some sort of uh blasphemy and it was. There was something exciting about it. That's why um no, so actually this this time around um, a book, a book series by uh, and I'm sure many people have heard it by an australian author named matthew riley, and he writes incredible action-packed books that as you read them, they just you feel like you're reading an action movie and it's some of the most thrilling stuff I've read. It's wonderful, it. You know you've got to have a, you've got to have a passion for that kind of thing, like, I've always loved my war games and I've always been interested by military and things like that right, and I love my action movies, right. So when I read this book I was like, oh my God, this is amazing.
Julian :So Matthew Riley writes a series following a Marine, codenamed Scarecrow, so it's just called like the scarecrow series, I think. Um, and he writes other books like contest and other things, and they're really cool. But this scarecrow series just, and each story is a standalone story. There's no kind of like flowing into another one. You could read one by itself and there's enough backstory that you get it. But I just love it. It's really how?
JD:How many books in a series do you know?
Julian :I think there's about five Scarecrow books.
JD:I can't remember I borrowed them off the neighbors and none converted to movies. No, actually I don't think they did.
Julian :They should, they absolutely should.
JD:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Julian :Okay, okay.
JD:I will look that up and include that in the notes from the episode, for sure. What about?
Julian :a quote. Okay, now that you did ask me for in advance and I've prepared. So I have two quotes. The first one is from Jim Rohn, who is someone that I listened to many years ago. I've actually re-listened to his audio book with Bob we're accountable for that. I've actually re-listened to his audio book with Bob we're accountable for that.
Julian :In that story that he tells that I wrote the LinkedIn post about the parable of the sower, so sowing seeds. He talks about how a lot of the seeds won't take root. They'll just wither and die. Or they'll take root but then die, or they'll get picked off by the birds, whatever.
Julian :But the underlying message he has in there is not just keep trying, but it's also to and this is the quote to discipline your disappointment. And it's a very just, a funny way of putting it, but essentially what he's saying is when those people don't show up. So if you're in sales, when people don't show up to the meeting, when people ghost you, when they stop replying, when after months of hard work, they just go with a different vendor or something right, whatever it is you're trying to achieve when you feel that disappointment because that seed didn't take root and it didn't flower, you have to be disciplined with that disappointment. So own it, accept it, but don't spend too much time on it. Often says something he says is like I wouldn't subscribe to that or something I wouldn't spend any time on that, you know so the idea is just get back to planting, just keep sowing those seeds.
Julian :So when something doesn't work, don't be too disappointed. Just accept it as it is. Don't worry, don't stress, don't ask why the world is that way. He says there are other people to do that. You just focus on sowing your seeds, right.
JD:So that's the quote discipline your disappointment I like that a lot and I I'm going to use um, a, I think, a similar metaphor that I think parallels with this one.
JD:That is, you know, know, my family's involved in performing arts and my youngest daughter, specifically, is a professional in the musical theatre realm and what that means is she does lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of auditions for shows that she doesn't get, and she has amazed me in her resilience, in continuing to do that with the same level of passion and enthusiasm. And her mental model and a mental model I hear from a lot of very successful performers is that the auditioning process is actually part of the experience and part of the role and it's not a negative, it's actually, it's a part of the journey, it's part of the process, and she amazes me because she always comes away from these auditions with, you know, I met somebody, or they gave me feedback, or I had to learn something I didn't know, and that was so cool, and it's that, I think it's that notion of. It's not disappointment, it's actually, um, another lived experience it's all growth, right?
Julian :yeah, I love hearing that. That's really cool and quite often right. So you celebrate the win quite loudly and so people will see oh, she got the role. Is this the, the george role, one of the roles? Yeah, yeah, she got the george role, of course. Yeah, yeah, so that was shouted from the rooftops, right. So I remember seeing that going oh my God, this is so cool.
JD:You know, to my kids I'm like look, look, look, look.
Julian :I know who that is, so that's really cool, but then what you don't see is the 20,000 things before that.
JD:Yeah, that didn't work the point of the sowing the seeds is that you just keep trying for the auditions and you don't need them all to flower, you just need that one and she got the one and she's smashing. It looks amazing, well, and they say the ratio is about 64 to 1, by the way, in the performing arts, 64 auditions, which is insane, right, yeah, um, but so I think that that I think that makes a lot of sense in terms of that quote. So I love that quote. You said you had two yeah, okay, this one's really.
Julian :Do you mind if I swear? Am I allowed to swear in this podcast? Yeah, yeah, okay. So this is regarding ai slop, which is what they call all the ai writing that's pervasive on linkedin and all that kind of stuff. And this was from a I won't say his name, but a bloke. I met a couple of weeks ago, um, at the dinner that you and I were going to go to with Paul, and so someone said to me, with regards to writing stuff in AI and you can clearly tell it's written in AI he said if you can't be fucked writing it, why should I be fucked reading it? And I loved it. I said, dude, I need to take that quote. That quote please. I'll credit where you want it, but otherwise it'll be anonymous.
Julian :So it was, it was a fantastic way of putting it and it really resonated with me because I'm, as I started to walk back my use of ai with certain little bits of writing right, um, especially in a if it's something for your website, that's a static page, you know, your about page, whatever that's fine. But if you're writing something for your website, that's a static page, your about page, whatever, that's fine. But if you're writing something for your newsletter to your people, don't let AI write the entire thing. You've got to have your voice right. So I really, really appreciated that and I just cracked up laughing when he said it.
JD:I love it and I don't think any other word would work. I think it works perfectly.
Julian :I like it.
JD:Okay that, I think it works perfectly. I like it Okay.
Julian :That's it. We'll let that one in, that's it. Yeah, that's it, I promise yeah.
JD:It's been so great to catch up with you. You've done so much over that last period since we caught up last time and I'm incredibly proud of the work that you've done and excited about what you're doing and so forth. We'll continue to monitor you and the success of PyBytes and the good work that you and Bob are doing together I think is phenomenal For the folks listening. If they want to work with you, how can they contact you?
Julian :So easily. There's so many different places, but I would say the easiest place is just LinkedIn. But you know our website's there, the community's there. So I'd say the easiest thing connect with me on LinkedIn and send me a DM. It's just simplistic Magic.
JD:I will include both your LinkedIn and your website links in the notes from the show. No question about that.
Julian :Any parting messages. Before I let you go, the only thing I'll add onto I mean, we talked about a lot, so the only thing I'll just say is that your network is everything. That's my tip to everyone, especially in the entrepreneurial world your network is everything. Do not be ashamed or shy or embarrassed to ask them for things, and so if there's a parting message, it's that hey, all of you out there listening, if you know anyone that is in the CSR world, hit me up, help me out, because this is something I really feel we can really give back with, like, really make an impact on people at scale. So it's not so much a message now, it's an ask. So anyone listening, hit me up. I'd love your support. It would be really incredible.
JD:Well, and let me chime in like I'm a part of your marketing department, which I'm not a part of your marketing department, no-transcript in in Asia you can be, you know, in in Europe or whatever. You can help communities anywhere in on the planet, frankly. So don't feel like location is a limiting factor. Uh, if you think julian's organization can, can, support communities where you are, put your hand up. I think it's a phenomenal opportunity and I think we we change not we're not changing individuals lives. I think the work that we're doing in terms of bringing stem and bringing technology to these communities is changing the entire community's opportunities for the future and we should never understate that. Again, it's been a tremendous catch up with you. I really appreciate you making time to catch up again. We might do it again in another 18 months time and see how it's all going then.
Julian :That'd be awesome. We could do it in person next time as well. That'd be good.
JD:Actually do it in person next time as well. That'd be good.
Julian :Actually, that'd be fun, wouldn't it? Yeah, that'd be fun.
JD:I'd be in the same place as you, though.
Julian :Yeah, actually, you know what You're supposed to come up here in a couple of weeks. Don't worry about it. All right, I'll tell you've done with the podcast. Where you're going, you're coaching business, starting, um, all the excitement coming in the in the coming year for you and the family. It's just it's awesome to see where you've landed as well. So I really appreciate you letting me be a part of it.
JD:Thanks, man, I appreciate it. All right, listeners. Um, I said it's great to have you here, love to hear your feedback and your thoughts. Always love your ideas as well. I've had a remarkable number of people who've reached out to me about the podcast lately. I've got like six people in the hopper right now who want to come on and do their own episodes, which is fantastic. There's some great stories to tell through this podcast. So, equally, if you think you've got somebody out there who should be on the podcast, who's got a great story to tell about their journey and their learning experiences, let me know. But with that, julian, I'll let you get back to your life. Mate, go off and sell some Python training, all right, man.
Julian :I will after lunch, Thanks.
JD:John Cheers. Thanks, John Cheers. Thanks everyone Any second now I'll stop the recording.
Julian :My biggest fear is that.
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