Topic Archive

Developer

  • Why do we insist on struggling alone?

    Julian Sequeira

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    2 min read

    A realisation about my son’s basketball team reminded me that we should never be ashamed to ask for help, or better yet, seek formal coaching/support. Last year, for two straight seasons, my son’s team got absolutely smashed on the court.  They had the energy and the determination, but they were effectively running in circles without any real guidance (and I’m definitely not a basketball player!). Sound familiar? It should! It’s exactly what it feels like when you can’t figure out where you’re going wrong, stuck in tutorial hell or banging your head against a wall trying to architect an application by…

  • 3 Questions to go from thinking like a Scrappy to Senior Dev

    Julian Sequeira

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    2 min read

    How do you know if you’re actually growing as a dev? Last week I was chatting with a developer who’d hit a wall. (I talk to a lot of devs now that I think about it!) Like him, you might consider yourself a scrappy coder. You’re an all-rounder, can generally figure things out and write some sort of scrappy script to solve a problem. It’s actually a badge of pride! I myself have a bunch of scrappy scripts running in my home lab to do various things. The thing is, sometimes this confidence we feel being scrappy, may actually just…

  • How Even Senior Developers Mess Up Their Git Workflow

    Julian Sequeira

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    4 min read

    There are few things in software engineering that induce panic quite like a massive git merge conflict. You pull down the latest code, open your editor, and suddenly your screen is bleeding with <<<<<<< HEAD markers. Your logic is tangled with someone else’s, the CSS is conflicting, and you realise you just wasted hours building on top of outdated architecture. It is easy to think this only happens to juniors, but it happens to us all. Case in point – this week it was the two of us butting… HEADs (get it?). When you code in isolation, you get comfortable.…

  • How to Automate Python Performance Benchmarking in Your CI/CD Pipeline

    Julian Sequeira

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    2 min read

    The issue with traditional performance tracking is that it is often an afterthought. We treat performance as a debugging task, (something we do after users complain), rather than a quality gate. Worse, when we try to automate it, we run into the “Noisy Neighbour” problem. If you run a benchmark in a GitHub Action, and the container next to you is mining Bitcoin, your metrics will be rubbish. To become a Senior Engineer, you need to start treating performance exactly like you treat test coverage. The Solution: Continuous Performance Guardrails If you want to stop shipping slow code, you need…

  • The Vibe Coding trap

    Julian Sequeira

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    3 min read

    One of my readers replied to an email I sent a couple of weeks ago and we got into a brief discussion on what I’ll call, Skills Erosion. They brought up the point that by leaning too heavily on AI to generate code, people were losing their edge. It’s a good point that’s top of mind for many devs. I’m guessing you’ve thought about it too. After all, if AI writes all of our code, how are we actually learning anything? The exchange made me go down a rabbit hole and I found the data quite interesting. We all know what Vibe…

  • Building Useful AI with Asif Pinjari

    Julian Sequeira

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    2 min read

    I interview a lot of professionals and developers, from 20-year veterans to people just starting out on their Python journey. But my conversation with Asif Pinjari was different. Asif is still a student (and a Teaching Assistant) at Northern Arizona University. Usually, when I talk to people at this stage of their life and career, they’re completely focused on passing tests or mastering syntax. Asif on the other hand, is doing something else: He’s doing things the Pybites way! He’s building with a focus on providing value. We spent a lot of time discussing a problem I’m seeing quite often…

  • Coding can be super lonely

    Julian Sequeira

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    3 min read

    I hate coding solo. Not in the moment or when I’m in the zone, I mean in the long run. I love getting into that deep focus where I’m locked in and hours pass by in a second! But I hate snapping out of it and not having anyone to chat with about it. (I’m lucky that’s not the case anymore though – thanks Bob!) So it’s no surprise that many of the devs I chat with on Zoom calls or in person share the same sentiment. Not everyone has a Bob though. Many people don’t have anyone in their circle that…

  • The missing 66% of your skillset

    Julian Sequeira

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    2 min read

    Bob and I have spent many years as Python devs, and 6 years coaching with Pybites and we can safely say that being a Senior Developer is only about 1/3 Python knowledge. The other 60% is the ecosystem. It’s the tooling. It’s all of the tech around Python that makes you stand out from the rest. This is the biggest blind spot keeping developers stuck in Tutorial Hell. You spend hours memorising obscure library features, but you crumble when asked to configure a CI/CD pipeline. (That’s not just made up by the way – many of you in dev roles will have seen…

  • Try an AI Speed Run For Your Next Side Project

    Chris Patti

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    7 min read

    The Problem I have for as long as I can remember had a bit of a problem with analysis paralysis and tunnel vision. If I’m working on a problem and get stuck, I have a tendency to just sit there paging through code trying to understand where to go next. It’s a very unproductive habit and one I’m committed to breaking, because the last thing you want is to lose hours of wall clock time with no progress on your work. I was talking to my boss about this a few weeks back when I had a crazy idea: “Hey…

  • Creating a Fitness Tracker App with Python Reflex

    Bob Belderbos

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    10 min read

    In this post, I will build a simple fitness tracker app using Python Reflex. Reflex is a Python library that allows you to create reactive applications using a functional and declarative approach. We will use Reflex to create a simple fitness tracker app that allows you to log the amount of workouts completed per week. This is how it will look: Install Reflex After making a new directory and cd’ing into it, I’ll use uv (anybody not yet using this amazing tool? 💡) to initialize a project and install Reflex: The awesome thing about uv is that you don’t have…