Hey there,

Happy Monday!

I've got some interesting things lined up for you this week.

1. Agentic AI community, live event and guide

I started a Slack a while back for developers, but last week I pivoted it to be Agentic AI-focused first.

https://pythonagenticai.com/

You can join there, as well as register for our upcoming live event on the 14th of October: Deterministic systems on top of stochastic LLMs

While there, also make sure you grab our new free 14-page PDF guide: Beyond the LLM Call - Designing the Python system around an AI agent

I am excited to teach more people how to build systems around LLMs.

Hope to see you in the community and at the live event!

2. The Resistance

I've picked up Steven Pressfield's The War of Art again.

We all struggle with procrastination, especially for things that require us to step outside of our comfort zone (for me right now, that's video production, which I haven't done in a while).

This quote spoke to me because, as with all hard things, it's not the doing that's hard; it's the starting. 💡

To help with this, I developed a habit tracker app: commitgraph.app.

It sounds cliché, but it's already helping me and others stay more consistent with important habits (e.g. reading the Daily Stoic, doing my daily workout, certain business tasks).

At noon I get a reminder email with the habits I have yet to tick off.

I love where productivity meets tooling: it adds accountability. 😎

I was happy that PyCoder's Weekly featured the technical write-up of this app: 5 design patterns used in my new habit tracker app

3. Learning hard things again

Speaking of resistance, I also want to share a post that really resonated with me.

It was by Michael P. on learning C. In case you're not on LinkedIn, here it is:

Using Claude/agents, I get a lot of things done faster, but there is a cost. I often don't feel particularly challenged. 😮

I use my existing skills to steer the tool and use my judgment to course-correct.

But when was the last time I had to really struggle to learn something new?

Actually, I do have a reference point.

A few months ago I did our Rust cohort as a student. The struggle and the code reviews were both great; I was really learning again.

Here is the repo if you want to see the process.

And I'm happy to see people in the current cohort experiencing the same. Here is what Wilfred shared the other day:

Are you also facing a variant of "I don't learn anything, I just throw things at LLMs"?

I'd be curious to hear how you'd like to be challenged to learn new things again. Or is it LLMs all the way these days? 😅

If the answer is Rust for you, I'd love to guide you through the journey over at Scripter to Rust.

"There is no learning without pain." - Aristotle

4. Programming books matter! Join my book club

Speaking of fundamental knowledge, I want to share something I'm starting: a programming book club.

I've always loved pair reading books, and while writing The Programming Books I Still Recommend After 15 Years I realized how important and timeless some of these books are.

Let's start with one of the best, most timeless programming books: The Pragmatic Programmer (Hunt & Thomas). We will read it together, discuss it, and apply the lessons to our own projects and experiences.

Join here

5. Free Python foundational course

If you're learning Python, you've probably noticed that the syntax isn't the hard part.

It's everything around it that can be overwhelming: the terminal, Git, virtual environments, dependencies, packaging, setting up an SSH key to push to GitHub, and writing your first tests.

I'm creating a free 6-week self-paced course that helps aspiring Python devs get up to speed faster.

If you still struggle with all the things you need to know to ship a Python project, this course is for you. If you're already well versed in this, please share this with somebody who is struggling to get started.

Weeks 1 and 2 are live, and every Friday I release a new week.

Start here

Have a great week and hit me up if you want to chat about any of the above, or just say hi. ☕

Especially these days with AI, human connections are more important than ever! 💡 📈

Cheers,

Bob

P.S.

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