David Beazley – Programming Courses
dabeaz.com
dabeaz.com
Funny enough, a few months ago we decided to start a new project and we chose async Python. I had no clue how'd work so I decided to read the PEP and learn a bit more. Big was my surprise when I realized I "knew" all the fundamentals just by understanding how coroutines and generators worked low level, thanks to David's talks.
EDIT: His talks about the GIL are also super informative!
I saw some old code of mine that used PLY a few weeks ago and god damn is that a fine library. Fast, to the point, and a beautiful API.
Personally, I'm finding this kind of story lately shocking and heartbreaking.
Programmers are worse off for his retirement, but (given his career change) Chicago-area high school kids are in for a real treat.
It was engaging, challenging, and all the other students were there specifically because they wanted to be there. I've never experienced anything like that in school, it was uniquely motivating.
I always thought I'd get to try his compilers course one day, but I waited too long!
All the best to him on his next adventure.
He's long been a fabulous teacher to adults; kids will be lucky to have him.
Best wishes to him going forward.
I wish David the best with his new teaching direction. And I hope David will find a practical way to make these courses available for self-study.
People don't want learn tools anymore. Programming education experienced tremendous growth from the 2000s onward because coding became a valuable skill in the job market. Today, the market has shifted. Learning to code in 2010 is, in many ways, the equivalent of learning to use AI effectively for software development in 2026. The underlying goal is the same: acquiring the skills that employers and the market value.
What's happening to David is the same thing happening to many "learn to code" platforms. Their catalogs were built for a different era, and declining demand reflects changes in the job market, not a decline in people's interest in learning.
Maybe David is simply tired of teaching programming and changing a catalog that he put a lot of hard work for the last 20 years seems like a lot of work, and that's completely fair. But he could also adapt his expertise and content to fit this new reality instead of relying on a curriculum designed for a thriving market that no longer exists.
Will change back in 12 - 24 months.
People still learn math, despite the calculator existing. Accounts still learn accounting, despite Excel and accounting software existing.
If/when it does change in 12-24 months, I think companies need to take a serious look at the people in these “leadership” positions. If the quality of their thinking on big things like this is that bad, and so easily swayed by marketing and hype, then they don’t seem qualified for the positions they’re in.
It's getting quite exhausting having to endure all these major events of the 21st century and their consequences - 9/11 and the Iraq war, the 2008 financial crisis, covid-19, and now AI.
But I guess it's better than all out war and conquest as was with most of human history.
They do, but you need far fewer or none of the original workers whose full-time job this sort of stuff was.
Raw math does not matter, but what you do with it. Similarly, you could earn a (modest) living knowing nothing but raw HTML, JavaScript and a bit of browser tech not too long ago. That is no longer possible.
Programming and software engineering will be devalued. These occupations won't disappear overnight, but you will see compensation and growth stagnate until equilibrium is reached again. Currently, supply outstrips demand, and I do think it is structural, not just hype.
I'm certainly not creative enough, but I currently do not see demand picking up sufficiently; Gen Z is bearish on social media, VR was a bust, blockchain was a bust, software has already penetrated almost all walks of live and lines of work. There is no next big thing (Internet, ...) on the horizon, to unlock the next order of magnitude of demand. There is certainly more work to do still, but it very suddenly does not require the same headcount, but something like 5%-30% less. Lots of the remaining work will be around integrating LLMs into existing software, which does not sound exciting either.
What I agree with is that things will come back around in 12 to 24 months.
What I don't agree with is that I also consider this to be AI.
In fact, when you use AI, the stratification of input is very clear. In the end, even in software engineering, the quality of what AI produces depends heavily on how you prompt it. And there's no way around it—AI will inevitably do better than most people. It's pointless to say to an encyclopedia, 'I know more than you.' For a human to beat AI, the only way is to dig deeper into the latest technologies, but that's something only scholars who are up to date with cutting-edge academic trends can do. Most ordinary people won't be able to win against it.
However, I think software engineering will continue to exist. The reason is the stratification of input. In the end, software skills might become something like a subset selection technique for prompting within a specific domain.
What I’ve found is that in the instances where I want to learn, ai teaches me now.
The reason is simple: AI only gives you the information it deems necessary and semantically related to your prompt. But humans don't just dig into local details—they give you a broader map. That's what a curriculum does, in a sense.
In that regard, I think human education will shift toward cultivating macro-level insight and perspective.
p.s I'm really amazed that you're the author of the IPython Cookbook. I found that book incredibly useful. The fact that I was able to work as an assistant to data scientists was also based on what I learned from that book. I'm personally a fan of yours, so it's surprising to see you here
You start to see patterns that let you understand what input leads to what output, and so to organize your actions in a way that will generate preferred outcomes.
In hindsight, I am _very_ happy that I never made that project into a main source of income.
I'm not sharing this to steal any thunder, but more to relate:
I've been making video programming courses since 2015 on Flask and Docker. Built up a whole business of doing contract work + courses. Released 500+ blog posts and YouTube videos for free to help share what I learned with no strings attached, but had the courses available for sale if anyone wanted to learn more or support my work. Organic search traffic and word of mouth was 99% of my traffic.
I sustained myself for a decade and I was living what I would consider my best life. I never made a ton of money but I got the flexibility to work on what I wanted and it was amazing hearing stories about the courses helping someone change their life for the better. Countless emails of people turning their life around by building things to help them and their families. Hundreds of success stories.
I also noticed an insane drop off around 2023 and by now in mid-2026, it's dead. I literally haven't sold 1 course in 40 days, not even 1. At this point I'm spending thousands a year just to host them out of pocket. Traffic to everything is down over 10x, etc..
I saw the writing on the wall a few years ago and I ended up doing full time work instead but I still post every week.
All that to say, I don't know what to do. I tried everything I could think of. Even did a 2 year weekly podcast in a related field and it yielded close to nothing, despite a number of folks emailing me saying it was their favorite podcast on DevOps / software development.
All I can say is, this really sucks. Our life's work has been gobbled up by trillion dollar companies and sold where we see nothing of it. I had to change my entire life around. I've gone back and forth on just deleting everything or at least putting it all behind a free sign up to stop AI but that doesn't feel right to the actual humans out there.
The real sad thing is internally, there's an endless number of courses I could make. This isn't anywhere near me wanting to stop. I have a ton more things to share. It's just impossible (for me at least) to move forward on it because these things take time and to be able to survive in this world you need money.
I'd take the whole set if I could. I too am a little dismayed by the state of the world I'd like to see, his courses should be full.
He is as an amazing of a teacher as you would think he is from his publicly available talks. I hope secondary education means middle school, he'd light so many fires.
Thanks Dave!
Hope he finds something fulfilling in the days ahead.