 I'm going to do quick introductions and then I'll ask some questions and I will try to save some time at the end so that we can take some questions from you all also. So on the panel we have Mark Lavin, am I pronouncing that right? Yes. Okay. One of the co-authors of Lightweight Django and the technical director of Cactus Group. Andrew Pinkham, freelance software consultant and author of Django Unleashed, scheduled for publication in 2015 by Pearson. Andrew specializes in web and mobile products and is also passionate about security and distributed systems. I feel like I'm doing a game show. This is awesome. Buddy Lindsey creates screencasts on gojango.com, helping those who have the basics of Django and want to take it to the next level. Peter Bumgardner, Peter is the founder of Lincoln Loop. One of the first agencies to provide professional Django support back in 2007, Peter is the author of High Performance Django and a frequent speaker at DjangoCon and has given talks at PyCon and SaltConf as well. Tracy Osborn, author of Hello Web App. I got my autographed copy last night, which walks, yes you can too, which walks beginners through creating their first web app with Django as well as the, and she's also the founder of Wedding Lovely. Okay, so in this first part, I'm going to talk about what you all do as writing. So I'd like all of you to answer this question, this first one, and then some others. You can decide which ones you would like to answer. So tell us about how and when you got involved with Django and why don't we just start down here by you and, oh, I thought you all had it already. I'm sorry. Try it out. Can you hear me? I guess so. Yes. I started in doing Django, actually I don't remember the year, I think four years ago, doing, helping with Mozilla Developer Network. That was my first introduction into it. And I really liked it. I started in ASP.net, did some rails, and then saw this Django thing, and it was kind of a hybrid between the two in a few areas, and I really liked it. And so I just kind of stuck with it. And then from there on the Go Django side, like a couple of months after I started, I was like, you know, I really wish somebody was doing screencasts for these. So why don't I do them? Because no one else is. And so I started doing those. And that really took my learning up to the next level. And that's kind of the dirty secret of Go Django. I didn't know what I was doing, but I was teaching everyone else how to do it, too. So everyone was learning with me, and there still are. So. Yeah, that's my dirty secret as well. Yeah, if you want to come to Expert and something, write a book on it or do screencasts. I was a friend, developer, and designer. I started learning Django four years ago, four or five years ago, because I wanted to launch my startup. And everyone said you had to go find a co-founder, and I tried that, and it was horrible. So I decided just to learn how to program and do it myself. So I've been working on startup ever since then, but as I was growing my startup and becoming a better developer, I kept thinking back to those original tutorials I used and be like, oh, there could be such a better way to teach this, especially as someone who was like me with a front end and design background. So that's, I decided to, as a feeling like a beginner, I decided to jump full into writing my own book and how I wished that Django was taught. My path was, I was a ski bum, and I wanted to make more money. So I became a computer technician and then started hosting email for people because nobody had good email servers, and then they started asking me to build websites for them. So I started doing PHP and WordPress, and then people asked for more complex websites, and I tried to build that stuff in PHP and WordPress, and it was painful. So I moved to Django, and yeah, I've been working with Django since, I think, the .96 version, and it's been good. Yeah, I started learning Python on my own. I wanted to use it for work. I was working in finance at the time, and never really caught on at work, but I really enjoyed what I was doing, and then I wanted to build a little website for myself, so I started to learn Django. I watched some Show Me Do screencasts back in the day, and they were all on .96, but 1.0 was out, and a bunch of weird errors trying to watch the screencast. And yeah, eventually, I decided to move out of finance, and I thought, man, I really like building things with Django or what I've been learning. Maybe someone will pay me to do this. And turns out, by a stroke of complete luck, I ended up at Cactus Group, and just has snowballed from there. Yeah. I started working in the startup scene in 2011, and after a couple jobs where I was working in PHP or Rails or JavaScript, I discovered that I really, really didn't like any of those tools, and ended up on a project with Python and Django, and said, this is it. I don't want to deal with those other tools for any of the other websites, and just kind of stuck with it. All right, thank you. Good answers. OK, so one thing that we have to be mindful, and all the publications I've worked on actually have all been for international audiences, and so in opensource.com, for example, we have a huge editorial lack of focus, I guess, if anything under open source will fit in our site. So when you're thinking about your audience and who you wrote for, I'm curious, what are you picturing as your audience? Is it primarily North American? Are you concerned about having your works translated? Are you picturing this being used at a university level or in a professional setting, or is this something for somebody who is self-taught and doing this at home for fun? So tell us a little bit about the audience you have in mind for how you're creating content. Yeah, I'll let you all pick who decides since. OK, as a self-publisher, because I self-published, I don't have a publisher. I have to think about all those things myself. And a lot of it has to be, I try to make it as accessible as possible. I'm selling on three different platforms, which is kind of weird for a lot of people who do self-publishing, because most people choose either a thing like Gumroad where you're owning the sales and payment yourself versus Amazon, which is kind of universal, but I kind of did Amazon because it does sell internationally really well. But I'm running into a problem. I kind of try to maximize it as much as possible. But I'm working on a second book. In the second book, I'm using Stripe. And Stripe doesn't exist internationally, which has been an issue, because I talked to some people in Budapest, and they were like, well, we can't use Stripe, so that's going to be useless. So the long answer is that personally, I try to make it so anyone, for me, because I'm a beginner audience, anyone who's totally new can use my book. And beginners, you will use multiple tutorials, and I understand that. But I have been running into some internationalization problems. Don't have any answer for it just yet, though. My audience would be probably professionals or people who want to be professionals using it and are kind of in the trenches. I would love to have it internationalized, but I haven't had any request for it yet, and it seems like a monumental task as a self-publisher. So I'm in the same boat that we saw on Gumroad and Amazon and a couple other platforms. So we do get some international sales. Unfortunately, I think English right now is sort of the de facto technical language, which I'm sure it isolates some people, but right now, I think it would just be too big of an undertaking to try to translate. I think there was some effort to translate our book, but that wasn't really a concern we had when we were writing it. Our audience, Julie and I, we wanted to address questions that we felt were coming from the community. Ours is definitely that, like, intermediate to advance user of person, people that's starting to feel constrained by the framework, and we wanted to show them those constraints only exist in their mind and that, like, there are ways to use Django in, you might not have done before or have seen solid examples on. Julia, my co-author, would probably be mad at me for saying this, but I wrote the book for the haters. I wrote the book for the people that hate Django that want to use flask instead, that want to use note instead. I wrote it for them. Do you hear from them often? They don't buy the book. It's for them. It's for them. I spent a lot of time thinking about the difficulty level and the sort of how much knowledge people had when they were going to be reading my book, and I tried to write for two audiences. I tried to write for an audience of people who didn't know how websites worked, didn't understand how web frameworks worked, and needed that extra knowledge before they could come in and look at the Django documentation and the web API, because an API is great as long as you understand the problem that you're using, the problem that you need to solve using that API, and then how all that API fits together. So that was the first audience, and the second audience, and the second, two-thirds of the book, were people who were familiar with the problem and the solution, and who wanted an example of some of the lesser known parts of the Django framework. I'm lucky because I wrote this with Pearson, and Pearson handles internationalization, rather, so it was not something I had to actively think about, because if they believe there is a market, and unfortunately, I have no say in that, please email them directly if you think there is. They will then go ahead and translate it for that market. So it was not a real concern of mine. I'm going to tweak the question for you, buddy. Okay, so mine's two part for you. So what audience did you have in mind, and then are you able to get demographics since you're doing video? Are you able to see who's actually watching the video? And I'd be curious if you had any surprises there, or who's watching our videos. Yeah, so to jump back to the original original question, my first thought was, you're supposed to take all that into mind? I mean, that was a lot. I had never thought about it, almost any of that. Like, oh, wow. So I first started Go Django for me is an opportunity for me to learn, and a lot of other people know what what I've learned. And from there, it's kind of evolved. I have a kind of a more dynamic situation than books, because as as I produce more content, I get more audience and it varies. And so as that's happened, it's changed. I've watched, you know, with Google Analytics, the demographic information, and, and it's very normal tech industry, 20 to 40 male, 80% male, 20% women. And so like, it is the exact representation of what the tech industry is. So, but in all honesty, I haven't really kind of focused much on that. My, my actual target is more skill level is where I try to produce, put it at, at the beginner media to intermediate. So you've, you've done that, you've done the polls tutorial, you maybe done the, the, the pie ladies tutorial, the hello web app, and you're ready to go that one next step. That's kind of where I try to target what I'm doing. And recently I've started backfilling with subtitles and or close captioning. So I found a service that can do that that's not prohibitively expensive, so I can offer the tutorials to like hearing impaired. That also gets the next level of somebody wants to come in and translate, they now have timings to more easily translate it. I just, I can't afford to translate anything. But there's opportunity there for translation to international languages. Plus it actually helps. I've had a couple of people email me and say, hey, I would like close captioning because I can read English really well and I can't, I can't listen very fast, but I can follow along with what you're doing and read at the same time. So I get the benefits of there. So as time has progressed, I've gone like, you know, who's actually watching and how can I help, you know, international specifically? And again, hearing impaired as well. So thank you. Can you hand it down to Peter? Okay, so the next question is about the tools you use for writing, particularly open source tools. What do you use for writing and recording video text editors, or if you're doing any of your own layout, you know, or any of your self publishing or whatever, we'd be interested to hear what tools that you like or ones that you've tried that you don't like or and why you didn't like them. Yeah, I used Sphinx and I didn't like it. It was it was pretty painful, but honestly, I don't really know of a much better option. Some of the things that Sphinx does well, like footnotes and code samples and all this stuff really came in handy. And when I started to research other options, I always kind of found issues that they didn't cover. So yeah, and then layout is using LaTeX, which is I don't like even more. And I had the right idea, you know, I was like, I don't want to deal with this. I had somebody kind of do a style guide, and then I pitched it over to this guy who was a LaTeX expert and to do all the type setting. And he got like 80% of the way done and sort of disappeared. So I had to figure it out kind of last minute under the gun on the deadline, which is mostly like Googling and pasting in things and finding out what didn't work and then Googling again and pasting something else. And so it's really horrible. I did not enjoy that part of the process. But in the end, like, you know, we got something that's pretty close to what we wanted it to look like. So I write in Markdown and I'm using right now Lean Pub platform because Hello App App is also published through Lean Pub and by writing in Markdown using, you know, I save it on Dropbox. I use Macvam personally just to do my writing. So it gives me a little bit of highlighting and stuff. But Lean Pub will generate the mobile, the Moby files and EPUB files for me. So I skipped the, I heard a lot of horror stories about LaTeX or LaTeX, whatever it is. I heard a lot of horror stories about it. And I was like, I don't want to do that. And luckily for my book, all this, all my code stuff is actually really simple. So in Markdown, Lean Pub, because they do technical books, translates it into the digital versions for me. And I can sell the digital versions through Amazon. And then I have a background in design. So then I'm also able to import Markdown into InDesign. And I could do the formatting myself, but I do everything at Markdown. We actually didn't have to make that choice, thankfully. That's one of the joys of not self publishing. We were working with a publisher. They had a lot of documentation. We used ASCII Doc, which is very similar to restructured text, except it compiles to DocBook XML rather than HTML. And very similar format. It's really nice. I like ASCII Doc and I would use it again. Though I have no idea how to compile it. That's all done by their platform. We would just clone to get repo. We put our ASCII Doc files in. We push them up and then they had a platform. We press a button and they'd build a PDF and put it on S3. We downloaded it. It was magic. So I don't know how hard that process of converting ASCII Doc into PDF or MOBI formats actually is. But I liked the process of just writing in ASCII Doc. That was really easy. So Pearson doesn't have that. They probably should be talking to O'Reilly about that because there was no documentation. I was sort of told, go and do whatever you want. The problem is that I wrote in a thousand page book and that's a lot of code. And any time I tweaked it or changed it based on feedback, I didn't want to have to go in and copy the code back in every single time. So I started writing in Markdown and wrote a script that would take the code from GitHub and put it in the Markdown. Except Markdown doesn't have references or sort of any intelligent formatting. So then I extended the Markdown using my own scripts, made it compatible with Pandoc Markdown, compile it into LaTeX and then compile the LaTeX. I'm sorry I've horrified you. And I tried to do the ASCII Doc thing. I really did. And it was simply too rigid given what I was trying to do with it. So I'm so sorry. You are a software developer. So my tool chain is when I first started, I used a $5 screen recording app on the App Store, absolutely hated it, but it got the job done. And then I, Ryan Bates had some conversion scripts on his repo for Railscast. So I copied and pasted those onto my computer. And that's how I got started. Now it's a little more sophisticated. I use IShowUHD for screen recording. I use Audacity for audio recording. And then I mix the two together in Final Cut Pro. I have a couple of custom scripts that do my post-production stuff. And then I have more custom scripts that actually upload everything and set all the show notes and also send it off to get the transcripts and closed captioning done as well automatically. So a lot of custom stuff that I've done. Thank you. We pass it down to Mark and we'll have him start with the next question. OK, so when I write, if it's something I'm excited about writing and I have a vision for it, it's all written in my head before I start writing. And if it's something I need to write or have to write, it's where you'll see me doing an outline and all of that. And so I'm curious about what your processes are and how you decided to start writing or recording. Do you like recording? Do you have a script in mind first or do you wing it? And then with writing the book, did you do an outline? I'd like to hear how you do that. We had an outline as part of the pitch, you know, to say this is the book that we want to write and that was the rough guide of what the chapters would be and what the subject matter would be. And then from there, a lot of it stemmed from the thing that we wanted to create that we wanted to walk the user through the creation of a project. And so we'd start by building the project from nothing and write it and test it and play with it. And then we would go through it and build it all again from scratch and see if we built it the same way the second time and then explain how we built it step by step. That was sort of the process. And working together, we also would sort of swap out who would do the first draft of a chapter and so I would build out chapter one and Julia would build a different chapter and then we would swap and do the second pass. And I write really fast and terrible and so like I would just produce just loads and loads of pages of garbage and then like Julia would refine it and that's, that was our process. She did the garbage collection? Like I mean it's nice to have a co-author, you had a co-author as well, right? It's nice to have another set of eyes and that was definitely part of my process. It's sort of knowing someone's got my back before it went to the editor or a technical reviewer like someone had my back before it got to that point. I had actually started teaching this as a class and actually had intended for a lot of this material to actually be screencasts first and it was at sort of a test viewing of the screencast that someone said, you know, this would be much better as a book and so I started off with actually a whole bunch of slides and a small repo and that I was used to going through and explaining and so when I was structuring the book, it was very much from the standpoint of a class. It turns out I had to seriously expand on that once we expanded on the book. The book was originally intended just to be this 300 page thing and then my editor at PyCon 2014 said, you know, we really like what you've got. Can you give us more of it? And I made the mistake of saying yes. So at that point, I expanded the repo and it became a question of sort of scanning through multiple times where I would build the code out and then write about it and see what was working, what wasn't working, send it off to people and say, how do you feel about these explanations and then scan back through the code as slowly, slowly build it out. And that's sort of how I tackled the problem. For me, the book actually started as kind of like a wrap up letter for a consulting engagement I had and like a list of recommendations for this client we were working with and I was like, I could write more on this and this would probably be helpful for other people. And like the first five or 10,000 words like happened really fast. I was like, oh, this is going to be no problem. And then so from there, I kind of like, you know, I wrote out a bunch of stuff that was all kind of stream of consciousness and then it was outlining like, okay, where are the gaps here? What am I missing? And then my co-author who had, you know, some knowledge, Yen Malay, he was able to fill in some of the gaps where his expertise was, you know, considerably more than mine and then it was sort of, yeah, just kind of combing over that again and again and refining it and filling in gaps and, you know, reading and seeing what we missed and all that. So basically take their process and that's kind of what I do, a mix of all of that. But for idea generation, that's I think a little different for me. I take what I call the long-term blogging approach. Since I try to release three videos a month, I have to think very long term and so I like to get ideas that can last two months or a month or at least two weeks and then I'll spend 10 to 30 hours coding out over and over several times to make sure I can make a video on it and basically doing everything that everyone else talked about. But idea generation comes from what do I want to learn? What's interesting to me? What has someone asked for? I do a lot of that and also what do I see on like Reddit or Stack Overflow that people are asking about consistently? And then what is somebody complaining to me about? So stuff like this, that's kind of where I start getting ideas for mine. The process of outlining for my two books, this one and the new one that's being funded on Kickstarter right now. This book is kind of, I started out with the idea of like what's the basic project, MVP project that someone want to build and then I worked backwards to build chapters in terms of those steps because this book is very much to go from here to here in one flow and that was all done in Google Docs because I like Google Docs because it's really easy to share. So I was able to take the flow, I just listed out and pull it points each chapter and then I had notes on each chapter and I kind of sent to a few people to make sure that I wasn't missing any bits. But book number two, the chapters are individual. They're individual exercises and so that's also on Google Docs and I like just because it's really easy to share. In terms of idea generation there, I guess I'm still finalizing the last chapters and whatnot but a lot of it's just again kind of what I wished with this book existed. So the second book, which is Intermediate Concepts has always like intermediate exercises. I have had it taught myself there wasn't any documentation online, like one of the chapters when we sat in Bootstrap and I knew that something that kind of doesn't exist right now. So knowing that there was a hole there I was able to throw a chapter in and that's kind of how I built all the second book. Okay, let's start with Andrew on this one and you might not have an answer for this Andrew since as you said you have a publisher and so I'm curious about licensing. How do you pick how to license your material or is it chosen for you and if you did get to pick what made you decide on the license that you decided on? So I did not get to pick and it was not a question I realized I could ask. I got into a really interesting conversation with Harry Percival who published all of his material online under a Creative Common license. I had been led to believe when I signed the contract with Pearson that I had no say in the matter and it later turns out that they do allow for some flexibility and O'Reilly allows for some flexibility but so when I signed the contract I was told this is the only contract you will sign it is non-negotiable and that was it. So if you got to pick do you have one in a favorite in mind? I probably would look at the Creative Commons options honestly. I showed up at DjangoCon 2013 with the dual purpose of trying to learn more Django but also to meet people in the community. I at that point had not signed a contract with Pearson but had begun the conversation with them and I wasn't going to write a book for a group of people that I didn't like. So I showed up and I loved the community and I said yes I will write this book and so given that I wrote a book for the community it seems really silly not to just give a lot of that away. On the other hand I'd also like to make money off of this so I'm not sure that's the right answer. So I honestly haven't thought a whole lot about it. I'm in the same boat I really I mean I have the ultimate choice considering I own all of it but I never really thought about it and haven't because you know I I just want to create content for people and it's available on my site a bunch of it's free a bunch of it's not and so yeah and I want to make money so I I might think about it somewhere but at the moment I just retain the full copyright and I just go about my day on that just creating content that's really what I want to do. Yeah it's a little awkward for me being a beginner tutorial because the there's an excellent Django Girls tutorial and I encourage people to do both but they're free and I'm not and that makes you feel awkward sometimes I feel like I should release it for free I'm trying to make this into my my day job and that would be so awesome if I was doing this is my day job and Ergo I need to charge at some point so I do retain copyright and I try to release some things for free and it's made some conversations awkward but everyone's been super supportive that I haven't I've been charging for beginner content. Yeah our book is you know Copyright All Rights Reserve we're in the same boat I mean it's a tremendous amount of work to put a book out there I wouldn't do it if there weren't some you know other upside and we do like we post on our blog and when I'm interested in a topic I'll write about in our blog honestly there's nothing in this book and my guess is you know probably most of the other people's that you couldn't find if you dug enough online the point of the book is it's kind of you have it all in one place and instead of spending weeks digging around you have it you know all right there so yeah it's it is a little strange in an open source environment to release you know copyrighted pay-for material but I think if it weren't for that it just wouldn't get done you wouldn't have high quality books available if they were all kind of free and open source. As of a small thing to add and this wasn't really a big discussion that we had though I did talk to Harry as well about the process of him open sourcing all of his content and I think that's I think that's great that it's available for free but I feel like even though it's available for free and it is available on github it's not truly open source like people aren't collaborating on this book together you know this book is our vision and like we're not going to accept pull requests on like unless it's a typo like you're not going to change the book for us so I don't know I guess we can make it open like so that people could download it and try to build it themselves though it would never happen like it would never work but it's not really open source in that sense. I just remember there's actually a chapter that's my installation instructions that are on github and I originally put it up there because I knew that installation stuff would change fast and I didn't want my book to go out of to be old information too fast and I put it on github and I was talking about the book and people actually have I mean little things like finding typos someone gave me a whole thing for how to install on linux like some things I hadn't filled out I have a page on there with extra resources and it was really cool seeing people come in and help out with this because I put the information on this repository it was kind of cool so it's like a tiny little open source area that people have helped me out with. Well that wasn't a trick question because I've worked under many licenses with the different publications I worked on and and I was honestly curious because people have different things that they found work for them you know or different motivations for writing and I remember at linux pro which is not an inexpensive magazine it's about a hundred dollars a year very low ad count though and we counted on subscribers and you know occasionally people would say information wants to be free and my response was well I don't work for free you know and I expect to get paid for writing and editing and so someone's gonna have to pay me you know and so but there are many different models that work for different people obviously so we don't have about 10 minutes I have more questions I can ask but I want to make sure that everyone here gets a chance so let's take audience questions and there's a mic over here and then if we have time I will ask more at the end so I don't think we'll have time for my questions so. Long time ago I wrote a Drupal book so from that experience I asked how did you maintain your sense of wellness while doing the work I mean that's a serious question because you're kind of working all the time and how do you maintain health balance? This question is predicated on the fact that we did yeah no I mean again I don't know how y'all that don't have a co-author did it by yourself it's insane I did it by being carried by Julia at times and I carried Julia when she needed me it was not I'm not good at work-life balance I work like all the time and then I work on the book and then I go run and I sleep and that's you know everything that I do every single day but I don't know it's we did it for the challenge I yeah I would say how did we find how did I find a balance I didn't find a balance I have a startup so when I get burnt out my startup I go to writing and when I get burnt out I'm writing I'll go back to my startup and I'm lucky to have that flexibility to do that with my hours I end up working 24-7 on one or the other but it does help me to context switch and it allowed me to work on this without like feeling like it was like a terrible terrible job I set very strict deadlines from basically when I leave in the morning at 6 a.m and basically till I get home around 4 like that's my full-time job and I don't do my full-time job outside of that and then I do family stuff until about 6 and then from 6 to 9 I three days a week I do go Django stuff and so I have to make sure my process is extremely streamlined to make sure I fit it in there and then I'll do Saturday morning before noon sometimes to get stuff and I just and my wife reminds me if I start deviating out of that so I just have a question about kind of the process so I did a three-hour tutorial here at DjangoCon and I felt so overwhelmed and that's you know one-tenth of the amount of content and I found when I would go in to try and do something I would just kind of get lost in all that there was and it's like oh there's a reference here that goes there how do you kind of think about like taking a small amount of work it's like I'm just gonna work on this chapter or like how do you like deal with the breadth of information that you have and actually just focus on where you need to be working divide and conquer is sort of the short answer no seriously I because I was so focused on demonstrating code I made sure that all of the the code was heavily annotated in github and all of the I knew which commit was in which chapter any commands that I had run at that point were in the github notes and I was I was writing notes as I went and that way anytime I was writing about that I could simply look at the list of commits see which ones were relevant to that chapter and then begin looking through the notes that I had written to myself while I was building it and then add two notes that I had written to myself on the side in a text editor and try and pick that up but there is a substantial amount of information yeah just to add I think you really have to know your audience and focus on your audience your book can't be everything to everyone or your content can't be everything to everyone so it's constantly like can I cut this like you know your tutorial was about writing documentation like do they really need to know this they really care about this you know having a focus just saying like this can be covered by another book like we didn't really cover testing which is not great but there's other great books about testing and our book can be about what it's about and they can go buy Harry's book instead okay we have about five more minutes so and I think everybody would probably be happy to talk in the hallway track around breaks later so let's go and let Jacob ask a question first off thanks y'all so much this has been really fantastic so many years ago I had a publisher someone who worked at a publisher tell me that they didn't want to do Django books because the the the quality of the documentation meant that there was no market for paid Django content and I think you've all like proven that wrong but I'm interested in what your relationship is with the documentation I mean is the is the existence of all this great content to sign that the doc quality has slipped are we covering different areas where can you talk a little bit about how you see yourself versus what's in the official docs for me the Django docs and kind of need to be non-opinionated you know they shouldn't be having favorites on and our book is a lot about the tooling that goes around Django so I felt like there was an opportunity to say you know sure there's other stuff out there but this is probably what you should be using or this is a this is a good starting point I think there are some easy kind of performance gotchas in Django that I don't know how well they're they're documented maybe but I don't know if that's Django's job either you know that the ORM can hide the fact that you're doing a bazillion queries and like that might be a problem or you're counting a table with millions of rows so yeah I think the Django documentation is great and I think most of the content in my book wouldn't belong in the Django documentation I tried using polls way back in the day and it didn't work and I ended up teaching myself Django using Kenneth loves getting started Django video series but yes it was because Django polls that I wrote this my real quick comment is the Django docs cover what to do we cover how to do it yeah time for another question thank you for this nice panel my question is what tools do you recommend for your viewers in case of screencast and readers in case of books for your students and what is their text editors versus id straight up for novice programmers from your perspective I don't think we have a lot of opinions about that I like dead tree copies I like physical books I also like and I was talking with someone else about this before I like not being able to copy and paste the code I like having to type it out myself I think there's something very that's part of my learning process I don't know if that's true of everyone else so I like having print editions and having to type and understand the code regardless of what the editor is not being able to copy and paste is like that's a feature to me I don't I don't have a real opinion I purposely don't have full projects on GitHub like other people do because of exactly that I have just enough code in my show notes to show you exactly what I typed most of the time you can't copy and paste and make it work I purposely did that because I'm that way I I have to do it myself for me to learn and often I when I was when I experimented with giving full examples people would email me asking how stuff worked without watching the videos and so it's like I explained it in this five minute video that I spent 30 hours producing well why do I need to spend the next 30 minutes talking to you and the re-explaining it so Al did you have a quick question because we have about one minute yeah I'm sure everyone's heard of Khan Academy and Code Academy and just using technology as a way of teaching new things especially programming languages in Django do you feel that books as a medium have a much longer future for for learning different technologies or are they going to eventually be surpassed by screencasts or even interactive tutorials or or something else even problem with books is especially in my case is that Django keeps changing its version and so if you release a book and then Django changes then things go out of date so that's the problem with say books over say tutorials one that's harder to update but you could you could make the argument that even if you're putting together screencast you're still locked into a version I've had actually so I teach Django classes startups corporate and I've had a lot of people in startups who say oh well I learned Python in Code Academy and Code Academy has a specific limitation where it puts all the code in a little box and then it doesn't let you out of that box and so one of the things about a lot of the I'm not saying this is a limitation of the medium but one of the things that you see on almost all of these sites is that they they've locked you in and that turns out to be a real problem whereas I don't think books or other mediums allow you to do that right that they give you all of the freedom without putting you in this box and they in some ways it's less great because they force you to go out and figure out the install and they put this overhead right away sorry so it does a great way to end though because long-lived print is the takeaway there thank y'all