David Beazley – Programming Courses

"It's sad, but true. The courses that I used to offer here have to come to end. ... Honestly, I thought I might be teaching these courses into my retirement, but the enrollment numbers don't lie. Since 2023, there has been a complete collapse in the market for continuing education."

Personally, I'm finding this kind of story lately shocking and heartbreaking.

David's talks at PyCon are all amazing. My favorite is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCs5OvhV9S4

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 took dabeaz's course on the Raft algorithm a few years ago.

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.

I took Dave’s “Write a compiler” course several years ago, and it was mind-blowing in the absolute best sense of the term. What a great teacher and person.

Programmers are worse off for his retirement, but (given his career change) Chicago-area high school kids are in for a real treat.

Sad to learn that future generations of programmers won’t benefit from learning from him directly. I took his SICP course a couple of years ago after numerous failed attempts at reading the book and even watching the MIT videos. David’s course was the first time the concepts really clicked.

Very sad. I never took his courses, for various reasons, but having something like this as an option available was quite inspiring in my never ending quest to become a better software engineer.

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.

I took the Compilers course with Dave, remote.

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!

I think that even if you will never code, it will teach you how to think—especially if you also learn math, stats, and other engineering courses.

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.

I've decided to go back to graduate school to get my Professional Educator's License in Secondary Education, final destination unknown

He's long been a fabulous teacher to adults; kids will be lucky to have him.

Best wishes to him going forward.

Noticed a similar thing with calmcode.io, the numbers don't lie. At the same time though, the setup of that site is so light/cheap that it remains zero effort to just keep the tutorials up.

In hindsight, I am _very_ happy that I never made that project into a main source of income.

I wish there was video material of the courses taught by Dave available for purchase.

Took the compilers class in 2012 and it was amazing. Loved the immersive format and the fact all the students wanted to be there.

Hope he finds something fulfilling in the days ahead.

Seeing even these experienced professionals quit teaching programming, it seems like AI has had a big impact on the education market

[dead]