145 points by gregsadetsky3 days ago | 36 comments
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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!
PLY's fine but parser generators feel like solving problem you don't have anymore. Recursive descent gets you 90% there with zero grammar file to debug, and you actually understand your own parser at 2am. PLY's API is nice, sure, but "nice API" isn't why I'd reach for it.
Lean for who though? His stuff reads great once you already know asyncio's internals well enough to spot what he's simplifying. Ever watched a total beginner try to follow along without that context already in their head?
"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.
I kept coming back to his course listing to find some that were on site, but they were all online. I wanted to take my current team to the same onsite experience I had with Dave over 15 years ago. Classes taught in person are so much better.
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.
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!
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 do not think this is actually AI: currently, there is a narrative (gradually dying out) that AI will replace software engineers and you don't need CS/Software Engineering education as a result. It's the "leaders" who listen to this.
Small nit: it's just "O'Reilly" now, they dropped "Media" from the name years ago after splitting off the events/media business. Anyway yeah, some of Dave's PyCon/conference talks are on there too, not just packaged courses.
I had Prof. Beazley as a CS undergrad at University of Chicago. He was an amazing professor and much loved. Seeing how little the university valued his contributions is a big reason I chose not to pursue an academic path.
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'm really sad to see this happen to another fellow course creator.
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.
Learning itself hasn't fundamentally changed because of AI, period. Anyone claiming otherwise probably isn't thinking seriously about what learning actually is. What has changed is the demand for certain types of courses, especially computer science and programming courses, which has declined significantly. Honestly, this was entirely predictable.
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.
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.
How is anyone making money from courses if dabeaz isn't? He's got the word of mouth going on, celebrity status in the Python world, world-class courses, it doesn't make sense to me. I'm not asking rhetorically, am truly curious about what's going on.
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.
We tried running small paid workshops at our last company, similar model. Math never worked past ~15 people per cohort before quality dropped, and 15 people times a few hundred bucks doesn't cover the prep time. Enrollment "problem" is probably just the format's ceiling.
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!