Helpful YouTube Channels - December 2021

YouTube is one my favorite resources for learning. Seeing someone work through a problem and explain how something works helps me consider problems and challenges that I have faced in the past. Often I find simpler approaches to solving my own issues. It’s also a great way to discover new tools or strategies that you may not have been aware of before.

Since I spend a good amount of time on YouTube, I thought I would share some of the channels I’ve been into more recently and a short blurb on why I like them. Most of these will be programming and python related, but if you read until the end, I’ve got a bonus fishing channel as well :)

Fireship.io

Fireship.io has quickly become one of my favorite channels. Fireship does an awesome series called 100 Seconds of Code. As you might have guessed, each video is ~100 seconds long and gives you the quick TL;DR info that you might have to Google and skim wikipedia for when starting to learn something new. Topics for this series range from languages (Java) to frameworks (React) and other developer tools (Kubernetes). Every now and then, Fireship will add a bonus tutorial towards the end of the video. I particularly like this one for NextJS

PyBytes

PyBites is a newer channel that I’ve recently stumbled upon. I’ve found this channel to be great for that “discovery phase” I mentioned where I find out about new tools or strategies that I hadn’t heard of before. Here’s a few videos in particular that have been useful:

• HTMX Demo - a nice demo of HTMX, a newer library that lets you do AJAX without writing JavaScript, with FastAPI
• GitHub Actions - a how-to video of using GitHub Actions to automate testing. PyBites also has a blog post on the benefits of using GitHub Actions
• Ag & Sed - a demo and tutorial of using ag and sed to edit multiple files at once from the command line

anthonywritescode

The final channel that I’ll share for now is anthonywritescode. Anthony is the primary maintainer of flake8 and a core developer for pytest and tox. His video topics cover a wide range such as try and except best practices to publishing a package on pypi. Generally his videos are short and sweet and include a practical example. One that I find particularly useful is this python debugger crash course.

BONUS - FISHING VIDEO!

In Deep on the Delta with Steve Cooper

You might have been able to tell from my last post, but I really enjoy fishing. I spent a good amount of the last year fishing the California Delta aka the Delta. At first, it was overwhelming because there is so much water and just about everything looks like it holds good fish. Then, I found In Deep on the Delta with Steve Cooper. Steve has been fishing the Delta for years and has begun sharing weekly fishing reports, tips and techniques like pitch casting, and even interviews with other local legends. Steve’s videos have truly helped build my confidence for fishing out on the Delta and I highly recommend them if you’re interested in fishing too!

That’s it for now, catch you in the next one!