2025-09-13 –, Ballroom 1
When you're learning to code, no matter what the language, you learn small components: write a function to do something, create a class to do other things, add a user interface component and so on.
Then you get out into the real world and there's nobody telling you what components to write. You know how to code, but you don't know how to develop. So you do more courses and tutorials, watch more videos and read more documentation. But you still don't know how to take that extra step and apply your knowledge to develop an entire project. You're stuck in tutorial hell!
I'm going to go beyond the code and show you how to design, structure, and document your projects. I'll also show you how you can use AI to help.
These problems and their solutions will apply to every language and development environment you'll use through your career, whether or not you're using Python. By the end, I hope I will have given you some tools to help you escape from tutorial hell and start developing your own projects.
One of the problems you need to solve to escape from tutorial hell is working out what code to write. Before you write a single line of code, step away from the computer and design your project. What exactly is it going to do? What platforms does it need to run on? What technologies will you use to build it? With these decisions made, you can break down the project into smaller parts that you already know how to do.
Project structure is fundamental to reading and maintaining your project. Over the life span of any development project, the code will be read - by you or by other developers - far more often than it is written or edited. Logical file structures and consistently formatted code make it easier to find the code you need. Naming is considered one of the great problems of programming but using good names for your files, classes, functions and variables makes your code more usable and more readable.
Documentation is crucial for any project, whether you're working alone or in a team. First, I'll look at strategies for discovering and reading official documentation. Then I'll talk about documenting your own code. I'll also discuss strategies for keeping your knowledge up to date.
AI is a powerful tool that can help you write or improve code. I'll talk about ways to improve the results that AI gives you and discuss some of the pros and cons of using AI in your teaching, learning, and development process.
Sarah has been programming since before most PyCon AU-ers were born (and since before many universities even owned a computer!). Having developed for macOS and the web for many years she has built everything from fermentation monitoring devices to furniture visualisers, but over the decades has never lost the thrill of being able to make a computer do what she wants.
While she might not consider herself a teacher, she has literally written the book on macOS development for macOS newbies (well, four books actually).
Sarah's passion is trying to get more people writing apps for the Mac itself, so her latest book "Escape from Tutorial Hell" helps people get over that next hurdle from beginner-coder to developer-in-your-own-right.
Sarah just can't get enough of computers, so in her spare time you'll either find her playing World of Warcraft or putting Python to work to solve Advent of Code problems.