I recently interviewed Miguel Grinberg for the Distinguished Devs podcast.
If you’ve ever done any web development work with Python, you’ve almost certainly come across Miguel Grinberg - his successful blog being one of the most useful resources on Flask, Python and many other areas. He has literally written the book on Flask Web Development published by O'Reilly, and is the author of the Flask Mega tutorial.
He is also the creator and maintainer of a large number of popular open source projects, including python-socketio, Flask-SocketIO, FlaskHTTPAuth and many more.
You can listen to the full podcast here, but I'll summarise/paraphrase some of my favourite parts below.
On knowledge sharing
Miguel notes that sharing knowledge, in the form of blog posts, open source software, or books, has been the most important thing in his career. Though you might do it to help others, the rewards it gives you personally are immense.
Miguel says that initially, the motivation to blog and share has to come from yourself; his first tweet about the Flask Mega Tutorial only received one like, and the series did not receive much engagement for a long time before it gained traction.
On learning
Miguel says that the best way to learn anything is to pick a project or goal and use your new skill to work towards it. Without this goal, it's hard to find the motivation to learn effectively.
The Distinguished Devs podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify etc.
I hope you enjoy this episode, please let me know what you think!
Don't forget to hit follow if you're interested in more of the series!
Top comments (1)
I actually read his book on Flask cover to cover. I completely agree with his point on knowledge sharing. Blogging is what I do when I want to get really learn about the material. It motivates me to research well and be able to explain the topic clearly, covering possible questions readers may have.
But it’s nice to receive feedback as well from my readers. Makes me feel I’m not writing on a wall.