S03E02 - The joy of teaching Python - with Reuven Lerner

Half Stack Data Science

In this episode of Half Stack Data Science we continue our season 3, all about data science education, with a conversation with Reuven Lerner.

Reuven is a full-time Python trainer with a bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering from MIT, and a PhD in learning sciences from Northwestern University.

In 2020, Reuven published "Python Workout" a collection of Python exercises with extensive explanations, published by Manning. He's currently working on "Pandas workout" a similar collection of exercises using the "pandas" library for data analytics.

Reuven's free, weekly "Better developers" newsletter, about Python and software engineering, is read by more than 30,000 developers around the globe.

Reuven's most recent venture is Bamboo Weekly: Every Wednesday, he presents a problem based on current events, using a public data set. And every Thursday, he shared detailed solutions to those problems using Pandas.

We spoke to Reuven about his love of teaching Python to beginners, what he thinks of notebooks and ChatGPT as educational tools, and how he got banned for life from advertising on Facebook.