Hey Pythonista,
We run periodic ensemble coding sessions: a small group of developers working together on a single problem, on one shared screen.
One person types, another reviews, and another watches the time. The rest participate and think along – suggesting ideas, spotting edge cases, refactoring, etc.
As we rotate, everybody gets a chance at all of the roles, so we all play an equal part.
You'll see different approaches in real time and leave with one high-quality solution the whole group understands.
In practice, these sessions are so powerful because:
You’re not coding alone.
Working in a group changes the dynamic completely. The immediate feedback loop is huge. 💡
You have to think out loud.
In your 5-minute turn you’re solving but also verbalising your thinking – that meta-skill is at least as valuable as the code you write. 🤩
Safe exposure to “live coding”.
It’s a lightweight way to experience the kind of live problem-solving you’ll see in interviews, but in a friendly, safe setting where “obvious” questions are welcome. Seeing experienced devs struggle in the open is a great antidote to impostor syndrome. 🚀
You watch debugging habits, not just solutions.
When we get stuck, you see how different developers debug, reason, and get unstuck. That’s gold. 🥇
Patterns appear in real code.
You don’t just hear about stacks, deques, itertools, etc. You see when we reach for them and how much they can speed things up. 🏃
And all you have to do is show up – we bring the problems (AoC, Bites, small projects), guidance, and discussion.
Want to join?
Stay tuned in our community for the next ensemble session. If you’d like us to put you on a small “ping me” list, just hit reply and say ensemble.
To get the most out of it:
Practise your Python – a Bite a day on our platform goes a long way. I’m hearing from people who are interviewing or feeling AI-induced skill atrophy: they go back to our coding platform and start seeing great results again.
Join the Advent of Code with us next week – for the last few years people in the community have been sharing solutions in a daily post.
Do our community code challenge – this month we have you build a TUI.
If you want deeper feedback, our coaching gives you 1:1 reviews on your code.
By the way, both the Platform and our PDC coaching are 30–40% off until the end of Monday 1st December – just for this week: https://pybit.es/bf2025/
- Bob & Julian
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