David Beazley – Programming Courses

Took the compilers class in 2012 and it was amazing. Loved the immersive format and the fact all the students wanted to be there.

Hope he finds something fulfilling in the days ahead.

I took the Compilers course with Dave, remote.

I'd take the whole set if I could. I too am a little dismayed by the state of the world I'd like to see, his courses should be full.

He is as an amazing of a teacher as you would think he is from his publicly available talks. I hope secondary education means middle school, he'd light so many fires.

Thanks Dave!

Learning itself hasn't fundamentally changed because of AI, period. Anyone claiming otherwise probably isn't thinking seriously about what learning actually is. What has changed is the demand for certain types of courses, especially computer science and programming courses, which has declined significantly. Honestly, this was entirely predictable.

People don't want learn tools anymore. Programming education experienced tremendous growth from the 2000s onward because coding became a valuable skill in the job market. Today, the market has shifted. Learning to code in 2010 is, in many ways, the equivalent of learning to use AI effectively for software development in 2026. The underlying goal is the same: acquiring the skills that employers and the market value.

What's happening to David is the same thing happening to many "learn to code" platforms. Their catalogs were built for a different era, and declining demand reflects changes in the job market, not a decline in people's interest in learning.

Maybe David is simply tired of teaching programming and changing a catalog that he put a lot of hard work for the last 20 years seems like a lot of work, and that's completely fair. But he could also adapt his expertise and content to fit this new reality instead of relying on a curriculum designed for a thriving market that no longer exists.

David Beazley taught fundamentals above tools. People seem to no longer want to know the fundamentals.

I'm really sad to see this happen to another fellow course creator.

I'm not sharing this to steal any thunder, but more to relate:

I've been making video programming courses since 2015 on Flask and Docker. Built up a whole business of doing contract work + courses. Released 500+ blog posts and YouTube videos for free to help share what I learned with no strings attached, but had the courses available for sale if anyone wanted to learn more or support my work. Organic search traffic and word of mouth was 99% of my traffic.

I sustained myself for a decade and I was living what I would consider my best life. I never made a ton of money but I got the flexibility to work on what I wanted and it was amazing hearing stories about the courses helping someone change their life for the better. Countless emails of people turning their life around by building things to help them and their families. Hundreds of success stories.

I also noticed an insane drop off around 2023 and by now in mid-2026, it's dead. I literally haven't sold 1 course in 40 days, not even 1. At this point I'm spending thousands a year just to host them out of pocket. Traffic to everything is down over 10x, etc..

I saw the writing on the wall a few years ago and I ended up doing full time work instead but I still post every week.

All that to say, I don't know what to do. I tried everything I could think of. Even did a 2 year weekly podcast in a related field and it yielded close to nothing, despite a number of folks emailing me saying it was their favorite podcast on DevOps / software development.

All I can say is, this really sucks. Our life's work has been gobbled up by trillion dollar companies and sold where we see nothing of it. I had to change my entire life around. I've gone back and forth on just deleting everything or at least putting it all behind a free sign up to stop AI but that doesn't feel right to the actual humans out there.

The real sad thing is internally, there's an endless number of courses I could make. This isn't anywhere near me wanting to stop. I have a ton more things to share. It's just impossible (for me at least) to move forward on it because these things take time and to be able to survive in this world you need money.