Access Granted?

Dave presenting to humans at PyCon India, 2019

I have written software, given talks, and taught a variety of courses over my 35-year professional career. All of this work was a labor of love by a human (me) and freely shared with the hope that it might be interesting to other humans.

If you, a human, would like full free access to my work, I kindly ask that you complete the following form. Once received, I'll send you a link by which you can access presentation slides, course materials, papers, software, and other resources. Note: this is NOT an email subscription or a paywall.

Why am I doing this?

A dirty secret of open-source is that most people who contribute to it are financially supported by their employer. I certainly was in the early part of my career when I worked as a University professor. For the past 19 years however, I've operated an independent teaching business that has had a symbiotic relationship with releasing open materials. Much of what I put online was actually a product of my teaching and by making it available, it pointed students towards my classes--as a soft kind of "advertisement" if you want to look at it that way.

Sadly, bots and LLMs have broken this relationship. When a bot ingests my material, strips attribution, and presents it as work of its own, why would anyone come take a class? Or even know about a class in the first place? I'm not willing to play that game--especially now that my teaching business has been completely destroyed. So, this access wall is a not-so-subtle attempt at erecting a barrier between my work and bots. Humans, yes. Bots, no.