Hi, I'm Bob Belderbos. I help developers move beyond working code to the engineering judgment that directs it. AI is an accelerator, not a compass, and I coach the part that does the steering.

I've been building software since 2006, and I did not start in tech.

I came out of a business economics degree, and my first jobs were as a financial analyst. What hooked me was automating the tedious parts: I built Excel and VBA tools to speed up reporting, got into Unix shell scripting at Sun Microsystems, then taught myself Perl, PHP, and eventually Python by building tools that solved real problems on the job. Self-taught, one shipped tool at a time.

That decade was at Sun and then Oracle, where I grew from support into feature development, rewrote our automation tooling in Python, and delivered company-wide training on writing clean, Pythonic code. I learned that you can write maintainable code from the start, and that the fastest way to learn a language is to build something real with it.

End of 2016 I co-founded Pybites, where I built two coding platforms from scratch: 500+ exercises with more than 50,000 developer sign-ups over the years. The coaching grew out of that. Since 2020 I've worked 1:1 with more than 150 engineers, from career changers to senior engineers to SaaS founders. In 2026 I brought that practice home to belderbos.dev, which is where most of my work happens now.

These days I keep the training current with AI (realistic, responsible usage, no hype), and I'm fascinated by Rust, which is making me a better Python developer. I co-run the Agentic AI and Scripter to Rust cohorts with specialist coaches, and coach developers 1:1 on their own real projects.

AI doesn't change what software engineering is. These tools make you productive, but the hard part was never typing the code, it's the judgment: what to keep, what to rewrite, what to trust. That judgment is exactly what I coach.