Stay ConnectedA weekly Python podcast hosted by Christopher Bailey with interviews, coding tips, and conversation with guests from the Python community.
The show covers a wide range of topics including Python programming best practices, career tips, and related software development topics. Join us every Friday morning to hear what’s new in the world of Python programming and become a more effective Pythonista.
Copyright: © 2020 Real Python
What goes into a code review in Python? Is there a difference in how a large organization practices code review compared to a smaller one? What do you do if you’re a solo developer? This week on the show, Brendan Maginnis and Nick Thapen from Sourcery return to talk about code review and automated code assistance.
Nick and Brendan discuss their personal experiences with code reviews. From working together at a large company to starting Sourcery as a pair of developers to growing a team, they’ve experienced how various organizations review code.
We discuss the importance of keeping code reviews positive and maintaining developer momentum. Nick and Brendan share techniques for automating organizational code rules and retaining institutional developer knowledge.
They’ve been busy developing new features for Sourcery, moving beyond the current refactoring features. Their team is leveraging LLMs to build an automated code assistant that can perform code reviews, write tests, and answer questions about your codebase. The goal is for it to act as a personalized computer pair programmer.
Course Spotlight: Using the bpython Enhanced REPL
In this video course, you’ll learn about bpython, an alternative Python REPL that brings code suggestions and many other IDE-like features to the terminal. Once you discover how much bpython can improve your productivity, you’ll never want to return to using the vanilla Python REPL again.
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Have you thought of a way to improve the Python language? How do you share your idea with core developers and start a discussion in the Python community? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week, bringing another batch of PyCoder’s Weekly articles and projects.
We consider a couple of Python syntax and functional ideas posted to the discussions on python.org. The first idea is for simplifying the syntax of a function’s keyword arguments, and the second is for the ability to return a NamedTuple from a function. The threads reveal steps within the Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) process and the goal of finding a sponsor.
Christopher covers a tutorial on building a JSON-like parser in Python. The project is a solid place to start if you want to learn about parsing and developing rules for recognizing syntax and extracting data.
We also share several other articles and projects from the Python community, including a couple of release announcements and news items, a step-by-step guide to building a hangman game for the command line in Python, the reasons why the Django admin is supposedly ugly and ways to customize it to differentiate admin environments, an explanation of confusing git terminology, a project to extract links from a remote HTML resource, and a regex crossword game.
Course Spotlight: Advent of Code: Solving Puzzles With Python
Advent of Code is an online advent calendar that shares new programming puzzles each day from December 1 to the 25. In this Code Conversation, you’ll learn why solving programming puzzles can be beneficial and how you can get started with Advent of Code using Python.
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Our TOPPODCAST Picks NamedTupleNews:
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Has the current growth of artificial intelligence (AI) systems made you wonder what the future holds for Python developers? What are the hidden benefits of learning to program in Python and practicing computational thinking? This week on the show, we speak with author Lawrence Gray about his upcoming book “Mastering Python: A Problem Solving Approach.”
Lawrence shares how learning Python helped him through a dark and trying time. He developed lifelong skills that he wants to pass along through teaching and authoring a book.
We discuss what you can do to prepare for a future where coding jobs are automated through AI. He shares ways that Python can help build the higher-order thinking skills required by future careers. We also talk about how Python can help with computational thinking and promote cognitive development.
This week’s episode is brought to you by Site24x7.
Course Spotlight: Looping With Python enumerate()
Once you learn about for loops in Python, you know that using an index to access items in a sequence isn’t very Pythonic. So what do you do when you need that index value? In this course, you’ll learn all about Python’s built-in enumerate(), where it’s used, and how you can emulate its behavior.
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Have you moved through the fundamentals of Python, and are you now considering building a more extensive project or complete application? Where can you study the architecture of existing Python projects and learn best practices? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week, bringing another batch of PyCoder’s Weekly articles and projects.
We discuss a set of resources that developers can study to learn how to structure projects. The collection was shared in a blog post titled “Great Resources a Beginner Might Not Find So Easily.” It includes a pair of books on the architecture of large software applications and another aimed at more modest projects.
We consider when you should use lambda expressions in your Python code. These one-line expressions create anonymous functions. How do they differ from standard functions, and where is it appropriate to use them?
We also share several other articles and projects from the Python community, including a couple of release announcements, an explanation of Python as a compiled language, a discussion covering the controversy about the recent Flask release, a project for writing less Selenium code, and a project to create ASCII art with Python.
This week’s episode is brought to you by Site24x7.
Course Spotlight: Design and Guidance: Object-Oriented Programming in Python
In this video course, you’ll learn about the SOLID principles, which are five well-established standards for improving your object-oriented design in Python. By applying these principles, you can create object-oriented code that is more maintainable, extensible, scalable, and testable.
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Are you getting by with a few fundamental commands for Git when building your Python projects? Would you like to improve your version control techniques and become more efficient with the Git command line? This week on the show, Adam Johnson is back to talk about his new book, “Boost Your Git DX.”
Adam brings advice about creating a Git configuration, enabling autocorrect, and customizing a global ignore file. He combed through the cryptic documentation and found the valuable developer settings, so you won’t have to.
Adam also shares tools and settings to speed up your terminal workflows. We discuss configuring Zsh, creating aliases, and comparing diffs. We briefly dig into the most recent update to Django and his work on the project.
This week’s episode is brought to you by Taipy.
Course Spotlight: Introduction to Git and GitHub for Python Developers
What is Git, what is GitHub, and what’s the difference? Learn the basics of Git and GitHub from the perspective of a Pythonista in this step-by-step video course.
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How do you prepare a scientific Python project for sharing with others? Could you use some best practices and guidance for packaging, documentation, and testing? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week, bringing another batch of PyCoder’s Weekly articles and projects.
We talk about the creation of the Scientific Python Library Development Guide. The guide was finalized during the 2023 Scientific Python Developer Summit and is a resource for modern packaging. It includes sections of tutorials, principles, templates, and common patterns.
Christopher shares a recent Real Python tutorial about sorting Unicode strings in Python. He covers some of the pitfalls and ways to avoid them. The tutorial includes multiple third-party libraries to assist in wrangling Unicode characters.
We also share several other articles and projects from the Python community, including a couple of release announcements, information on namespaces and variable scope in Python, benchmark comparisons of Numba and Mojo, a discussion of recent so-called AI fails, a TUI for log files with a merged timeline, a cross-platform GUI building tool similar to HyperCard, and a project for reproducing exact argparse arguments.
Course Spotlight: Exploring Scopes and Closures in Python
In this Code Conversation video course, you’ll take a deep dive into how scopes and closures work in Python. To do this, you’ll use a debugger to walk through some sample code, and then you’ll take a peek under the hood to see how Python holds variables internally.
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logmerger: TUI for Log Files With Merged Timelinereverse_argparse: Tell the User What They RanNews:
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logmerger: TUI for Log Files With Merged Timelinereverse_argparse: Tell the User What They RanAdditional Links:
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You may remember a recent Python Package Index (PyPI) announcement about hiring a full-time security engineer. We’ve also mentioned several current security initiatives from PyPI. This week on the show, we talk with Mike Fiedler about accepting this new role and securing accounts on PyPI.
Mike talks about how he started as a contributor to PyPI and eventually became a maintainer. We dig into why he fits this new role well and what his responsibilities are.
We discuss the initiative to secure accounts using two-factor authentication (2FA) methods. Mike also explains how package maintainers can adopt a new, more secure publishing method called trusted publishing that doesn’t require long-lived passwords.
We also discuss Mike’s recent talk called “How to Give Back to Open Source Without Losing Your Mind.” Mike shares advice and resources for finding your own contribution entry points.
Course Spotlight: Publishing Python Packages to PyPI
In this video course, you’ll learn how to create a Python package for your project and how to publish it to PyPI, the Python Package Index. Quickly get up to speed on everything from naming your package to configuring it using setup.cfg.
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What fundamental developer skills are new Python users missing? What best practices might developers without a computer science background be lacking? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week, bringing another batch of PyCoder’s Weekly articles and projects.
Christopher opens our discussion by sharing a recent social media thread about teaching software engineering best practices to scientists and others without a computer science background. We talk about software design philosophy and strategies for sharing knowledge within an organization.
We cover the results from the sixth annual official Python Developer Survey. The survey covers Python usage, language versions, frameworks, libraries, and various demographics. We dig into the details and share our insights.
We also share several other articles and projects from the Python community, including a couple of release announcements, so many Python dataframes, ways to speed up your code when multiple cores aren’t an option, Python’s syntactic sugar, a computer algebra system named SymPy, the process of building a blog in Django, code metrics in Python with Radon, and a TUI app for daily writing.
This week’s episode is brought to you by Snyk.
Course Spotlight: Filtering Iterables With Python
In this video course, you’ll learn how Python’s filter() works and how to use it effectively in your programs. You’ll also learn how to use list comprehension and generator expressions to replace filter() and make your code more Pythonic.
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Python 3.12 is here! Our regular guests, Geir Arne Hjelle and Christopher Trudeau, return to discuss the new version. Geir Arne coordinated a series of preview articles with several members of the Real Python team this year, and his showcase tutorial, “Python 3.12: Cool New Features for You to Try,” came out on October 2. Christopher’s video course was posted the next day, covering the topics from the article with visual examples of Python 3.12 in action.
Geir Arne and Christopher collaborated to create code examples of the new features. We discuss better error messaging, more intuitive f-strings, subinterpreters, the Linux perf profiler, improved typing syntax, and more.
We dig into the updates and offer advice on incorporating them into your projects. We also consider when you should start running Python 3.12.
Course Spotlight: What’s New in Python 3.12
In this video course, you’ll explore the new features that Python 3.12 brings to the table. These include improved f-strings, better error messages, changes to CPython internals, additions to static typing, and more.
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perf profileritertools.batched() for grouping ItemsPath.walk() for listing files in subdirectoriesShow Links:
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What can you learn from feeding an entire book on Python programming into ChatGPT-4 and asking it to provide a technical review? What are the potential pitfalls of using an LLM as a learning tool? This week on the show, author Al Sweigart talks about his recent experiments using ChatGPT and Python.
Al wanted to test how well an LLM could understand the computer science concepts covered in his recent book, The Recursive Book of Recursion. We talk about the positive and negative results of this technical review. We consider if this would be a valuable tool for technical review of your projects.
Al shares his thoughts on using ChatGPT as a learning tool and its potential pitfalls. We also cover the current strengths of this type of tool for Python developers.
Course Spotlight: Python Basics Exercises: Conditional Logic and Control Flow
In this Python Basics Exercises course, you’ll review how to use conditional logic to write programs that perform different actions based on different conditions. Paired with functions and loops, conditional logic allows you to write complex programs that can handle many different situations.
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