Python Getting Faster and Leaner & Ideas for Django Projects

What changes are happening under the hood in the latest versions of Python? How are these updates laying the groundwork for a faster Python in the coming years? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week, bringing another batch of PyCoder’s Weekly articles and projects.

Christopher shares an article about Python’s recent performance improvements. The piece covers the specialized adaptive interpreter and explains what those terms mean. It also includes details about the experimental feature of the Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler added in 3.13.

We dig into a collection of Django projects you can use to practice and develop your skills. The projects ramp up from detailed beginner tutorials to more advanced projects with guidelines on how to get started. We also discuss a collection of popular websites that use Django.

We share several other articles and projects from the Python community, including a batch of recent Python Enhancement Protocols (PEPs), a couple of Python releases, using DuckDB in the browser with Pyodide, building a contact book app with Textual, generating a tiny status page with a Python script, and a grep-like tool that understands code.

This episode is sponsored by AssemblyAI.

Course Spotlight: Building a Site Connectivity Checker

In this video course, you’ll build a Python site connectivity checker for the command line. While building this app, you’ll integrate knowledge related to making HTTP requests with standard-library tools, creating command-line interfaces, and managing concurrency with asyncio and aiohttp.

Topics:

• 00:00:00 – Introduction
• 00:03:11 – PEP 777: How to Re-Invent the Wheel
• 00:04:22 – PEP 758: Allow except and except* Expressions Without Parentheses
• 00:04:51 – PEP 760: No More Bare Excepts (Withdrawn)
• 00:05:42 – PEP 735: Dependency Groups in pyproject.toml
• 00:06:29 – PEP 761: Deprecating PGP Signatures for CPython Artifacts
• 00:06:59 – Python 3.12.7 Released
• 00:07:12 – Incremental GC and Pushing Back the 3.13.0 Release
• 00:09:10 – DuckDB in the Browser With Pyodide
• 00:15:35 – Sponsor: AssemblyAI
• 00:16:18 – Build a Contact Book App With Python, Textual, and SQLite
• 00:21:55 – Django Project Ideas
• 00:28:42 – Video Course Spotlight
• 00:30:00 – In the Making of Python Fitter and Faster
• 00:35:13 – tinystatus: Tiny Status Page Generated by a Python Script
• 00:38:06 – srgn: Grep-Like Tool That Understands Code
• 00:42:01 – Thanks and goodbye

News:

• PEP 777: How to Re-Invent the Wheel – “The current wheel 1.0 specification was written over a decade ago, and has been extremely robust to changes in the Python packaging ecosystem… this PEP prescribes compatibility requirements on future wheel revisions.”
• PEP 758: Allow except and except* Expressions Without Parentheses – “This PEP proposes to allow unparenthesized except and except* blocks in Python’s exception handling syntax. Currently, when catching multiple exceptions, parentheses are required around the exception types.”
• PEP 760: No More Bare Excepts (Withdrawn)
• PEP 735: Dependency Groups in pyproject.toml (Accepted)
• PEP 761: Deprecating PGP Signatures for CPython Artifacts – Since Python 3.11.0, CPython has provided two verifiable digital signatures for all CPython artifacts: PGP and Sigstore. Th