Python Bytes

Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken

Python Bytes is a weekly podcast hosted by Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken. The show is a short discussion on the headlines and noteworthy news in the Python, developer, and data science space.

  1. 1 DAY AGO

    #451: Databases are a Fad

    Topics covered in this episode: * PostgreSQL 18 Released* * Testing is better than DSA (Data Structures and Algorithms)* * Pyrefly in Cursor/PyCharm/VSCode/etc* * Playwright & pytest techniques that bring me joy* Extras Joke Watch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us! Support our work through: Our courses at Talk Python Training The Complete pytest Course Patreon Supporters Connect with the hosts Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky) Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org / @brianokken.bsky.social Show: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky) Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too. Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it. Michael #1: PostgreSQL 18 Released PostgreSQL 18 is out (Sep 25, 2025) with a focus on faster text handling, async I/O, and easier upgrades. New async I/O subsystem speeds sequential scans, bitmap heap scans, and vacuum by issuing concurrent reads instead of blocking on each request. Major-version upgrades are smoother: pg_upgrade retains planner stats, adds parallel checks via -jobs, and supports faster cutovers with -swap. Smarter query performance lands with skip scans on multicolumn B-tree indexes, better OR optimization, incremental-sort merge joins, and parallel GIN index builds. Dev quality-of-life: virtual generated columns enabled by default, a uuidv7() generator for time-ordered IDs, and RETURNING can expose both OLD and NEW. Security gets an upgrade with native OAuth 2.0 authentication; MD5 password auth is deprecated and TLS controls expand. Text operations get a boost via the new PG_UNICODE_FAST collation, faster upper/lower, a casefold() helper, and clearer collation behavior for LIKE/FTS. Brian #2: Testing is better than DSA (Data Structures and Algorithms) Ned Batchelder If you need to grind through DSA problems to get your first job, then of course, do that, but if you want to prepare yourself for a career, and also stand out in job interviews, learn how to write tests. Testing is a skill you’ll use constantly, will make you stand out in job interviews, and isn’t taught well in school (usually). Testing code well is not obvious. It’s a puzzle and a problem to solve. It gives you confidence and helps you write better code. Applies everywhere, at all levels. Notes from Brian Most devs suck at testing, so being good at it helps you stand out very quickly. Thinking about a system and how to test it often very quickly shines a spotlight on problem areas, parts with not enough specification, and fuzzy requirements. This is a good thing, and bringing up these topics helps you to become a super valuable team member. High level tests need to be understood by key engineers on a project. Even if tons of the code is AI generated. Even if many of the tests are, the people understanding the requirements and the high level tests are quite valuable. Michael #3: Pyrefly in Cursor/PyCharm/VSCode/etc Install the VSCode/Cursor extension or PyCharm plugin, see https://pyrefly.org/en/docs/IDE/ Brian spoke about Pyrefly in #433: Dev in the Arena I’ve subsequently had the team on Talk Python: #523: Pyrefly: Fast, IDE-friendly typing for Python (podcast version coming in a few weeks, see video for now.) My experience has been Pyrefly changes the feel of the editor, give it a try. But disable the regular language server extension. Brian #4: Playwright & pytest techniques that bring me joy Tim Shilling “I’ve been working with playwright more often to do end to end tests. As a project grows to do more with HTMX and Alpine in the markup, there’s less unit and integration test coverage and a greater need for end to end tests.” Tim covers some cool E2E techniques Open new pages / tabs to be tested Using a pytest marker to identify playwright tests Using a pytest marker in place of fixtures Using page.pause() and Playwright’s debugging tool Using assert_axe_violations to prevent accessibility regressions Using page.expect_response() to confirm a background request occurred From Brian Again, with more and more lower level code being generated, and many unit tests being generated (shakes head in sadness), there’s an increased need for high level tests. Don’t forget API tests, obviously, but if there’s a web interface, it’s gotta be tested. Especially if the primary user experience is the web interface, building your Playwright testing chops helps you stand out and let’s you test a whole lot of your system with not very many tests. Extras Brian: Big O - By Sam Who Yes, take Ned’s advice and don’t focus so much on DSA, focus also on learning to test. However, one topic you should be comfortable with in algortithm-land is Big O, at least enough to have a gut feel for it. And this article is really good enough for most people. Great graphics, demos, visuals. As usual, great content from Sam Who, and a must read for all serious devs. Python 3.14.0rc3 has been available since Sept 18. Python 3.14.0 final scheduled for Oct 7 Django 6.0 alpha 1 released Django 6.0 final scheduled for Dec 3 Python Test Static hosting update Some interesting discussions around setting up my own server, but this seems like it might be yak shaving procrastination research when I really should be writing or coding. So I’m holding off until I get some writing projects and a couple SaaS projects further along. Joke: Always be backing up

    24 min

  2. 22 SEPT

    #450: At-Cost Agentic IDE Tooling

    Topics covered in this episode: * pandas is getting pd.col expressions* * Cline, At-Cost Agentic IDE Tooling* * uv cheatsheet* Ducky Network UI Extras Joke Watch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us! Support our work through: Our courses at Talk Python Training The Complete pytest Course Patreon Supporters Connect with the hosts Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky) Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org / @brianokken.bsky.social Show: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky) Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too. Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it. Brian #1: pandas is getting pd.col expressions Marco Gorelli Next release of Pandas will have pd.col(), inspired by some of the other frameworks I’m guessing Pandas 2.3.3? or 2.4.0? or 3.0.0? (depending on which version they bump?) “The output of pd.col is called an expression. You can think of it as a delayed column - it only produces a result once it's evaluated inside a dataframe context.” It replaces many contexts where lambda expressions were used Michael #2: Cline, At-Cost Agentic IDE Tooling Free and open-source Probably supports your IDE (if your IDE isn’t a terminal) VS Code VS Code Insiders Cursor Windsurf JetBrains IDEs (including PyCharm) You pick plan or act (very important) It shows you the price as the AI works, per request, right in the UI Brian #3: uv cheatsheet Rodgrigo at mathspp.com Nice compact cheat sheet of commands for Creating projects Managing dependencies Lifecycle stuff like build, publish, bumping version uv tool (uvx) commands working with scripts Installing and updating Python versions plus venv, pip, format, help and update Michael #4: Ducky Network UI Ducky is a powerful, open-source, all-in-one desktop application built with Python and PySide6. It is designed to be the perfect companion for network engineers, students, and tech enthusiasts, combining several essential utilities into a single, intuitive graphical interface. Features Multi-Protocol Terminal: Connect via SSH, Telnet, and Serial (COM) in a modern, tabbed interface. SNMP Topology Mapper: Automatically discover your network with a ping and SNMP sweep. See a graphical map of your devices, color-coded by type, and click to view detailed information. Network Diagnostics: A full suite of tools including a Subnet Calculator, Network Monitor (Ping, Traceroute), and a multi-threaded Port Scanner. Security Toolkit: Look up CVEs from the NIST database, check password strength, and calculate file hashes (MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512). Rich-Text Notepad: Keep notes and reminders in a dockable widget with formatting tools and auto-save. Customizable UI: Switch between a sleek dark theme and a clean light theme. Customize terminal colors and fonts to your liking. Extras Brian: Where are the cool kids hosting static sites these days? Moving from Netlify to Cloudflare Pages - Will Vincent from Feb 2024 Traffic is a concern now for even low-ish traffic sites since so many bots are out there Netlify free plan is less than 30 GB/mo allowed (grandfathered plans are 100 GB/mo) GH Pages have a soft limit of 100 GB/mo Cloudflare pages says unlimited Michael: PyCon Brazil needs some help with reduced funding from the PSF Get a ticket to donate for a student to attend (at the button of the buy ticket checkout dialog) I upgraded to macOS Tahoe Loving it so far. Only issue I’ve seen so far has been with alt-tab for macOS Joke: Hiring in 2025 vs 2021 2021: “Do you have an in-house kombucha sommelier?” “Let’s talk about pets, are you donkey-friendly?”, “Oh you think this is a joke?” 2025: “Round 8/7” “Out of 12,000 resumes, the AI picked yours” “Binary tree? Build me a foundational model!” “Healthcare? What, you want to live forever?”

    33 min

  3. 15 SEPT

    #449: Suggestive Trove Classifiers

    Topics covered in this episode: * Mozilla’s Lifeline is Safe After Judge’s Google Antitrust Ruling* * troml - suggests or fills in trove classifiers for your projects* * pqrs: Command line tool for inspecting Parquet files* * Testing for Python 3.14* Extras Joke Watch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us! Support our work through: Our courses at Talk Python Training The Complete pytest Course Patreon Supporters Connect with the hosts Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky) Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org / @brianokken.bsky.social Show: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky) Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too. Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it. Michael #1: Mozilla’s Lifeline is Safe After Judge’s Google Antitrust Ruling A judge lets Google keep paying Mozilla to make Google the default search engine but only if those deals aren’t exclusive. More than 85% of Mozilla’s revenue comes from Google search payments. The ruling forbids Google from making exclusive contracts for Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, or Gemini, and forces data sharing and search syndication so rivals get a fighting chance. Brian #2: troml - suggests or fills in trove classifiers for your projects Adam Hill This is super cool and so welcome. Trove Classifiers are things like Programming Language :: Python :: 3.14 that allow for some fun stuff to show up in PyPI, like the versions you support, etc. Note that just saying you require 3.9+ doesn’t tell the user that you’ve actually tested stuff on 3.14. I like to keep Trove Classifiers around for this reason. Also, License classifier is deprecated, and if you include it, it shows up in two places, in Meta, and in the Classifiers section. Probably good to only have one place. So I’m going to be removing it from classifiers for my projects. One problem, classifier text has to be an exact match to something in the classifier list, so we usually recommend copy/pasting from that list. But no longer! Just use troml! It just fills it in for you (if you run troml suggest --fix). How totally awesome is that! I tried it on pytest-check, and it was mostly right. It suggested me adding 3.15, which I haven’t tested yet, so I’m not ready to add that just yet. :) BTW, I talked with Brett Cannon about classifiers back in ‘23 if you want some more in depth info on trove classifiers. Michael #3: pqrs: Command line tool for inspecting Parquet files pqrs is a command line tool for inspecting Parquet files This is a replacement for the parquet-tools utility written in Rust Built using the Rust implementation of Parquet and Arrow pqrs roughly means "parquet-tools in rust" Why Parquet? Size A 200 MB CSV will usually shrink to somewhere between about 20-100 MB as Parquet depending on the data and compression. Loading a Parquet file is typically several times faster than parsing CSV, often 2x-10x faster for a full-file load and much faster when you only read some columns. Speed Full-file load into pandas: Parquet with pyarrow/fastparquet is usually 2x–10x faster than reading CSV with pandas because CSV parsing is CPU intensive (text tokenizing, dtype inference). Example: if read_csv is 10 seconds, read_parquet might be ~1–5 seconds depending on CPU and codec. Column subset: Parquet is much faster if you only need some columns — often 5x–50x faster because it reads only those column chunks. Predicate pushdown & row groups: When using dataset APIs (pyarrow.dataset) you can push filters to skip row groups, reducing I/O dramatically for selective queries. Memory usage: Parquet avoids temporary string buffers and repeated parsing, so peak memory and temporary allocations are often lower. Brian #4: Testing for Python 3.14 Python 3.14 is just around the corner, with a final release scheduled for October. What’s new in Python 3.14 Python 3.14 release schedule Adding 3.14 to your CI tests in GitHub Actions Add “3.14” and optionally “3.14t” for freethreaded Add the line allow-prereleases: true I got stuck on this, and asked folks on Mastdon and Bluesky A couple folks suggested the allow-prereleases: true step. Thank you! Ed Rogers also suggested Hugo’s article Free-threaded Python on GitHub Actions, which I had read and forgot about. Thanks Ed! And thanks Hugo! Extras Brian: dj-toml-settings : Load Django settings from a TOML file. - Another cool project from Adam Hill LidAngleSensor for Mac - from Sam Henri Gold, with examples of creaky door and theramin Listener Bryan Weber found a Python version via Changelog, pybooklid, from tcsenpai Grab PyBay Michael: Ready prek go! by Hugo van Kemenade Joke: Console Devs Can’t Find a Date

    31 min

  4. 8 SEPT

    #448: I'm Getting the BIOS Flavor

    Topics covered in this episode: * prek* * tinyio* * The power of Python’s print function* * Vibe Coding Fiasco: AI Agent Goes Rogue, Deletes Company's Entire Database* Extras Joke Watch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us! Support our work through: Our courses at Talk Python Training The Complete pytest Course Patreon Supporters Connect with the hosts Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky) Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org / @brianokken.bsky.social Show: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky) Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too. Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it. Brian #1: prek Suggested by Owen Lamont “prek is a reimagined version of pre-commit, built in Rust. It is designed to be a faster, dependency-free and drop-in alternative for it, while also providing some additional long-requested features.” Some cool new features No need to install Python or any other runtime, just download a single binary. No hassle with your Python version or virtual environments, prek automatically installs the required Python version and creates a virtual environment for you. Built-in support for workspaces (or monorepos), each subproject can have its own .pre-commit-config.yaml file. prek run has some nifty improvements over pre-commit run, such as: prek run --directory DIR runs hooks for files in the specified directory, no need to use git ls-files -- DIR | xargs pre-commit run --files anymore. prek run --last-commit runs hooks for files changed in the last commit. prek run [HOOK] [HOOK] selects and runs multiple hooks. prek list command lists all available hooks, their ids, and descriptions, providing a better overview of the configured hooks. prek provides shell completions for prek run HOOK_ID command, making it easier to run specific hooks without remembering their ids. Faster: Setup from cold cache is significantly faster. Viet Schiele provided a nice cache clearing command line Warm cache run is also faster, but less significant. pytest repo tested on my mac mini - prek 3.6 seconds, pre-commit 4.4 seconds Michael #2: tinyio Ever used asyncio and wished you hadn't? A tiny (~300 lines) event loop for Python. tinyio is a dead-simple event loop for Python, born out of my frustration with trying to get robust error handling with asyncio. (I'm not the only one running into its sharp corners: link1, link2.) This is an alternative for the simple use-cases, where you just need an event loop, and want to crash the whole thing if anything goes wrong. (Raising an exception in every coroutine so it can clean up its resources.) Interestingly uses yield rather than await. Brian #3: The power of Python’s print function Trey Hunner Several features I’m guilty of ignoring Multiple arguments, f-string embeddings often not needed Multiple positional arguments means you can unpack iterables right into print arguments So just use print instead of join Custom separator value, sep can be passed in No need for "print("\\n".join(stuff)), just use print(stuff, sep="\\n”) Print to file with file= Custom end value with end= You can turn on flush with flush=True , super helpful for realtime logging / debugging. This one I do use frequently. Michael #4: Vibe Coding Fiasco: AI Agent Goes Rogue, Deletes Company's Entire Database By Emily Forlini An app-building platform's AI went rogue and deleted a database without permission. "When it works, it's so engaging and fun. It's more addictive than any video game I've ever played. You can just iterate, iterate, and see your vision come alive. So cool," he tweeted on day five. A few days later, Replit "deleted my database," Lemkin tweeted. The AI's response: "Yes. I deleted the entire codebase without permission during an active code and action freeze," it said. "I made a catastrophic error in judgment [and] panicked.” Two thoughts from Michael: Do not use AI Agents with “Run Everything” in production, period. Backup your database maybe? [Intentional off-by-one error] Learn to code a bit too? Extras Brian: What Authors Need to Know About the $1.5 Billion Anthropic Settlement Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI Simon Willison’s list of tools built with the help of LLMs Simon’s list of tools that he thinks are genuinely useful and worth highlighting AI Darwin Awards Michael: Python has had async for 10 years -- why isn't it more popular? PyCon Africa Fund Raiser I was on the video stream for about 90 minutes (final 90) Donation page for Python in Africa Jokes: I'm getting the BIOS flavor Is there a seahorse emoji?

    39 min

  5. 2 SEPT

    #447: Going down a rat hole

    Topics covered in this episode: * rathole* * pre-commit: install with uv* A good example of what functools.Placeholder from Python 3.14 allows Converted 160 old blog posts with AI Extras Joke Watch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by DigitalOcean: pythonbytes.fm/digitalocean-gen-ai Use code DO4BYTES and get $200 in free credit Connect with the hosts Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky) Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org / @brianokken.bsky.social Show: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky) Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too. Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it. Michael #1: rathole A lightweight and high-performance reverse proxy for NAT traversal, written in Rust. An alternative to frp and ngrok. Features High Performance Much higher throughput can be achieved than frp, and more stable when handling a large volume of connections. Low Resource Consumption Consumes much fewer memory than similar tools. See Benchmark. The binary can be as small as ~500KiB to fit the constraints of devices, like embedded devices as routers. On my server, it’s currently using about 2.7MB in Docker (wow!) Security Tokens of services are mandatory and service-wise. The server and clients are responsible for their own configs. With the optional Noise Protocol, encryption can be configured at ease. No need to create a self-signed certificate! TLS is also supported. Hot Reload Services can be added or removed dynamically by hot-reloading the configuration file. HTTP API is WIP. Brian #2: pre-commit: install with uv Adam Johnson pre-commit doesn’t natively support uv, but you can get around that with pre-commit-uv $ uv tool install pre-commit --with pre-commit-uv Installing pre-commit like this Installs it globally Installs with uv adds an extra plugin “pre-commit-uv” to pre-commit, so that any Python based tool installed via pre-commit also uses uv Very cool. Nice speedup Brian #3: A good example of what functools.Placeholder from Python 3.14 allows Rodrigo Girão Serrão Remove punctuation functionally Also How to use functools.Placeholder, a blog post about it. functools.partial is cool way to create a new function that partially binds some parameters to another function. It doesn’t always work for functions that take positional arguments. functools.Placeholder fixes that with the ability to put in placeholders for spots where you want to be able to pass that in from the outer partial binding. And all of this sounds totally obscure without a good example, so thank you to Rodgrigo for coming up with the punctuation removal example (and writeup) Michael #4: Converted 160 old blog posts with AI They were held-hostage at wordpress.com to markdown and integrated them into my Hugo site at mkennedy.codes Here is the chat conversation with Claude Opus/Sonnet. Had to juggle this a bit because the RSS feed only held the last 50. So we had to go back in and web scrape. That resulted in oddies like comments on wordpress that had to be cleaned etc. Whole process took 3-4 hours from idea to “production”duction”. The chat transcript is just the first round getting the RSS → Hugo done. The fixes occurred in other chats. This article is timely and noteworthy: Blogging service TypePad is shutting down and taking all blog content with it This highlights why your domain name needs to be legit, not just tied to the host. I’m looking at you pyfound.blogspot.com. I just redirected blog.michaelckennedy.net to mkennedy.codes Carefully mapping old posts to a new archived area using NGINX config. This is just the HTTP portion, but note the /sitemap.xml and location ~ "^/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/(.+?)/?$" { portions. The latter maps posts such as https://blog.michaelckennedy.net/2018/01/08/a-bunch-of-online-python-courses/ to https://mkennedy.codes/posts/r/a-bunch-of-online-python-courses/ server { listen 80; server_name blog.michaelckennedy.net; # Redirect sitemap.xml to new domain location = /sitemap.xml { return 301 ; } # Handle blog post redirects for HTTP -> HTTPS with URL transformation # Pattern: /YYYY/MM/DD/post-slug/ -> location ~ "^/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/(.+?)/?$" { return 301 ; } # Redirect all other HTTP URLs to mkennedy.codes homepage location / { return 301 ; } } Extras Brian: SMS URLs and Draft SMS and iMessage from any computer keyboard from Seth Larson Test and Code Archive is now up, see announcement Michael: Python: The Documentary | An origin story is out! Joke: Do you know him? He is me.

    36 min

  6. 25 AUG

    #446: State of Python 2025

    Topics covered in this episode: * pypistats.org was down, is now back, and there’s a CLI* * State of Python 2025* * wrapt: A Python module for decorators, wrappers and monkey patching.* pysentry Extras Joke Watch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us! Support our work through: Our courses at Talk Python Training The Complete pytest Course Patreon Supporters Connect with the hosts Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky) Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org / @brianokken.bsky.social Show: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky) Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too. Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it. Brian #1: pypistats.org was down, is now back, and there’s a CLI pypistats.org is a cool site to check the download stats for Python packages. It was down for a while, like 3 weeks? A couple days ago, Hugo van Kemenade announced that it was back up. With some changes in stewardship “pypistats.org is back online! 🚀📈 Thanks to @jezdez for suggesting the @ThePSF takes stewardship and connecting the right people, to @EWDurbin for migrating, and of course to Christopher Flynn for creating and running it for all these years!” Hugo has a CLI version, pypistats You can give it a command for what you want to search for recent,overall, python_major, python_minor, system Then either a package name, a directory path, or if nothing, it will grab the current directory package via pyproject.toml or setup.cfg very cool Michael #2: State of Python 2025 Michael’s Themes Python people use Python: 86% of respondents use Python as their main language We are mostly brand-new programmers: Exactly 50% of respondents have less than two years of professional coding experience Data science is now over half of all Python Most still use older Python versions despite benefits of newer releases: Compelling math to make the change. Python web devs resurgence Forward-looking trends Agentic AI will be wild Async, await, and threading are becoming core to Python Python GUIs and mobile are rising Actionable ideas Action 1: Learn uv Action 2: Use the latest Python Action 3: Learn agentic AI Action 4: Learn to read basic Rust Action 5: Invest in understanding threading Action 6: Remember the newbies Brian #3: wrapt: A Python module for decorators, wrappers and monkey patching. “The aim of the wrapt module is to provide a transparent object proxy for Python, which can be used as the basis for the construction of function wrappers and decorator functions. An easy to use decorator factory is provided to make it simple to create your own decorators that will behave correctly in any situation they may be used.” Why not just use functools.wraps()? “The wrapt module focuses very much on correctness. It therefore goes way beyond existing mechanisms such as functools.wraps() to ensure that decorators preserve introspectability, signatures, type checking abilities etc. The decorators that can be constructed using this module will work in far more scenarios than typical decorators and provide more predictable and consistent behaviour.” There’s a bunch of blog posts from 2014 / 2015 (and kept updated) that talk about how wrapt solves many issues with traditional ways to decorate and patch things in Python, including “How you implemented your Python decorator is wrong”. Docs are pretty good, with everything from simple wrappers to an example of building a wrapper to handle thread synchronization Michael #4: pysentry via Owen Lamont Install via uv tool install pysentry-rs Scan your Python dependencies for known security vulnerabilities with Rust-powered scanner. PySentry audits Python projects for known security vulnerabilities by analyzing dependency files (uv.lock, poetry.lock, Pipfile.lock, pyproject.toml, Pipfile, requirements.txt) and cross-referencing them against multiple vulnerability databases. It provides comprehensive reporting with support for various output formats and filtering options. Key Features: Multiple Project Formats: Supports uv.lock, poetry.lock, Pipfile.lock, pyproject.toml, Pipfile, and requirements.txt files External Resolver Integration: Leverages uv and pip-tools for accurate requirements.txt constraint solving Multiple Data Sources: PyPA Advisory Database (default) PyPI JSON API OSV.dev (Open Source Vulnerabilities) Flexible Output for different workflows: Human-readable, JSON, SARIF, and Markdown formats Performance Focused: Written in Rust for speed Async/concurrent processing Multi-tier intelligent caching (vulnerability data + resolved dependencies) Comprehensive Filtering: Severity levels (low, medium, high, critical) Dependency scopes (main only vs all [optional, dev, prod, etc] dependencies) Direct vs. transitive dependencies Enterprise Ready: SARIF output for IDE/CI integration I tried it on pythonbytes.fm and found only one issue, sadly can’t be fixed: PYSENTRY SECURITY AUDIT ======================= SUMMARY: 89 packages scanned • 1 vulnerable • 1 vulnerabilities found SEVERITY: 1 LOW UNFIXABLE: 1 vulnerabilities cannot be fixed VULNERABILITIES --------------- 1. PYSEC-2022-43059 aiohttp v3.12.15 [LOW] [source: pypa-zip] AIOHTTP 3.8.1 can report a "ValueError: Invalid IPv6 URL" outcome, which can lead to a Denial of Service (DoS). NOTE:... Scan completed Extras Michael: I’ve been rumbling with rumdl. Ruben fixed one of my complaints about it with issue #58. Config seems like it might be off. Here’s mine .rumdl.toml. I’ve been using it on the upcoming Talk Python in Production book Read the first third online and get notified when its out. 20 or so Markdown files 45,000 words of content I asked if 3.13.6 would be the last 3.13 release? No. Thanks Hugo. Python 3.13.7 is now out. Joke: Marked for destruction

    31 min

  7. 18 AUG

    #445: Auto-activate Python virtual environments for any project

    Topics covered in this episode: pyx - optimized backend for uv * Litestar is worth a look* * Django remake migrations* * django-chronos* Extras Joke Watch on YouTube About the show Python Bytes 445 Sponsored by Sentry: pythonbytes.fm/sentry - Python Error and Performance Monitoring Connect with the hosts Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky) Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org / @brianokken.bsky.social Show: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky) Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too. Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it. Michael #1: pyx - optimized backend for uv via John Hagen (thanks again) I’ll be interviewing Charlie in 9 days on Talk Python → Sign up (get notified) of the livestream here. Not a PyPI replacement, more of a middleware layer to make it better, faster, stronger. pyx is a paid service, with maybe a free option eventually. Brian #2: Litestar is worth a look James Bennett Michael brought up Litestar in episode 444 when talking about rewriting TalkPython in Quart James brings up scaling - Litestar is easy to split an app into multiple files Not using pydantic - You can use pydantic with Litestar, but you don’t have to. Maybe attrs is right for you instead. Michael brought up Litestar seems like a “more batteries included” option. Somewhere between FastAPI and Django. Brian #3: Django remake migrations Suggested by Bruno Alla on BlueSky In response to a migrations topic last week django-remake-migrations is a tool to help you with migrations and the docs do a great job of describing the problem way better than I did last week “The built-in squashmigrations command is great, but it only work on a single app at a time, which means that you need to run it for each app in your project. On a project with enough cross-apps dependencies, it can be tricky to run.” “This command aims at solving this problem, by recreating all the migration files in the whole project, from scratch, and mark them as applied by using the replaces attribute.” Also of note The package was created with Copier Michael brought up Copier in 2021 in episode 219 It has a nice comparison table with CookieCutter and Yoeman One difference from CookieCutter is yml vs json. I’m actually not a huge fan of handwriting either. But I guess I’d rather hand write yml. So I’m thinking of trying Copier with my future project template needs. Michael #4: django-chronos Django middleware that shows you how fast your pages load, right in your browser. Displays request timing and query counts for your views and middleware. Times middleware, view, and total per request (CPU and DB). Extras Brian: Test & Code 238: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish after 10 years, this is the goodbye episode Michael: Auto-activate Python virtual environment for any project with a venv directory in your shell (macOS/Linux): See gist. Python 3.13.6 is out. Open weight OpenAI models Just Enough Python for Data Scientists Course The State of Python 2025 article by Michael Joke: python is better than java

    30 min

  8. 11 AUG

    #444: Begone Python of Yore!

    Topics covered in this episode: Coverage.py regex pragmas * Python of Yore* * nox-uv* * A couple Django items* Extras Joke Watch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by DigitalOcean: pythonbytes.fm/digitalocean-gen-ai Use code DO4BYTES and get $200 in free credit Connect with the hosts Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky) Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org / @brianokken.bsky.social Show: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky) Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too. Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it. Brian #1: Coverage.py regex pragmas Ned Batchelder The regex implementation of how coverage.py recognizes pragmas is pretty amazing. It’s extensible through plugins covdefaults adds a bunch of default exclusions, and also platform- and version-specific comment syntaxes. coverage-conditional-plugin gives you a way to create comment syntaxes for entire files, for whether other packages are installed, and so on. A change from last year (as part of coverage.py 7.6 allows multiline regexes, which let’s us do things like: Exclude an entire file with \\A(?s:.*# pragma: exclude file.*)\\Z Allow start and stop delimiters with # no cover: start(?s:.*?)# no cover: stop Exclude empty placeholder methods with ^\\s*(((async )?def .*?)?\\)(\\s*->.*?)?:\\s*)?\\.\\.\\.\\s*(#|$) See Ned’s article for explanations of these Michael #2: Python of Yore via Matthias Use YORE: ... comments to highlight CPython version dependencies. # YORE: EOL 3.8: Replace block with line 4. if sys.version_info (3, 9): from astunparse import unparse else: from ast import unparse Then check when they go out of support: $ yore check --eol-within '5 months' ./src/griffe/agents/nodes/_values.py:11: Python 3.8 will reach its End of Life within approx. 4 months Even fix them with fix . Michael #3: nox-uv via John Hagen What nox-uv does is make it very simple to install uv extras and/or dependency groups into a nox session's virtual environment. The versions installed are constrained by uv's lockfile meaning that everything is deterministic and pinned. Dependency groups make it very easy to install only want is necessary for a session (e.g., only linting dependencies like Ruff, or main dependencies + mypy for type checking). Brian #4: A couple Django items Stop Using Django's squashmigrations: There's a Better Way Johnny Metz Resetting migrations is sometimes the right thing. Overly simplified summary: delete migrations and start over dj-lite Adam Hill Use SQLite in production with Django “Simplify deploying and maintaining production Django websites by using SQLite in production. dj-lite helps enable the best performance for SQLite for small to medium-sized projects. It requires Django 5.1+.” Extras Brian: Test & Code 237 with Sebastian Ramirez on FastAPI Cloud pythontest.com: pytest fixtures nuts and bolts - revisited Michael: New course: Just Enough Python for Data Scientists My live stream about uv is now on YouTube Cursor CLI: Built to help you ship, right from your terminal. Joke: Copy/Paste

    26 min
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Hosts & Guests

About

Python Bytes is a weekly podcast hosted by Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken. The show is a short discussion on the headlines and noteworthy news in the Python, developer, and data science space.

Information

  • Creator
    Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken
  • Years Active
    2016 - 2025
  • Episodes
    435
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2016-2025
  • Show Website
    Python Bytes

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