Advice on Managing Projects & Making Python Classes Friendly

What goes into managing a major project? What techniques can you employ for a project that’s in crisis? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week with another batch of PyCoder’s Weekly articles and projects.

We discuss an article by Ben Kuhn titled, “How I’ve Run Major Projects.” We dig into the skills required for project management, and provide advice for when projects fall into crisis. We cover how the field’s terminology has been updated. However, the time investment, sober communication, and planning still remain at the core of successful projects.

We also share other articles and projects from the Python community, including recent releases and announcements, exploring an IDE for data science development, using Python set comprehensions, making friendly classes, using atexit for cleanup, a high-performance caching library for Python written in Rust, and a curated list of awesome marimo things.

This episode is sponsored by PropelAuth.

Video Course Spotlight: Using Data Classes in Python

When using data classes, you don’t have to write boilerplate code to get proper initialization, representation, and comparisons for your objects.

Topics:

• 00:00:00 – Introduction
• 00:02:15 – Starlette 1.0 Released
• 00:03:08 – PyOhio 2026 Call for Proposals Now Open!
• 00:03:42 – Spyder: Your IDE for Data Science Development in Python
• 00:11:04 – Python Set Comprehensions: How and When to Use Them
• 00:14:40 – Sponsor: PropelAuth
• 00:15:17 – Making Friendly Classes
• 00:23:51 – How to Use atexit for Cleanup
• 00:25:49 – Video Course Spotlight
• 00:27:14 – How I’ve run major projects
• 00:47:47 – awesome-marimo: Curated List of Awesome Marimo Things
• 00:51:37 – moka-py: A high performance caching library for Python written in Rust
• 00:53:24 – Thanks and goodbye

News:

• Starlette 1.0 Released
• PyOhio 2026 Call for Proposals Now Open!

Show Links:

• Spyder: Your IDE for Data Science Development in Python – Learn how to use the Spyder IDE, a Python code editor built for scientists, engineers, and data analysts working with data-heavy workflows.
• Python Set Comprehensions: How and When to Use Them – In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to write set comprehensions in Python. You’ll also explore the most common use cases for set comprehensions and learn about some bad practices that you should avoid when using them in your code.
• Making Friendly Classes – What’s a friendly class? One that accepts sensible arguments, has a nice string representation, and supports equality checks. Read on to learn how to write them.
• How to Use atexit for Cleanup – Divakar recently came across Python’s atexit module and became curious about practical use cases in real-world applications. To explore it, he created a simple client-server app that uses a clean-up function.

Discussion:

• How I’ve run major projects: benkuhn.net

Projects:

• awesome-marimo: Curated List of Awesome Marimo Things
• moka-py: A high performance caching library for Python written in Rust

Additional Links:

• Positron
• Data Classes in Python (Guide) – Real Python
• Episode #230: marimo: Reactive Notebooks and Deployable Web Apps in Python
• Getting Started With marimo Notebooks – Real Python
• Investigating Quasar Data With Polars and Interactive marimo Notebooks

Level up your Python skills with our expert-led courses:

• Using Data Classes in Python
• Investigating Quasar Data With Polars and Interactive marimo Notebooks
• Getting Started With marimo Notebooks

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