Talk Python To Me

Space science is one of the few sciences that can spark wonder and imagining in almost anyone. It also happens to be the domain of Python with many missions, telescopes, and analysis happening with Python playing a major role.

When you think data science, Jupyter notebooks and associated tools probably come to mind. But I want to broaden your toolset a bit and encourage you to look around at other tools that are literally at your fingertips. The terminal and shell command line tools. On this episode, you'll meed Jeroen Janssens. He wrote the book Data Science on The Command Line Book and there are a bunch of fun and useful small utilities that will make your life simpler that you can run immediately in the terminal. For example, you can query a CSV file with SQL right from the command line.

No Python announcement of 2022 was met with more fanfare than pyscript. This project, announced at PyCon 2022, allows you to write Python files and run them in your browser in place of JavaScript or even with interactions between Python and JavaScript. There was just one catch: The runtime download was a 9MB WebAssembly file. That made its uses quite limited.

Wondering what Mastodon is all about? More importantly, what does it offer Python developers and other open source folks compared to Twitter? There is a huge amount of interest in the tech community about what's happening at Twitter and whether they should expand to or even move to a new location. So I decided to put together a set of experienced Python developers who have been Mastodon inhabitants for a long time to discuss what this unexpected shift means for one of our important online watering holes.

If you're a fan of Python's async and await keywords and the powers they unlock, then this episode is for you. We have Timo Furrer here to share a whole bunch of asyncio related Python packages. Timo runs the awesome-asyncio list and he and I picked out some of our favorites to share with you.

Python 3.11 is here! Keeping with the annual release cycle, the Python core devs have released the latest version of Python. And this one is a big one. It has more friendly error messages and is massively faster than 3.10 (between 10 to 60% faster) which is a big deal for a year over year release of a 30 year old platform. On this episode, we have Irit Katriel, Pablo Galindo Salgado, Mark Shannon, and Brandt Bucher all of whom participated in releasing Python this week on the show to tell us about that process and some of the highlight features.

Do you have a large or growing Python code base? If you struggle to run builds, tests, linting, and other quality checks regularly or quickly, you'll want to hear what Benjy Weinberger has to say. He's here to introduce Pants Build to us. Pants is a fast, scalable, user-friendly build system for codebases of all sizes. It's currently focused on Python, Go, Java, Scala, Kotlin, Shell, and Docker.

Python's data science and data visualization capabilities are certainly one of the reasons for Python's meteoric rise over the past 10 years. But often thens visuals have been corralled into notebooks used by data scientists themselves or into static web pages. Recently, a host of excellent dashboard build and hosting frameworks have come along to turn these visuals into interactive apps for everyone. On this episode, we'll talk about H20 Wave. One of these excellent dashboard frameworks. We have Martin Turoci from H2O.ai here to tell us about Wave.

Do you love Python's async and await but feel that you could use more flexibility and higher-order constructs like running a group of tasks and child tasks as a single operation, or streaming data between tasks, combining async tasks with multiprocessing or threads, or even async file support? You should check out AnyIO. On this episode we have Alex Grönholm the creator of AnyIO here to give us the whole story.

Do you struggle to know where to start in the wide range of Python's visualization frameworks? Not sure when to use Plotly vs. Matplotlib vs. Altair? Then this episode is for you. We have Chris Moffitt, a Talk Python course author and founder of Practical Business Python, back on the show to discuss getting started with Python's data visualization frameworks.

For all the amazing powers of Python, deploying packaged apps that leverage native OS-level capabilities isn't one of them. But it can be done and we have a great guest, Rhet Turnbull, here to tell us how he built his distributable macOS app Textinator that uses macOS's native vision recognition framework through Python.

When you think data exploration using Python, Jupyter notebooks likely come to mind. They are excellent for those of us who gravitate towards Python. But what about your everyday power user? Think of that person who is really good at Excel but has never written a line of code? They can still harness the power of modern Python using a cool application called Superset.

We are on the edge of a major jump in Python performance. With the work done by the Faster CPython team and Python 3.11 due out in around a month, your existing Python code might see an increase of well over 25% in speed with no changes. One of the main reasons is its new specializing, adaptive interpreter. This episode is about that new feature and a great tool called Specialist which lets you visualize how Python is speeding up your code and where it can't unless you make minor changes. Its creator, Brandt Bucher is here to tell us all about.

Terminals seem like the very lowest common denominator for software platforms. They have to work over SSH. They only show text. You can't do much with them. Or can you? Will McGugan and team have been building Textual (based on Rich) which looks more like an animated web app than a terminal app. And he has learned a bunch of lessons trying to maximize terminal based apps. He's here to share his 7 lessons he's learned while building a modern TUI (text user interface) framework.

Do you write web apps in Django? The framework has come a long way lately with versions 3 and 4 adopting many of the modern Python capabilities (async, for example). But there are so many other libraries and apps that you can use to do more with less code in plugin new functionality. I'm happy to have Christopher Trudeau here on talk Python to take us through his 17 favorite libraries you should be using in Django.