May 25, 2026

#481 Ways to die

33 minutes

Topics covered in this episode:

Dumb Ways for an Open Source Project to Die

How to create a pylock.toml lockfile

https://github.com/facebook/Lifeguard

Choosing a Python Logging Library in 2026

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: @[email protected] / @mkennedy.codes (bsky)

Brian: @[email protected] / @brianokken.bsky.social

Show: @[email protected] / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky)

Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 11am 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: Dumb Ways for an Open Source Project to Die

Core categories

The maintainer left

The maintainer is still there

Sabotage and capture

The release pipeline broke

Force majeure

The world moved on

The project split

Examples

Bulma PRs still from 2023, issues and PRs with no maintainer response for years, last release 1.5 years ago

diskcache Similar, got hired by OpenAI, crickets after that

Brian #2: How to create a pylock.toml lockfile

Tim Hopper

Tim walks through using uv, pip and pdm to create pylock.toml files.

Recommendation: use uv export --format pylock.toml -o pylock.toml

He also has How to install from a pylock.toml lockfile with pip but the short version is:

use -r because tools treat it like a requirements file

Michael #3: https://github.com/facebook/Lifeguard

Lifeguard is a static analyzer to detect Lazy Imports incompatibilities and ease the adoption overhead for Lazy Imports in Python.

I’m more excited about lazy imports after my Cutting Python Web App Memory Over 31% experience

Some Python patterns depend on imports executing immediately. For example:

Module-level side effects — a module that registers a handler or modifies global state at import time will behave differently if that import is deferred.

The registry pattern — a module that registers itself (e.g., adding to a global dict) when imported will silently fail to register under Lazy Imports.

sys.modules manipulation — code that reads or writes sys.modules assumes prior imports have already executed.

Metaclasses and __init_subclass__ — class creation side effects may depend on imports being resolved.

Project Stage: Beta Lifeguard is in active development. We are aiming to be ready for general use by the Python 3.15 final release.

Brian #4: Choosing a Python Logging Library in 2026

Ayooluwa Isaiah

" which libraries matter, how they compare, where they overlap with the standard module, and when each one makes sense.”

The slant with this article is the need to log json output, which seems reasonable as things like API entry and exit point logging will include json.

Covered libraries

standard library logging with a hat tip to python-json-logger

Same site has a guide to setting up python-json-logger

structlog

Loguru

Logbook

picologging

Some benchmarks with structlog, stdlib+json, and Loguru, with structlog coming out faster

I liked the Loguru example

I’m going to have to try @logger.catch and logger.exception() for easily logging exceptions and serialize=True to enable JSON output.

Extras

Brian:

When Women Stopped Coding - Planet Money segment , spotted on BlueSky from Savannah Ostrowski

Lean TDD is now leaner

Still working on audio version, but some great changes in 0.7.1 version

Ch 6, TDD Interpretations, move ATDD and some of BDD to chapter

Ch 7, Change name to TDD with Teams: BDD and ATDD

Ch 9, Lean TDD, streamline steps and chapter

Ch 10, Change name to Lean TDD with Teams: Lean ATDD

Ch 11, Lean TDD with AI, Add short discussion about guardrails and security

Michael:

New course: Python Web Security: OWASP Top 10 with Agentic AI

All courses now with Spanish subtitles, see announcement

Joke: Stop texting me

...more

View all episodes

By Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken

4.7

212212 ratings