May 08, 2026

Declarative Charts in Python & Discerning Iterators vs Iterables

56 minutes

What if you could build charts in Python by describing what your data means, instead of scripting every visual detail? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week with another batch of PyCoder’s Weekly articles and projects.

We cover a recent Real Python article about the data visualization library Altair. Most tools require you to write detailed boilerplate code to set up the axis and figure. Altair follows a declarative approach where you specify which columns go to which axis, the type of chart or plot, and what should be interactive.

We also share other articles and projects from the Python community, including recent releases, clarifying the differences between iterators and iterables, decoupling your business logic from the Django ORM, comparing an LLM-based tool for web scraping against Playwright, a neural network emulator for guitar amplifiers, and a CLI tool to generate ASCII art of the current moon phase.

This episode is sponsored by Build Your Own Coding Agent.

Video Course Spotlight: Use Codex CLI to Enhance Your Python Projects

Learn how to use Codex CLI to add features to Python projects directly from your terminal, without needing a browser or IDE plugins.

Topics:

00:00:00 – Introduction

00:02:38 – Read the Docs Now Supports uv Natively

00:03:09 – Reverting the Incremental GC in Python 3.14 and 3.15

00:04:51 – Altair: Declarative Charts With Python

00:12:23 – Sponsor: Build Your Own Coding Agent

00:13:17 – Decoupling Your Business Logic From the Django ORM

00:19:51 – browser-use vs. Playwright: Which to Pick for Web Scraping?

00:26:58 – 2048: iterators and iterables - Ned Batchelder

00:31:31 – Video Course Spotlight

00:33:00 – Discussion: Jumping back into solo developer mode

00:46:59 – neural-amp-modeler: Neural network emulator for guitar amplifiers

00:51:48 – ascii-moon-phase-python: CLI for ASCII art of the current moon phase

00:53:11 – Thanks and goodbye

00:54:43 – Appendix: Neural Amp Modeler - Demo

News:

Read the Docs Now Supports uv Natively – Popular open source documentation site Read the Docs has announced they now support native uv in .readthedocs.yaml for Python dependency installation. Learn how to use it in your configurations

Reverting the Incremental GC in Python 3.14 and 3.15

Fixing a Memory “Leak” From Python 3.14’s Incremental Garbage Collection – Adam encountered an out-of-memory error while migrating a client project to Python 3.14. The issue occurred when running Django’s database migration command on a limited-resource server, and seemed to be caused by the new incremental garbage collection algorithm in Python 3.14.

Show Links:

Altair: Declarative Charts With Python – Build interactive Python charts the declarative way with Altair. Map data to visual properties and add linked selections. No JavaScript required.

Decoupling Your Business Logic From the Django ORM – Where should I keep my business logic? This is a perennial topic in Django. This article proposes a continuum of cases, each with increasing complexity.

browser-use vs. Playwright: Which to Pick for Web Scraping? – Follow along in this walk-through building a Hacker News synthesizer with browser-use, then see it fail on a harder Newegg scraping task. Includes a side-by-side comparison with Playwright and a breakdown of when each tool is the right call.

2048: iterators and iterables - Ned Batchelder – Making a terminal based version of the 2048 game, Ned waded into a classic iterator/iterable confusion. This article shows you how they’re different and how confusing them can cause you problems in your code.

Projects:

neural-amp-modeler: Neural network emulator for guitar amplifiers

ascii-moon-phase-python: Command line program that outputs ASCII art of the current moon phase

Additional Links:

Vega-Altair: Declarative Visualization in Python — Vega-Altair 6.1.0dev documentation

Iterators and Iterables in Python: Run Efficient Iterations – Real Python

Neural Amp Modeler - Highly-accurate free and open-source amp modeling plugin

TONE3000 Official · Neural Amp Modeler (NAM) Profiles and Impulse Responses (IR’s)

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