Have you ever installed a Python package without knowing anything about it? What best practices should you employ to ensure the quality of your next package installation? Christopher Trudeau is back this week, bringing another batch of PyCoder’s Weekly articles and projects. We also have Python Software Foundation executive director, Deb Nicholson, to share details about PyCon US 2023.

We cover a recent Real Python tutorial by Philipp Acsany on evaluating the quality of Python packages. The piece provides a tool kit for researching the traits, history, software license, and current condition of external Python packages. We also discuss the techniques that we personally use before selecting a package for our Python projects.

We share several other articles and projects from the Python community, with topics such as the underlying structure of virtual environments, the overhead of Python asyncio tasks, documentation for Python projects with Sphinx and Read the Docs, a project for creating argparse boilerplate, and a way to generate seemingly realistic fake numbers using Benford’s law.

Deb Nicholson is also here to talk about the 20th anniversary of PyCon US, hosted in Salt Lake City. We dig into the details of the upcoming conference, including keynote speakers, tutorials, scheduled talks, and improvements to the hybrid online experience.

Course Spotlight: Documenting Python Projects With Sphinx and Read the Docs

In this video series, you’ll create project documentation from scratch using Sphinx, the de facto standard for Python. You’ll also hook your code repository up to Read The Docs to automatically build and publish your code documentation.

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