Python Bytes

By Michael Kennedy and Calvin Hendryx-Parker

Python Bytes is a weekly podcast hosted by Michael Kennedy and Calvin Hendryx-Parker. The show is a short discussion on the headlines and noteworthy news in the Python, developer, and data science spa... more

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June 23, 2026#485 Creating memories
Topics covered in this episode:
Backup Docker volumes locally or to any S3
Pyodide 314.0 Release
nb-cli: A Command-Line Interface for AI Agents and Notebook Automation
Hindsight Agent Memory That Learns
Extras
Joke
Watch on YouTube
About the show
Sponsored by us! Support our work through:
Our courses at Talk Python
AWS Community Day Midwest tomorrow Wednesday the 24th in downtown Indianapolis, Six Feet Up is sponsoring and there are 2 Sixies presenting
Connect with the hosts
Michael: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedIn
Calvin: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedIn
Show: Mastodon / BlueSky / X
Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Tuesday at 7am PT. Older video versions available there too.
Finally, if you want an bonus 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: Backup Docker volumes locally or to any S3
Via Bryan Weber (thanks Bryan!), who spotted it over on Virtualization HowTo. Find Bryan at bryanwweber.com.
offen/docker-volume-backup is a lightweight companion container that backs up the volumes your apps actually depend on, then ships them somewhere safe.
It's tiny: written in Go and about 25MB compressed, roughly 1/20th the size of the shell-based image (jareware/docker-volume-backup) that inspired it.
Drop it into your docker compose file as a backup service, mount the volumes you care about as read-only, and you're off.
Push backups to a pile of destinations: a local directory, plus any S3, WebDAV, Azure Blob Storage, Dropbox, Google Drive, or SSH-compatible target. Mix and match as many as you want in one run.
Recurring cron-style backups in a Compose setup, or one-off backups straight from the Docker CLI.
Production-friendly touches worth calling out:
Rotates away old backups so you don't quietly fill the disk.
GPG encryption for your archives.
Notifications on finished and failed runs (so you find out about failures before you need the backup).
Stop a container during backup for a consistent snapshot using a simple docker-volume-backup.stop-during-backup=true label, then auto-restart it.
Run custom commands during the backup lifecycle (great for a database dump before the file copy).
Docker Swarm support, plus arm64 and arm/v7 builds. Hello, Raspberry Pi homelab.
Fun aside from Bryan: he searched our back catalog for this tool and the search came back so fast he thought it hadn't run. Love to hear it.
Calvin #2: Pyodide 314.0 Release
PEP 783 is the real news — Pyodide maintainers used to hand-build 300+ packages. Now anyone can publish Pyodide wheels to PyPI with cibuildwheel.
The version jump from 0.29 to 314.0 is intentional — it now tracks the Python version, so 314.x = Python 3.14. Binary compatibility is locked per Python cycle, meaning packages you build today won't break on the next Pyodide release.
sqlite3, ssl, and lzma are back in the default stdlib — no more await pyodide.loadPackage("sqlite3"). Bigger download, but a much smoother experience for newcomers.
bigint precision bug is fixed — values above 2^53 were silently losing precision when crossing the Python/JS boundary. The new JsBigInt type makes the roundtrip correct. Worth flagging if anyone is doing numeric work in a browser app.
Experimental TCP sockets in Node.js — you can now connect Pyodide to a real database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis tested) when running server-side. Blurs the line between "Python in the browser" and "Python runtime anywhere Wasm runs."
Michael #3: nb-cli: A Command-Line Interface for AI Agents and Notebook Automation
From Piyush Jain (Jupyter and LangChain maintainer) on the Jupyter blog: nb-cli: A Command-Line Interface for AI Agents and Notebook Automation.
nb-cli is an experimental, Rust-based CLI to read, write, execute, and search Jupyter notebooks. The premise: agents are great at CLIs but terrible at hand-editing the nested JSON in an .ipynb, so let them operate on the notebook from the outside instead of running inside it.
Works with or without a Jupyter server. No server? It reads/writes .ipynb files directly and talks to kernels over ZeroMQ. Connected to a live JupyterLab, your edits show up instantly via Y.js (the same CRDT Jupyter uses).
Smart output format: instead of token-heavy JSON or ambiguous plain markdown, it uses @@cell / @@output sentinels with inline metadata. Less wasted context, unambiguous structure, and it degrades gracefully on truncation.
The payoff is composability. "Add a summary section and run it" becomes one shell pipeline instead of six agent tool calls. And nb search notebook.ipynb --with-errors returns only the failing cells, so the agent skips the cells that worked.
Claude Code tie-in: it ships as an agent skill. npx skills install jupyter-ai-contrib/nb-cli and your agent can drive notebooks via nb.
Out of jupyter-ai-contrib, which aims to become an official Jupyter AI subproject. Still early (crates.io is at v0.0.5), so kick the tires before anything load-bearing.
See also marimo-pair.
Calvin #4: Hindsight Agent Memory That Learns
AI agents forget everything between sessions — Hindsight gives them persistent memory that learns over time
Simple three-method API: retain(), recall(), reflect() — store, retrieve, and reason over memories
TEMPR retrieval runs semantic, keyword, graph, and temporal search in parallel for accurate results
Automatically consolidates related facts into durable observations instead of piling up duplicates
pip install hindsight-all runs the entire server in-process; integrates with LangChain, LlamaIndex, Pydantic AI, CrewAI, and more
Extras
Calvin:
Clanker: A Word For The Machine
**Ponytail — You know him. Long ponytail. Oval glasses. Has been at the company longer than the version control**
**Klangk: Multi-User AI Sandboxing, Collaboration and Coding Platform**
Cursor announces Origin
performative-ui to quick start your new idea
Michael:
Astral Joins OpenAI: The Interview
SpaceX to acquire Cursor
And OpenAI renews Open Source support
Portuguese subtitles are now available for Talk Python courses
DSF is hiring including Six Feet Up support
Joke: Oh Babe…
...more
39min
June 16, 2026#484 All our tools
Topics covered in this episode:
pi + superpowers
Terminal: Warp.dev + OhMyZSH
{Blink,kitty} + mosh + tmux
Claude code
MacWhisper or Handy
Tailscale
Extras
Joke
Watch on YouTube
About the show
Sponsored by us! Support our work through:
Our courses at Talk Python Training
Six Feet Up is hosting a LinkedIn Live
Connect with the hosts
Michael: @[email protected] / @mkennedy.codes (bsky)
Calvin: @[email protected] / @calvinhp.com (bsky)
Show: @[email protected] / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky)
Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Tuesday at 7am 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.
Calvin #1: pi + superpowers
terminal-first, open-source coding agent
Session management is a first-class citizen
Extension model is what makes pi special — it's aggressively composable
Superpowers brings a structured software development methodology as loadable skills
Steps back and asks you what you're really trying to do
“hand you the keys to the car” mode vs guardrails might not be for everyone
Michael #2: Terminal: Warp.dev + OhMyZSH
If you’re using the base terminal with default settings, you have so much head-room for improvement.
I’ve been using Warp.dev since Elvis talked me into it. ;)
Remarkable terminal but the AI side of things is a bit junky, can be turned off
OhMyZSH gives better autocomplete
e.g. git branch [HTML_REMOVED] lists all branches in the local repo!
Commandbookapp.com is excellent to keep the terminal focused on terminal things and more server commands and other automation in Command Book.
Calvin #3: {Blink,kitty} + mosh + tmux
Kitty Terminal — GPU-accelerated terminal emulator for macOS, Linux, and Windows with support for graphics, ligatures, and a powerful tiling layout system built right in.
Blink Shell — The go-to terminal for iPad/iPhone power users; full SSH and Mosh client with a gorgeous interface built specifically for mobile professional workflows.
Mosh — Mobile Shell replaces SSH for remote connections, surviving network switches, sleep cycles, and flaky Wi-Fi with zero dropped sessions — essential for staying connected to long-running agentic jobs.
tmux — Terminal multiplexer that keeps sessions alive on your Linux server indefinitely; detach from a Mosh session on your Mac, reconnect from your iPad, and your agent is right where you left it.
The combo — Kitty or Blink + Mosh + tmux creates a "persistent remote brain" pattern: your beefy Linux homelab runs the compute-heavy agent sessions 24/7, and any device becomes a thin client to drop in and out at will.
Michael #4: Claude code
I prefer the IDE experience, the new PyCharm + Claude integration is really good. VS Code too. Why IDE? Because we should still be present with our code and managing context is much easier.
Use the best/latest models on high thinking. “Speed” is not your friend, it’s just shortcuts.
Create skills and agents and use them.
Curate your own rules (e.g. Talk Python’s Claude.md)
Works well on non-coding things. Just create a folder, put a ton of files in there and it’s like NotebookLM + Chat + more.
Calvin #5: MacWhisper or Handy
Transcribes your speech using your choice of Whisper or Parakeet models.
All transcription is done on your device, no data leaves your machine.
Automatic Speaker Recognition with local models.
Handy is more basic, but open source and runs on all platforms.
Michael #6: Tailscale
No need to open ports at all, Tailscale makes machines inside the same network accessible to each other
Works great for laptops, desktops, etc. But also available for servers.
Though I still use cloud firewalls for servers.
How I use it:
My dev database server, preloaded with QA data, is always running on my home mac mini m4 pro. All my apps look for that server before looking locally and tailscale makes them always accessible to each other
My local LLMs expose OpenAI API compatible APIs. Tailscale makes these accessible even while traveling or at a coffee shop.
Use my mini as an exit node. All traffic is routed outbound from my local fiber network. Great to restricted IPs like accessing my servers without caring about the local IP.
Screen share back to my home machines even while traveling.
Listen to the Talk Python episode with Alex for a deeper conversation.
Extras
Calvin:
Telescopo great Mac Markdown viewer/editor.
Michael:
One more: Typora markdown editor.
Created formal documentation for many of my open source packages using Great Docs.
Via Mark Little: Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
Joke: No second date
...more
50min
June 09, 2026#483 Thanks Brian
Topics covered in this episode:
Vulnerability and malware checks in uv
HTTP GET requests with the Python standard library
Millions of AI agents imperiled by critical vulnerability in open source package
alembic-git-revisions
Extras
Joke
Watch on YouTube
About the show
Goodbye and Thanks Brian
Thanks Calvin for being part of this and future episodes! Also new time for the live show. Thanks Brian for all the hard work over the years.
Calvin #1: Vulnerability and malware checks in uv
release just yesterday by Astral https://astral.sh/blog/uv-audit
uv audit scans dependencies for known vulnerabilities and abandoned packages via the OSV database — runs 4–10x faster than pip-audit
Malware check runs on every install/sync, catching actively malicious packages (credential stealers, etc.) before they execute — including ones PyPI quarantined but lockfiles can still reference
Enable malware scanning with UV_MALWARE_CHECK=1 — it's opt-in and in preview
Future roadmap includes a resolver that steers toward vulnerability-free versions and install-time warnings scoped to newly added deps only
Michael #2: HTTP GET requests with the Python standard library
If you’re doing HTTP in Python, you’re probably using one of three popular libraries: requests, httpx, or urllib3.
There have been issues with httpx lately.
Niquest is another option: Drop-in replacement for Requests. Automatic HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and HTTP/3. WebSocket, and SSE included.
But maybe less is more, especially in the age of agentic AI
A good candidate needs two things to be true at once, not one: the used surface is small, and the behavior behind that surface is shallow.
Calvin #3: Millions of AI agents imperiled by critical vulnerability in open source package
"BadHost" (CVE-2026-48710) is a critical vulnerability in Starlette — the ASGI framework underlying FastAPI — with 325 million weekly downloads; also affects vLLM, LiteLLM, and most MCP server tooling
The exploit is trivial: injecting a single character into an HTTP Host header bypasses path-based authentication, and can lead to credential theft, SSRF, and in some cases remote code execution
MCP servers are a prime target since they store credentials for external services (email, databases, cloud accounts) — exposed data in the wild includes biopharma clinical trial DBs, full mailboxes, HR/PII pipelines, and AWS topology
Fix is available — patch to Starlette 1.0.1 immediately; use the free scanner at mcp-scan.nemesis.services to check if your servers are still running a vulnerable version
Open source sustainability footnote: the maintainer triages near-daily security reports solo, in his free time — most are AI-generated noise, and real ones like this still compete for the same evenings and weekends
Michael #4: alembic-git-revisions
By Julien Danjou from Mergify
Automatic Alembic migration chaining based on git commit history. No more Multiple head revisions are present for given argument 'head'.
See the introductory article
Caused by two migrations landed with the same down_revision, and Alembic doesn’t know which one comes first. The fix is always the same: someone manually edits the migration file to re-chain the revisions.
The insight: git already knows the order
Extras
Calvin:
GNU make can do pattern matching in the target. Not new at all, mentioned in the 1994-era docs. just and task don’t have this super power on the target name yet.
train-%:
uv run ./train.py $* --save-hyper-params --overwrite $(TRAIN_ARGS)
Michael:
Updated my HTTP client using packages from httpx to httpx2: listmonk, umami, and memberful. For motivation, see this reddit thread.
Joke: Accurate
...more
29min
June 01, 2026#482 Mr. Beast's episode
Topics covered in this episode:
CVE-2026-48710: A Maintainer's Perspective
daily-stars-explorer
Markdown to pdf with pandoc and typst
postman2pytest
Extras
Joke
Watch on YouTube
About the show
Brian #1: CVE-2026-48710: A Maintainer's Perspective
Marcelo Trylesinski
suggested by Lee Luocks
Short version:
users of Starlette: upgrade to Starlette 1.0.1
security professionals: we can’t treat open source projects like corporations
This top link is a Starlette security advisory with the title
Missing Host header validation poisons request.url.path, bypassing path-based security checks
The CVE apparently caused some negative press targeting starlette.
However, “the vulnerability came from the application pattern and the deployment, never from something Starlette intended.”
A quote from an OSTIF article: “This bug is a classic “responsibility gap” where if this maintainer didn’t patch, thousands of exposed projects would have to individually secure their projects. In doing this work, they’ve voluntarily taken on the responsibility to protect the ecosystem from long-term systemic harm. As with all open source projects, they owed us nothing and could have left this to be everyone else’s problem and took the extraordinary steps of helping the ecosystem.”
Both X40 D-Sec and Ars Technica expected immediate fixes and responses from Starlette.
That’s not good. We can do better.
Michael #2: daily-stars-explorer
Explore the full history of any GitHub repository.
📈 Full Star History - Complete daily star counts for any repo
⏰ Hourly Stars - Hour-by-hour activity with timezone support
🔀 Compare Repos - Side-by-side comparison of any two repositories
📊 Activity Timelines - Commits, PRs, Issues, Forks, Contributors over time
📌 Pin Favorites - Bookmark repos for quick access without retyping
📰 Feed Mentions - See when repos were mentioned on HN, Reddit, YouTube, GitHub
💾 Export Data - Download as CSV or JSON
🌙 Dark Mode - Easy on the eyes
Try/use it online at emanuelef.github.io/daily-stars-explorer or install it for yourself.
Brian #3: Markdown to pdf with pandoc and typst
typst suggestion from Matt Harrison
Markdown is awesome
Pandoc is great for converting markdown to tons of stuff
but for pdf, it goes through LaTeX, which is … yuk (my opinion)
Pandoc also can convert to typst
And typst creates beautiful pdfs and is way easier (my opinion) to deal with than LaTeX.
New tools
brew upgrade pandoc
brew install typst
Now convert
pandoc something.md --to typst -o something.typ
typst compile something.typ something.pdf
Michael #4: postman2pytest
via Mikhail
Based on postman app
Convert Postman Collection v2.1 JSON into executable pytest test suites
Postman collections document your API. postman2pytest turns that documentation into executable regression tests that run in CI. No manual rewriting, no drift.
Extras:
New blog, who dis? - testandcode.org is now on .org and a blog and soon to be a “publisher”.
Joke: Centering a div
...more
25min
May 25, 2026#481 Ways to die
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
34min
May 18, 2026#480 Proud Parents
Topics covered in this episode:
Using Django Tasks in production
Co-authored with Claude?
PyPI packages are increasing rapidly
httpx2
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.
Brian #1: Using Django Tasks in production
Tim Schilling shares how the Djangonaut Space website has been using Django’s new tasks framework and some of the info missing from the official Django docs.
Tasks require a third party package, django-tasks-db to actually run the tasks.
Article walks through all changes necessary to get an email process running to notify admins of new testimonials. Cool simple example.
With the db backend, you can monitor progress of tasks in the admin, to see which tasks are scheduled, completed, or have errors.
Some wishes for the community to implement
new tutorial in the Django docs
Django Debug toolbar panel for tasks
test/mock backend
Great title for wish list: Thinks I’d like to see, but I’m too lazy to implement myself.
Michael #2: Co-authored with Claude?
Via Nik T.
We don’t put “executed on macOS”, “edited with PyCharm”, etc. in our commits. Why Claude?
Seems like a growth hack to me, that I don’t really care to participate in.
Some projects that have formalized their thoughts on this: The Generative AI Policy Landscape in Open Source
Adjust to turn off in ~/.claude/settings.json see the docs.
{
"attribution": {
"commit": "",
"pr": ""
}
}
Brian #3: PyPI packages are increasing rapidly
Artem Golubin
There’s been an increase of published packages per week on PyPI
A pretty big increase in the last handful of months.
30% increase since 2025, clearly due to AI
Artem is building hexora, a malicious Python code detector.
Cool package too, it can:
Audit project dependencies to catch potential supply-chain attacks
Detect malicious scripts found on platforms like Pastebin, GitHub, or open directories
Analyze IoC files from past security incidents
Audit new packages uploaded to PyPi.
Artem is using hexora to analyze recently published pypi packages and many are obviously vibecoded and trigger false positives for abuses of eval, exec, and subprocess
Side note: I don’t think that’s necessarily a false positive. Not malicious, but maybe a stupid-code-detector?
Lots are LLM related, Lots have bots contributing code
Publishing rate is crazy, dozens to hundreds of published versions in a day is a bug, not a feature
Brian’s proposal, PyPI should limit releases per day for any package to something a sane human would do, even if they make a mistake on a release, to maybe like 2-3, definitely under 10, in a day. And if the repo has obvious agent contributors listed, maybe lower to the limit to 1-2 a day? Honestly, “move fast and break things” doesn’t apply to breaking the commons.
Michael #4: httpx2
More on the httpx, httpxyz, etc changes: Pydantic people started their own fork, httpx2.
Michiel says “while we think httpxyz was definitely needed, we welcome httpx2 and think it should be the ‘blessed’ fork.”
Kludex, who is among other things maintainer of Starlette, was considering a fork
As it stands, httpx2 is lacking the performance improvements they added to httpxyz. But it will not be long before they will add those, too.
Also they already made some smart decisions:
they are switching from certifi to truststore
they are switching to compression.zstd on Python 3.14+, enabling zstd compression by default
they merged httpcore and vendored it in their repository
Discussion on Hacker News
Extras
Brian:
The Four Horsemen of the LLM Apocalypse - Anarcat
Django/JetBrains 2026 developer survey is open
Pyrefly 1.0 : “meaning we are confident that Pyrefly is ready for production use.”
Michael:
Just about ready to release Python Web Security: OWASP Top 10 with Agentic AI course. Be sure to be on the courses newsletter to get notified.
Joke: Proud Parents
...more
34min
May 11, 2026#479 Talking About Types
Topics covered in this episode:
httpxyz one month in
Learn concurrency - a deep dive into multithreading with Python
pip 26.1 - lockfiles and dependency cooldowns
Python 3.15 sentinal values from PEP 661
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: httpxyz one month in
First version of httpxyz contained just the fixes to get zstd working, and the fixes to get the test suite running on python 3.14, some ‘housekeeping’ changes related to the renaming
End of March: a compatibility shim that allows you to use httpxyz even with third-party packages that import httpx themselves, as long as you import httpxyz first.
Importing httpxyz automatically registers it under the httpx name in sys.modules , see https://httpxyz.org/httpx-compatibility/
Fixed a WHOLE bunch of performance related issues by forking httpcore
Brian #2: Learn concurrency - a deep dive into multithreading with Python
Nikos Vaggalis
“Whenever you are trying to speed up code using multiple cores, always ask yourself: “Do these threads need to talk to each other right now?” If the answer is yes, it will be slow. The best parallel code splits a big job into completely isolated chunks, processes them separately, and merges the results at the finish line.”
Good overview of thread concurrency with Python and how that’s been improved dramatically with free-threaded Python
Defines lots of terms you come across, including “embarrassingly parallel multithreading”
There’s a counter example that’s nice
Start with a shared resource, a counter, and multiple threads updating it
Attempt to fix with threading.Lock(), which fixes it, but slows things down
Good explanation of why
Proper fix with concurrent.futures and separating the work of different threads so that they can be independent and their results can be combined when they’re all finished.
Michael #3: pip 26.1 - lockfiles and dependency cooldowns
Python 3.9 is no longer supported
Experimental: installing from pylock files
Dependency cooldowns (see my post about this)
Lifting several 2020 resolver limitations
Brian #4: Python 3.15 sentinal values from PEP 661
MISSING = sentinel("MISSING")
def next_value(default: int | MISSING = MISSING):
...
if default is MISSING:
...
Take a name str as a constructor parameter
Intended to be compared with is operator, similar to None
Sentinal objects can be used as a type, also similar to None
and can be combined with other types with |.
Unlike None, sentinal values are truthy. (Elipses ... are also truthy)
This seems like a strange choice. but I guess it must have made sense to someone.
It does force you to use is instead of depending on False-ness, so I guess it’ll make code using sentinels more readable.
Interesting that the PEP was started in 2021, and we’re finally getting it this year.
Extras
Brian:
Before GitHub - Armin Ronacher
tenacity - cross-platform multi-track audio editor/recorder
learned about it from Armin’s article
Joke:
Joke option Make it myself
Seems similar to what people think about software now
Links
httpxyz one month in
httpxyz.org/httpx-compatibility
Learn concurrency - a deep dive into multithreading with Python
pip 26.1 - lockfiles and dependency cooldowns
my post about this
Python 3.15 sentinal values from PEP 661
Before GitHub
tenacity
Make it myself
...more
36min
May 04, 2026#478 Iodine tablets and potable water
Topics covered in this episode:
profiling-explorer
Reverting the incremental GC in Python 3.14 and 3.15
VSCode AI Co-author defaults to on, then off
django freeze
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.
Brian #1: profiling-explorer
Adam Johnson
And intro post Python: introducing profiling-explorer
“profiling-explorer is a tool for exploring profiling data from Python’s built-in profilers, which are stored in pstats files. ”
Features
Dark mode
Click the calls, internal ms, or cumulative ms column headers to sort by that column.
Use the search box to filter by filename or function name.
Hover by a filename + line number pair to reveal the copy button, which copies the location to your clipboard for faster opening.
Click the callers or callees links on the right of a row (not pictured above) to see the callers or callees of that function.
Michael #2: Reverting the incremental GC in Python 3.14 and 3.15
Python 3.14 shipped with a new incremental garbage collector, but production reports of severe memory pressure (Neil Schemenauer measured up to 5× peak RSS on pathological cyclic workloads) have pushed the core team and Steering Council to revert it in both 3.14 and 3.15 - returning to the 3.13-era generational GC.
This is the second time the inc GC has been pulled back: it was also reverted right before 3.13.0 final, and it shipped in 3.14 without going through the PEP process.
The tradeoff is real: Neil's benchmarks showed max GC pause times of 1.3ms with inc GC versus 26ms with the generational one - great for latency-sensitive apps, terrible for memory-constrained ones.
Release manager Hugo van Kemenade will ship 3.14.5 early with the revert, and Gregory Smith floated the idea of a 3.14.5rc1 - the first patch-release RC since 3.9.2 back in 2021.
Tim Peters spent the thread doing live forensics on Windows, running a toy deque program that should cap at 1GB and watching it balloon to 15.6GB on a 16GB machine - and discovered the gen0 collector effectively never fires under the new scheme.
Tim's bigger meta-point: CPython has a chronic shortage of real-world GC benchmarks, pyperformance has "basically no interesting" cyclic workloads, and users almost never share real data - so core devs keep flying blind on changes like this.
Django maintainer Adam Johnson published a blog post mid-thread documenting a real memory "leak" in Django's migration system caused by inc GC, with a manual gc.collect() workaround - the listener-facing receipt that this wasn't just theoretical.
If the inc GC comes back for 3.16, it'll go through a proper PEP, and the discussion is already shifting toward keeping both collectors available via a startup flag - which Neil and Sergey Miryanov have both prototyped.
Brian #3: VSCode AI Co-author defaults to on, then off
VSCode merges Enabling ai co author by default - 3 week ago
Ton’s of “why would you do this” and related comments
VSCode merges Change default for git.addAICoAuthor to off - yesterday
Take-away, don’t rely on default, set addAICoAuthor to off yourself
Michael #4: django freeze
Convert your dynamic django site to a static one with one line of code.
Just run python manage.py generate_static_site :)
Features
Generate the static version of your Django site, optionally compressed .zip file
Generate/download the static site using urls (only superuser and staff)
Follow sitemap.xml urls
Follow internal links founded in each page
Follow redirects
Report invalid/broken urls
Selectively include/exclude media and static files
Custom base url (very useful if the static site will run in a specific folder different by the document-root)
Convert urls to relative urls (very useful if the static site will run offline or in an unknown folder different by the document-root)
Prevent local directory index
Extras
Brian:
Thinking Less, Trusting More: GenAI’s Impacts on Students’ Cognitive Habits
Michael:
Vercel breached, employee to blame
Introducing the new Talk Python web player
GitHub uptime (a couple of views 1, 2)
Joke: Friends in tech
...more
41min
April 20, 2026#477 Lazy, Frozen, and 31% Lighter
Topics covered in this episode:
Django Modern Rest
Already playing with Python 3.15
Cutting Python Web App Memory Over 31%
tryke - A Rust-based Ptyhon test runner with a Jest-style API
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: Django Modern Rest
Modern REST framework for Django with types and async support
Supports Pydantic, Attrs, and msgspec
Has ai coding support with llms.txt
See an example at the “showcase” section
Brian #2: Already playing with Python 3.15
3.15.0a8, 2.14.4 and 3.13.13 are out
Hugo von Kemenade
beta comes in May, CRs in Sept, and Final planned for October
But still, there’s awesome stuff here already, here’s what I’m looking forward to:
PEP 810: Explicit lazy imports
PEP 814: frozendict built-in type
PEP 798: Unpacking in comprehensions with * and **
PEP 686: Python now uses UTF-8 as the default encoding
Michael #3: Cutting Python Web App Memory Over 31%
I cut 3.2 GB of memory usage from our Python web apps using five techniques:
async workers
import isolation
the Raw+DC database pattern
local imports for heavy libraries
disk-based caching
See the full article for details.
Brian #4: tryke - A Rust-based Ptyhon test runner with a Jest-style API
Justin Chapman
Watch mode, Native async support, Fast test discovery, In-source testing, Support for doctests, Client/server mode for fast editor integrations, Pretty, per-assertion diagnostics, Filtering and marks, Changed mode (like pytest-picked), Concurrent tests, Soft assertions,
JSON, JUnit, Dot, and LLM reporters
Honestly haven’t tried it yet, but you know, I’m kinda a fan of thinking outside the box with testing strategies so I welcome new ideas.
Extras
Brian:
Why are’t we uv yet?
Interesting take on the “agents prefer pip”
Problem with analysis.
Many projects are libraries and don’t publish uv.lock file
Even with uv, it still often seen as a developer preference for non-libarries. You can sitll use uv with requirements.txt
PyCon US 2026 talks schedule is up
Interesting that there’s an AI track now. I won’t be attending, but I might have a bot watch the videos and summarize for me. :)
What has technology done to us?
Justin Jackson
Lean TDD new cover
Also, 0.6.1 is so ready for me to start f-ing reading the audio book and get on with this shipping the actual f-ing book and yes I realize I seem like I’m old because I use “f-ing” while typing.
Michael:
Python 3.14.4 is out
Beanie 2.1 release
Joke: HumanDB - Blazingly slow. Emotionally consistent.
...more
46min
April 06, 2026#476 Common themes
Topics covered in this episode:
Migrating from mypy to ty: Lessons from FastAPI
Oxyde ORM
Typeshedded CPython docs
Raw+DC Database Pattern: A Retrospective
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.
Brian #1: Migrating from mypy to ty: Lessons from FastAPI
Tim Hopper
I saw this post by Sebastián Ramírez about all of his projects switching to ty
FastAPI, Typer, SQLModel, Asyncer, FastAPI CLI
SqlModel is already ty only - mypy removed
This signals that ty is ready to use
Tim lists some steps to apply ty to your own projects
Add ty alongside mypy
Set error-on-warning = true
Accept the double-ignore comments
Pick a smaller project to cut over first
Drop mypy when the noise exceeds the signalAdd ty alongside mypy
Related anecdote:
I had tried out ty with pytest-check in the past with difficulty
Tried it again this morning, only a few areas where mypy was happy but ty reported issues
At least one ty warning was a potential problem for people running pre-releases of pytest,
Not really related: packaging.version.parse is awesome
Michael #2: Oxyde ORM
Oxyde ORM is a type-safe, Pydantic-centric asynchronous ORM with a high-performance Rust core.
Note: Oxyde is a young project under active development. The API may evolve between minor versions.
No sync wrappers or thread pools. Oxyde is async from the ground up
Includes oxyde-admin
Features
Django-style API - Familiar Model.objects.filter() syntax
Pydantic v2 models - Full validation, type hints, serialization
Async-first - Built for modern async Python with asyncio
Rust performance - SQL generation and execution in native Rust
Multi-database - PostgreSQL, SQLite, MySQL support
Transactions - transaction.atomic() context manager with savepoints
Migrations - Django-style makemigrations and migrate CLI
Brian #3: Typeshedded CPython docs
Thanks emmatyping for the suggestion
Documentation for Python with typeshed types
Source: typeshedding_cpython_docs
Michael #4: Raw+DC Database Pattern: A Retrospective
A new design pattern I’m seeing gain traction in the software space: Raw+DC: The ORM pattern of 2026
I’ve had a chance to migrate three of my most important web app.
Thrilled to report that yes, the web app is much faster using Raw+DC
Plus, this was part of the journey to move from 1.3 GB memory usage to 0.45 GB (more on this next week)
Extras
Brian:
Lean TDD 0.5 update
Significant rewrite and focus
Michael:
pytest-just (for just command file testing), by Michael Booth
Something going on with Encode
httpx: Anyone know what's up with HTTPX? And forked
starlette and uvicorn: Transfer of Uvicorn & Starlette
mkdocs: The Slow Collapse of MkDocs
django-rest-framework: Move to django commons?
Certificates at Talk Python Training
Joke:
Neue Rich
...more
33min

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