What are the advantages of spec-driven development compared to vibe coding with an LLM? Are these recent trends a move toward declarative programming? This week on the show, Marc Brooker, VP and Distinguished Engineer at AWS, joins us to discuss specification-driven development and Kiro.

Marc describes the process of developing an application by writing specifications, which outline what a program should do and what needs it should meet. We dig into a bit of computer science history to explore the differences between declarative and imperative programming.

We also discuss Kiro, a new integrated development environment from Amazon, built around turning prompts into structured requirements. We examine the various types of documents used to specify tasks, requirements, design, and steering.

Real Python Resource Spotlight: Python Coding With AI - Learning Path

Explore tools and workflows for AI in Python: coding partners, prompt engineering, RAG, ChromaDB, FastAPI chatbots, and MCP integrations. Stay current and start today.

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What are the recent advances in the field of quantum computing and high-performance computing? And what Python tools can you use to develop programs that run on quantum computers? This week on the show, Real Python author Negar Vahid discusses her tutorial, “Quantum Computing Basics With Qiskit.”

Negar digs into the fundamentals of quantum computers, describing qubits, superposition, entanglement, and interference. We discuss the concept of quantum advantage and the fields of exploration where quantum computing promises speed-ups over classical computers. She also shares tools for designing quantum circuits with Python.

Course Spotlight: Profiling Performance in Python

Learn to profile Python programs with built-in and popular third-party tools, and turn performance insights into faster code.

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What are the steps to get started building a FastAPI application? What are the different types of concurrency available in Python? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week, bringing another batch of PyCoder’s Weekly articles and projects.

We discuss a recent Real Python step-by-step tutorial about programming a FastAPI example application. You practice installing FastAPI, building your first endpoints, adding path and query parameters, and validating endpoints using Pydantic.

Christopher covers updates to his Real Python video course about concurrency in Python. The course digs into what concurrency means in Python and why you might want to incorporate it in your code. He describes the different methods and demonstrates how to approach coding using threading, asyncio, and multiprocessing.

We also share several other articles and projects from the Python community, including a news roundup, the PSF fundraiser campaign for 2025, where Python stores attributes, performance hacks for faster Python code, a project to transform functions into a web interface, and a Python disk-backed cache.

Course Spotlight: Python Descriptors

Learn what Python descriptors are, how the descriptor protocol works, and when descriptors are useful, with practical, hands-on examples.

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How do you prepare your Python data science projects for production? What are the essential tools and techniques to make your code reproducible, organized, and testable? This week on the show, Khuyen Tran from CodeCut discusses her new book, “Production Ready Data Science.”

Khuyen shares how she got into blogging and what motivated her to write a book. She shares tips on how to create repeatable workflows. We delve into modern Python tools that will help you bring your projects to production.

Course Spotlight: Python Project Management With uv

Create and manage Python projects with uv, a blazing-fast package and project manager built in Rust. Learn setup, workflow, and best practices.

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What are techniques for writing maintainable Python code? How do you make your Python more readable and easier to refactor? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week, bringing another batch of PyCoder’s Weekly articles and projects.

We discuss a recent article about writing code that is easy to maintain. We cover writing comments, creating meaningful names, avoiding magic numbers, and preparing code for your future self.

We also share several other articles and projects from the Python community, including release news, modifying the REPL, differences between Polars and pandas, generating realistic test data in Python, investigating quasars with Polars and marimo, creating simple meta tags for Django objects, and a GUI toolkit for grids of buttons.

Course Spotlight: Modern Python Linting With Ruff

Ruff is a blazing-fast, modern Python linter with a simple interface that can replace Pylint, isort, and Black—and it’s rapidly becoming popular.

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How do you deploy your Python application without getting locked into an expensive cloud-based service? This week on the show, Michael Kennedy from the Talk Python podcast returns to discuss his new book, “Talk Python in Production.”

Michael runs multiple Python applications online, including a training site, blog, and two podcasts. While searching for the best solution for hosting his business, he documented his findings in a book. We talk about containerizing Python applications, generating static sites, preparing for traffic spikes, and avoiding cloud service lock-in.

Course Spotlight: Speed Up Python With Concurrency

Learn what concurrency means in Python and why you might want to use it. You’ll see a simple, non-concurrent approach and then look into why you’d want threading, asyncio, or multiprocessing.

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How does Python 3.14 perform under a few hand-crafted benchmarks? Does the performance of asyncio scale on the free-threaded build? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week, bringing another batch of PyCoder’s Weekly articles and projects.

At the top of the show, we have a mountain of release news and Python Enhancement Proposals to cover. Then, we dig into a couple of articles covering the performance of Python 3.14. The first is a benchmarking comparison of the last several Python versions and their variations, including JIT and free-threaded mode. The second explores the changes in 3.14 that enable asyncio to scale on CPython’s free-threaded build.

We also share several other articles and projects from the Python community, including an introduction to NiceGUI, a free-threaded Python library compatibility checker, an exploration of what is “good taste” in software engineering, HTML templating with t‑strings, and a tool for testing Sphinx docs instantly in the browser.

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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How is teaching young students Python changing with the advent of LLMs? This week on the show, Kelly Schuster-Paredes from the Teaching Python podcast joins us to discuss coding and AI in the classroom.

Kelly shares her current thoughts on teaching Python to young students. She stresses that the earliest classes still need to cover the fundamentals. We also discuss how coding instruction is evolving toward reading and reviewing code more than writing it.

Course Spotlight: Building a Python GUI Application With Tkinter

In this video course, you’ll learn the basics of GUI programming with Tkinter, the de facto Python GUI framework. Master GUI programming concepts such as widgets, geometry managers, and event handlers. Then, put it all together by building two applications: a temperature converter and a text editor.

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Python 3.14 is here! Christopher Trudeau returns to discuss the new version with Real Python team member Bartosz Zaczyński. This year, Bartosz coordinated the series of preview articles with members of the Real Python team and wrote the showcase tutorial, “Python 3.14: Cool New Features for You to Try.” Christopher’s video course, “What’s New in Python 3.14”, covers the topics from the article and shows the new features in action.

Christopher and Bartosz dug into the new release to create code examples showcasing the new features for the tutorial and course. We look at the enhanced and more colorful REPL experience, better error messages, safer hooks for live debugging, and deferred annotation evaluation. We also discuss template strings, Zstandard compression, and multiple performance improvements.

We share our thoughts on the updates and offer advice about incorporating them into your projects. We also discuss when you should start running Python 3.14.

Course Spotlight: What’s New in Python 3.14

Covers Python 3.14’s key changes: free-threading, subinterpreters, t-strings, lazy annotations, new REPL features, and improved error messages.

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What’s changed about learning Python over the last few years? What new techniques and updated advice should beginners have as they start their journey? This week on the show, Stephen Gruppetta and Martin Breuss return to discuss beginning to learn Python.

We share techniques for finding motivation, building projects, and learning the fundamentals. We provide advice on installing Python and not obsessing over finding the perfect editor. We also examine incorporating LLMs into learning to code and practicing asking good questions.

Stephen shares details about our upcoming eight-week live course, Python for Beginners: Code With Confidence. Check out realpython.com/live to learn more and reserve your spot.

Course Spotlight: 11 Beginner Tips for Learning Python

In this course, you’ll see several learning strategies and tips that will help you jumpstart your journey towards becoming a successful Python programmer.

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