Python Bytes cover art

Python Bytes

Python Bytes

By: Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken
Listen for free

About this listen

 Python Bytes is a weekly podcast hosted by Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken. The show is a short discussion on the headlines and noteworthy news in the Python, developer, and data science space.Copyright 2016-2025 Politics & Government
Episodes
  • #456 You're so wrong

    #456 You're so wrong
    Nov 3 2025
    Topics covered in this episode: The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant programA Binary Serializer for Pydantic ModelsT-strings: Python's Fifth String Formatting Technique?CronboardExtrasJokeWatch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us! Support our work through: Our courses at Talk Python TrainingThe Complete pytest CoursePatreon Supporters Connect with the hosts Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky)Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org / @brianokken.bsky.socialShow: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky) Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am 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 Brian #1: The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program Related post from Simon WillisonARS Technica: Python plan to boost software security foiled by Trump admin’s anti-DEI rulesThe Register: Python Foundation goes ride or DEI, rejects government grant with strings attachedIn Jan 2025, the PSF submitted a proposal for a US NSF grant under the Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open Source Ecosystems program. After months of work by the PSF, the proposal was recommended for funding.If the PSF accepted it, however, they would need to agree to the some terms and conditions, including, affirming that the PSF doesn't support diversity. The restriction wouldn't just be around the security work, but around all activity of the PSF as a whole. And further, that any deemed violation would give the NSF the right to ask for the money back.That just won't work, as the PSF would have already spent the money.The PSF mission statement includes "The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers." The money would have obviously been very valuable, but the restrictions are just too unacceptable.The PSF withdrew the proposal. This couldn't have been an easy decision, that was a lot of money, but I think the PSF did the right thing. Michael #2: A Binary Serializer for Pydantic Models 7× Smaller Than JSONA compact binary serializer for Pydantic models that dramatically reduces RAM usage compared to JSON.The library is designed for high-load systems (e.g., Redis caching), where millions of models are stored in memory and every byte matters.It serializes Pydantic models into a minimal binary format and deserializes them back with zero extra metadata overhead.Target Audience: This project is intended for developers working with: high-load APIsin-memory caches (Redis, Memcached)message queuescost-sensitive environments where object size matters Brian #3: T-strings: Python's Fifth String Formatting Technique? Trey HunnerPython 3.14 has t-strings. How do they fit in with the rest of the string story?History percent-style (%) strings - been around for a very long timestring.Template - and t.substitute() - from Python 2.4, but I don’t think I’ve ever used thembracket variables and .format() - Since Python 2.6f-strings - Python 3.6 - Now I feel old. These still seem new to met-strings - Python 3.14, but a totally different beast. These don’t return strings.Trey then covers a problem with f-strings in that the substitution happens at definition time.t-strings have substitution happen later. this is essentially “lazy string interpolation”This still takes a bit to get your head around, but I appreciate Trey taking a whack at the explanation. Michael #4: Cronboard Cronboard is a terminal application that allows you to manage and schedule cronjobs on local and remote servers.With Cronboard, you can easily add, edit, and delete cronjobs, as well as view their status.✨ Features ✔️ Check cron jobs✔️ Create cron jobs with validation and human-readable feedback✔️ Pause and resume cron jobs✔️ Edit existing cron jobs✔️ Delete cron jobs✔️ View formatted last and next run times✔️ Accepts special expressions like @daily, @yearly, @monthly, etc.✔️ Connect to servers using SSH, using password or SSH keys✔️ Choose another user to manage cron jobs if you have the permissions to do so (sudo) Extras Brian: PEP 810: Explicit lazy imports, has been unanimously accepted by steering councilLean TDD book will be written in the open. TOC, some details, and a 10 page introduction are now available. Hoping for the first pass to be complete by the end of the year. I’d love feedback to help make it a great book, and keep it small-ish, on a very limited budget. Joke: You are so wrong!
    Show More Show Less
    26 mins
  • #455 Gilded Python and Beyond

    #455 Gilded Python and Beyond
    Oct 27 2025
    Topics covered in this episode: Cyclopts: A CLI library* The future of Python web services looks GIL-free** Free-threaded GC** Polite lazy imports for Python package maintainers*ExtrasJokeWatch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us! Support our work through: Our courses at Talk Python TrainingThe Complete pytest CoursePatreon Supporters Connect with the hosts Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky)Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org / @brianokken.bsky.socialShow: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky) Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am 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: Cyclopts: A CLI library A CLI library that fixes 13 annoying issues in TyperMuch of Cyclopts was inspired by the excellent Typer library.Despite its popularity, Typer has some traits that I (and others) find less than ideal. Part of this stems from Typer's age, with its first release in late 2019, soon after Python 3.8's release. Because of this, most of its API was initially designed around assigning proxy default values to function parameters. This made the decorated command functions difficult to use outside of Typer. With the introduction of Annotated in python3.9, type-hints were able to be directly annotated, allowing for the removal of these proxy defaults.The 13: Argument vs OptionPositional or Keyword ArgumentsChoicesDefault CommandDocstring ParsingDecorator ParenthesesOptional ListsKeyword Multiple ValuesFlag NegationHelp DefaultsValidationUnion/Optional SupportAdding a Version FlagDocumentation Brian #2: The future of Python web services looks GIL-free Giovanni Barillari“Python 3.14 was released at the beginning of the month. This release was particularly interesting to me because of the improvements on the "free-threaded" variant of the interpreter. Specifically, the two major changes when compared to the free-threaded variant of Python 3.13 are: Free-threaded support now reached phase II, meaning it's no longer considered experimentalThe implementation is now completed, meaning that the workarounds introduced in Python 3.13 to make code sound without the GIL are now gone, and the free-threaded implementation now uses the adaptive interpreter as the GIL enabled variant. These facts, plus additional optimizations make the performance penalty now way better, moving from a 35% penalty to a 5-10% difference.”Lots of benchmark data, both ASGI and WSGILots of great thoughts in the “Final Thoughts” section, including “On asynchronous protocols like ASGI, despite the fact the concurrency model doesn't change that much – we shift from one event loop per process, to one event loop per thread – just the fact we no longer need to scale memory allocations just to use more CPU is a massive improvement. ”“… for everybody out there coding a web application in Python: simplifying the concurrency paradigms and the deployment process of such applications is a good thing.”“… to me the future of Python web services looks GIL-free.” Michael #3: Free-threaded GC The free-threaded build of Python uses a different garbage collector implementation than the default GIL-enabled build.The Default GC: In the standard CPython build, every object that supports garbage collection (like lists or dictionaries) is part of a per-interpreter, doubly-linked list. The list pointers are contained in a PyGC_Head structure.The Free-Threaded GC: Takes a different approach. It scraps the PyGC_Head structure and the linked list entirely. Instead, it allocates these objects from a special memory heap managed by the "mimalloc" library. This allows the GC to find and iterate over all collectible objects using mimalloc's data structures, without needing to link them together manually.The free-threaded GC does NOT support "generations”By marking all objects reachable from these known roots, we can identify a large set of objects that are definitely alive and exclude them from the more expensive cycle-finding part of the GC process.Overall speedup of the free-threaded GC collection is between 2 and 12 times faster than the 3.13 version. Brian #4: Polite lazy imports for Python package maintainers Will McGugan commented on a LI post by Bob Belderbos regarding lazy importing“I'm excited about this PEP. I wrote a lazy loading mechanism for Textual's widgets. Without it, the entire widget library would be imported even if you needed just one widget. Having this as a core language feature would make me very happy.” https://github.com/Textualize/textual/blob/main/src/textual/widgets/__init__.pyWell, I was excited about Will’s example for how to, essentially, allow users of your package to import only the part they need, when they need it.So...
    Show More Show Less
    39 mins
  • #454 It's some form of Elvish

    #454 It's some form of Elvish
    Oct 20 2025
    Topics covered in this episode: djrest2 - A small and simple REST library for Django based on class-based views.Github CLIcaniscrape - Know before you scrape. Analyze any website's anti-bot protections in seconds.🐴 GittyUpExtrasJokeWatch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us! Support our work through: Our courses at Talk Python TrainingThe Complete pytest CoursePatreon Supporters Connect with the hosts Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky)Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org / @brianokken.bsky.socialShow: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky) Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am 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: djrest2 - A small and simple REST library for Django based on class-based views. Emma LevitBased on an interesting blog post Why, in 2025, do we still need a 3rd party app to write a REST API with Django?As opposed to using DRF or Django Ninja - Michael #2: Github CLI GitHub’s official command line toolFeatures Checking out a pull request locallyYou can clone any repository using OWNER/REPO syntax: gh repo clone cli/cliCreate a pull request interactively: gh pr createSee all at cli.github.com/manual/examples Brian #3: caniscrape - Know before you scrape. Analyze any website's anti-bot protections in seconds. reddit announcement and discussioncaniscrape checks a website for common anti-bot mechanisms and reports: A difficulty score (0–10)Which protections are active (e.g., Cloudflare, Akamai, hCaptcha, etc.)What tools you’ll likely need (headless browsers, proxies, CAPTCHA solvers, etc.)Whether using a scraping API might be better This helps you decide the right scraping approach before you waste time building a bot that keeps getting blocked. Michael #4: 🐴 GittyUp Never forget to pull again: Automatically discover and update all your Git repositories with one command.Built initially to solve this problemRebuilt and published last week as part of my upcoming Agentic AI Programming for Python course. Get notified this week at training.talkpython.fm/getnotifiedUpdate everything in a folder tree with gittyupReview changes, blockers, etc with gittyup --explain Extras Brian: Three times faster with lazy imports - Hugo van KemenadeInteresting discussion on Hugo’s post - on MastodonUse lazy module imports now - Graham DumpletonGraham’s post uses wrapt, a “module for decorators, wrappers and monkey patching”, to simulate lazy importsHelpful comment from Adam Johnson on Graham’s post to actually do the import during type checking using if TYPE_CHECKING: import ... Michael: uvloop is back!pypi+ listened. :) https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/1o9dey5/i_just_released_pypipluscom_20_offlineready/Feedback from my “Show me your ls” post. Joke: Some form of Elvish
    Show More Show Less
    29 mins
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.