Exploring the Python Documentary and Its Historical Significance

What are your options for hosting your Python application or scripts? What are the advantages of a platform as a service, container-based hosts, or setting up a virtual machine? 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 hosting Python applications. The piece digs into the differences between using containers or platform-provided tools to automatically configure your project. We also cover an older article listing several free hosting options for smaller projects or Python scripts.

The Python documentary premiered this past week, and we provide a synopsis and our thoughts. Following a similar theme, we cover our recent code conversation video course, which explores the history of Python versions and the features added across the releases.

We also share several other articles and projects from the Python community, including a news roundup, regex affordances, four different ways to speed up your code, a Python-based music library manager, a tool to visualize the structure of your data in Python, and a project for exploring color science in Python.

This episode is sponsored by InfluxData.

Topics:

• 00:00:00 – Introduction
• 00:03:02 – PEP 728: TypedDict With Typed Extra Items
• 00:04:09 – Django security releases issued: 5.2.6, 5.1.12, and 4.2.24
• 00:04:37 – Python Type System and Tooling Survey 2025
• 00:04:56 – Python: The Documentary - An Origin Story
• 00:14:11 – A History of Python Versions and Features
• 00:16:58 – Sponsor: InfluxData
• 00:17:48 – Regex Affordances
• 00:21:34 – Where to Host Your Python App
• 00:26:48 – Best hosting platforms for Python applications and Python scripts
• 00:30:18 – Video Course Spotlight
• 00:31:59 – 330× Faster: Four Different Ways to Speed Up Your Code
• 00:37:18 – beets: Music Library Manager
• 00:39:12 – Memory Graph - GitHub
• 00:40:49 – colour: Colour Science for Python
• 00:42:35 – Thanks and goodbye

News:

• PEP 728: TypedDict With Typed Extra Items (Accepted)
• Django security releases issued: 5.2.6, 5.1.12, and 4.2.24
• Python Type System and Tooling Survey 2025

Show Links:

• Python: The Documentary - An Origin Story - YouTube – “This is the story of the world’s most beloved programming language: Python. What began as a side project in Amsterdam during the 1990s became the software powering artificial intelligence, data science and some of the world’s biggest companies.”
• A History of Python Versions and Features – Video Course
• Regex Affordances – A tour of some real code showing little-used power features of the Python regular expression module, including verbose regex syntax, calling re.sub() with a function reference, and more.
• Where to Host Your Python App – Whether it’s Django, Flask, FastAPI, or some other Python web framework, your hosting options are plenty. This guide will show you how to choose.
• Best hosting platforms for Python applications and Python scripts
• 330× Faster: Four Different Ways to Speed Up Your Code – There are many approaches to speeding up Python code; applying multiple approaches can make your code even faster. This post talks about four different ways you can achieve speed-up.

Projects:

• beets: Music Library Manager
• Memory Graph - GitHub
• colour: Colour Science for Python

Additional Links:

• What’s in which Python - Ned Batchelder
• Anvil
• Opalstack: Managed Hosting

Level up your Python skills with our expert-led courses:

• Handling Missing Keys With the Python defaultdict Type
• Using Structural Pattern Matching in Python
• A History of Python Versions and Features

Support the podcast & join our community of Pythonistas