Starting With marimo Notebooks & Python App Config Management
The Real Python Podcast
Intro
This chapter explores how to create reusable Marimo notebooks for building interactive dashboards, covering installation steps, reactivity features, and environment management. It also discusses best practices for storing configuration files and addresses the limitations of traditional linear notebooks.
Looking for a guide on getting started with marimo notebooks? How do you build a reproducible notebook for sharing or create a dashboard with interactive UI elements? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week, bringing another batch of PyCoder’s Weekly articles and projects.
We cover a recent Real Python article by Ian Eyre about using narimo notebooks. The tutorial covers installing Marimo, taking advantage of reactivity, building interactive dashboards, and managing a notebook’s environment through sandboxing. The piece ends by examining the limitations of traditional linear notebooks and how Marimo addresses them.
Christopher discusses an article about how to store the configurations for your Python scripts and projects. Whether you’re managing resource handles to a database, deployment variables, or credentials to external services, you’ll need a way to save and load the details into your Python project. The piece compares saving configurations in several common file formats or through environment variables.
We also share several other articles and projects from the Python community, including a news roundup, the discourse between generative AI coding proponents and detractors, catching memory leaks with your test suite, epigrams on programming, a command line tool to check packages on PyPI, and a collection of string, file, and object utilities.
This episode is sponsored by Six Feet Up.
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Topics:
- 00:00:00 – Introduction
- 00:02:44 – Python Release 3.14.0b2
- 00:03:09 – Django security releases issued: 5.2.2, 5.1.10, and 4.2.22
- 00:03:27 – PyBay 2025
- 00:03:43 – PyCon NL 2025 - Call for Proposals
- 00:04:05 – Django Forum: Supporting t-strings
- 00:04:44 – Ruff Users: What Rules Are You Using and What Are You Ignoring?
- 00:05:19 – My Shot at Real Python
- 00:06:03 – My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts
- 00:10:06 – I Think I’m Done Thinking About genAI For Now
- 00:11:12 – AI Changes Everything
- 00:23:01 – Video Course Spotlight
- 00:24:14 – Configuration of Python Applications
- 00:29:15 – marimo: A Reactive, Reproducible Notebook
- 00:35:15 – Sponsor: Six Feet Up
- 00:36:02 – Catching memory leaks with your test suite
- 00:41:45 – Epigrams on Programming
- 00:46:54 – whatsonpypi: Check PyPI From the Command Line
- 00:48:18 – strif: String, File, and Object Utilities
- 00:49:44 – PyCoder’s Weekly - Submit a Link
- 00:50:13 – Thanks and goodbye
News:
- Python Release 3.14.0b2
- Django security releases issued: 5.2.2, 5.1.10, and 4.2.22
- PyBay 2025
- PyCon NL 2025 - Call for Proposals
- Django Forum: Supporting
t-strings - Ruff Users: What Rules Are You Using and What Are You Ignoring?
- My Shot at Real Python – Amanda has recently written her first article for Real Python and this post talks about her experience doing so. If you want to check out the article, it’s on Nested Loops.
Show Links:
- My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts
- I Think I’m Done Thinking About genAI For Now
- AI Changes Everything
- AI Blog Comparison - Armin Ronacher
- Configuration of Python Applications – This post talks about how to store configuration for your script and how and when to load the information into your program.
- marimo: A Reactive, Reproducible Notebook – Discover how marimo notebook simplifies coding with reactive updates, UI elements, and sandboxing for safe, sharable notebooks.
- Catching memory leaks with your test suite – “If you have a good test suite, you may be able to use
pytestfixtures to identify memory and other resource leaks.”
Discussion:
Projects:
Additional Links:
- Episode #238: Charlie Marsh: Accelerating Python Tooling With Ruff and uv
- Episode #250: DjangoCon Europe 2025: Live Recording From Dublin
- Episode #236: Simon Willison: Using LLMs for Python Development
- GenAI Criticism and Moral Quandaries - Armin Ronacher
- Math support in Markdown - The GitHub Blog
- Quiz: marimo: A Reactive, Reproducible Notebook
- Episode #42: What Is Data Engineering and Researching 10 Million Jupyter Notebooks
- We Downloaded 10,000,000 Jupyter Notebooks From Github – This Is What We Learned
- Episode #230: marimo: Reactive Notebooks and Deployable Web Apps in Python
- Episode #501 - marimo - Reactive Notebooks for Python - Talk Python To Me Podcast
- Episode #24: Options for Packaging Your Python Application: Wheels, Docker, and More - Itamar Turner-Trauring
- Episode #128: Using a Memory Profiler in Python & What It Can Teach You
- Episode #172: Measuring Multiple Facets of Python Performance With Scalene
- PyCoder’s Weekly - Submit a Link
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