Principles for Considering Your Python Tooling

What are the principles you should consider when making decisions about which Python tools to use? What anti-patterns get in the way of making the right choices for your team? 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 effective Python developer tooling. Instead of digging into a list of current libraries, we talk about the principles you must consider before making decisions for your team. We cover common pitfalls teams get mired in and how to avoid them.

We also share several other articles and projects from the Python community, including a news roundup, a huge collection of the top Python libraries of 2024, programming sockets in Python, merging dictionaries, a Django quiz, mistakes to avoid in production, building a Portal sentry turret, a powerful TUI expense tracker, and a pure-Python async rendering engine.

Topics:

• 00:00:00 – Introduction
• 00:01:53 – DjangoCon US 2025 (Chicago, Sept 8-12) Announced
• 00:02:38 – Textualize 1.0 Released
• 00:03:15 – Top Python Libraries of 2024
• 00:07:07 – Programming Sockets in Python
• 00:11:56 – Merging Dictionaries in Python
• 00:17:03 – Django Quiz 2024
• 00:17:55 – Confessions of a Django Dev: Mistakes To Avoid in Production
• 00:18:40 – Sentry Turret Straight Out of the ‘Portal’ Franchise
• 00:20:00 – Video Course Spotlight
• 00:21:26 – Effective Python Developer Tooling in December 2024
• 00:41:13 – Bagels: Powerful TUI Expense Tracker
• 00:43:42 – htmy: Async, Pure-Python Rendering Engine
• 00:45:41 – Thanks and goodbye

News:

• DjangoCon US 2025 (Chicago, Sept 8-12) Announced
• Textualize 1.0 Released

Show Links:

• Top Python Libraries of 2024 – For the past ten years, Tyrolabs has put together a list of their favorite Python libraries of the year. This list includes ten general purpose libraries and ten more specific to AI/ML and Data.
• Programming Sockets in Python – In this in-depth video course, you’ll learn how to build a socket server and client with Python. By the end, you’ll understand how to use the main functions and methods in Python’s socket module to write your own networked client-server applications.
• Merging Dictionaries in Python – There are multiple ways of merging two or more dictionaries in Python. This post teaches you how to do it and how to deal with corner cases like duplicate keys.
• Django Quiz 2024 – Adam runs a quiz on Django at his Django London meetup. He’s shared it so you can try it yourself. Test how much you know about your favorite web framework.
• Confessions of a Django Dev: Mistakes To Avoid in Production – This post covers some of the common mistakes you might make when taking a Django project into production.
• Sentry Turret Straight Out of the ‘Portal’ Franchise – “Reckless_commenter has created a Raspberry Pi-powered sentry turret that looks and sounds just like the creepy machines found in the ‘Portal’ franchise.” Logic and sound effects managed through the PyGame library.

Discussion:

• Effective Python Developer Tooling in December 2024 – This post talks about how tooling doesn’t solve all your problems when you code, especially with a team. It outlines some principles to implement, and bad practices to avoid when writing Python.
• Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases - Sean Goedecke

Projects:

• Bagels: Powerful TUI Expense Tracker
• htmy: Async, Pure-Python Rendering Engine

Additional Links:

• Episode #97: Improving Your Django and Python Developer Experience
• Deployment checklist - Django documentation
• Portal (video game) - Wikipedia
• PyCoder’s Weekly - Have a Project You Want to Share? - Submit a Link

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