Python App Hosting Choices & Documenting Python's History

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Sep 12, 2025

Christopher Trudeau, a frequent contributor on Python topics, returns to discuss crucial choices for hosting Python applications. He compares platforms like Railway and Heroku, as well as free options such as Python Anywhere. Trudeau also shares insights on the recent Python documentary, spotlighting its historical significance and key moments in Python's evolution. Additionally, they dive into ways to optimize Python performance and explore exciting community projects like a music library manager and a color science tool, making it a rich conversation for developers.

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INSIGHT

Documentary Illuminates Python's Social History

The Python documentary focuses on the social history and key players behind Python's rise.
It highlights governance shifts like Guido stepping down and creation of the PSF and Steering Council.

ADVICE

Use Documentary And Course Together

Watch both the documentary and the Real Python course to get social and technical context.
Use the course to learn when language features appeared and the doc to learn who shaped Python.

INSIGHT

Regex Has Readability And Power Tools

Use regex verbose mode, named groups, and function-based replacements to make complex patterns maintainable.
These affordances improve readability and enable contextual substitutions per match.

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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.

Course Spotlight: A History of Python Versions and Features

Explore Python’s evolution from the 1990s to today with a brief history and demos of key features added throughout its lifetime.

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:

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:

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