How does a debugger work? What can you learn about Python by building one from scratch? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week, bringing another batch of PyCoder’s Weekly articles and projects.

Christopher shares a two-part tutorial on building a debugger in Python? Creating a simple one requires less code than you might think.

We also talk about an article from Itamar Turner-Trauring about how to prepare for the upcoming changes to NumPy. The new version is not backward compatible and will require some inspection of your project dependencies. Itamar includes advice, techniques, and tools for updating your code.

We also share several other articles and projects from the Python community, including a couple of news items, a discussion about managing advice as a new developer, moving to Python as a former R developer, building a Markov chain to generate readable nonsense, optimizing fonts to individual glyphs on your website, and a project for working with units of measurement in Python.

This week’s episode is brought to you by Posit Connect.

Course Spotlight: Create a Tic-Tac-Toe Python Game Engine With an AI Player

In this video course, you’ll create a universal game engine in Python for tic-tac-toe with two computer players, one of which will be an AI player using the powerful minimax algorithm. You’ll give your game library a text-based graphical interface and explore two front ends.

Topics:

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:02:18 – DjangoCon Europe 2024 CFP Now Open
00:02:38 – Python Insider: Python 3.13.0 alpha 3 is now available
00:03:04 – NumPy 2 Is Coming: Preventing Breakage, Updating Your Code
00:07:37 – Using a Markov Chain to Generate Readable Nonsense
00:12:53 – Sponsor: Posit Connect
00:13:43 – Python Rgonomics
00:20:10 – Let’s Create a Python Debugger Together
00:23:49 – Video Course Spotlight
00:25:08 – Advice for New Devs Who’ve Read Other Advice Essays
00:42:44 – Fontimize: Optimize Fonts to the Glyphs on Your Site
00:44:57 – Pint: Units for Python
00:46:55 – Thanks and Goodbye

News:

Show Links:

NumPy 2 Is Coming: Preventing Breakage, Updating Your Code – NumPy 2 is coming, and it’s backwards incompatible. Learn how to keep your code from breaking, and how to upgrade.
Using a Markov Chain to Generate Readable Nonsense – Describes a simple Markov chain algorithm to generate reasonable-sounding but utterly nonsensical text, and presents some example outputs as well as a Python implementation in only 20 lines of code.
Python Rgonomics – If you’re coming to Python from R, this article outlines some libraries that have an R-like feel, helping you make the transition to Pythonic workflows.
Let’s Create a Python Debugger Together – Ever wondered how a debugger works? Implementing a simple one requires less code than you might think. Read on to find out how.

Discussion:

Advice for New Devs Who’ve Read Other Advice Essays – After reading some programming advice posts, this author decided a lot of them concentrated on the wrong things. Here is his own take.
Associated Hacker News Discussion

Projects:

Additional Links:

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