The Real Python Podcast

Christopher Trudeau, a Python educator and developer, joins Bartosz Zaczyński, a Python educator and technical writer, to explore Python 3.15’s upcoming features. They cover sentinel values, lazy imports, unpacking in comprehensions, frozendict, mathematical upgrades, and the Tachyon sampling profiler. They also discuss terminal improvements, free threading, the JIT, and when to upgrade.

Meagen Voss, Wagtail’s community manager, and Thibaud Colas, a core contributor shaping its technical direction, explore AI’s impact on open source. They discuss the surge of AI-assisted pull requests, responsible contribution policies, model transparency, environmental costs, and measuring real productivity. They also reveal Wagtail’s human-centered AI features, agent-ready 8.0 release, and renewed interest in the independent web.

Christopher Trudeau, a Python developer, educator, and technical course creator, joins the conversation on Django’s 2026 survey trends and how developers are using AI. They explore reproducible Python builds, PyPI security, CPython infrastructure, and the GIL debate. Also covered: Polars versus SQL, secure Django unsubscribe links, Pydantic physical units, and a tool that rewrites if chains as match statements.

Den Odell, a staff web engineer, author, and performance specialist with 25 years of experience, explores how to make software fast by default. They discuss performance budgets, profiling across the stack, library and architecture trade-offs, end-user pain points, CI safeguards, and whether AI-generated code performs well. They also look at Python, WebAssembly, and Den’s return to synthesizers.

Christopher Trudeau, software developer and curator of PyCoder's Weekly, returns to highlight Python news and projects. He compares complicated versus complex systems and practical patterns for tackling them. He explores repeatable data science pipelines, including DataFrame validation with pointblank and using configuration (Hydra) to avoid hardcoded paths. Other tools and community releases are also discussed.

Calvin Hendryx-Parker, AI practitioner and speaker on agentic AI orchestration, explains why large-context workflows lead to silent failures. He highlights context management, deterministic chunking and embeddings, audit trails and hooks. He also talks about stripping noisy file formats, spawning subagents with clean contexts, and using evals and CI to catch model drift.

Christopher Trudeau, curator of PyCoder’s Weekly and Python community commentator, returns to discuss recent NumPy and CPython performance work. He highlights how removing the GIL was not enough and how profiling uncovered hidden bottlenecks preventing NumPy from scaling on free-threaded Python. Other short topics include SIMD-in-Python experiments and Django and PyPI news.

Brett Kennedy, author and applied ML practitioner who builds real-world LLM systems, explains DSPy and programmatic prompting. He describes declarative signatures, optimizers that search and tune prompts, and moving from brittle manual prompts to higher-level prompt programming. He also covers RAG workflows, evaluation with judge models, and practical patterns for production LLM apps.

Christopher Trudeau, Python educator and Real Python contributor who curates PyCoder's Weekly, returns to highlight articles, projects, and a video course on built-in functions. They debate whether you must know an entire codebase and when partial understanding is realistic. Discussions cover Python 3.15 news, replacing long if-else chains, Django F expressions, a fast JSON option for Django, and useful cheat sheets.

Ayan Pahwa, developer advocate at Zyte and builder of scraping tools and LLM harnesses. He discusses creating a compact Scrapy extension and scalable scraping with Zyte. He walks through his homelab self-hosting setup. He explains harness design, moving from prompt to loop engineering, and running local/edge models.