What are the typical computer tasks you do manually every week? Could you automate those tasks with a Python script? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week, bringing another batch of PyCoder’s Weekly articles and projects.
We discuss a recent Hacker News thread about frequently used automation scripts. We share the kinds of tasks we’ve automated with Python in our work and personal lives.
Christopher shares a tutorial about building a micro-search engine from scratch using Python. The post takes you through coding the components of a crawler, index, and ranker. The finished engine is designed to search the posts of the blogs you follow.
We also share several other articles and projects from the Python community, including a news roundup, how a Polars query works under the hood, using Python for data analysis, understanding open-source licensing, summarizing the significant changes between Python versions, a robust TUI hex editor, and a lightweight dataframe library with a universal interface for data wrangling.
This week’s episode is brought to you by Intel.
Course Spotlight: Building Command Line Interfaces With argparse
In this step-by-step Python video course, you’ll learn how to take your command line Python scripts to the next level by adding a convenient command line interface that you can write with argparse.
Topics:
- 00:00:00 – Introduction
- 00:02:23 – uv: Python Packaging in Rust
- 00:02:43 – Rye Grows With uv
- 00:03:20 – Python 3.13.0 Alpha 4 Is Now Available
- 00:03:45 – A Bird’s Eye View of Polars
- 00:07:28 – Polars: Why We Have Rewritten the String Data Type
- 00:09:33 – A Search Engine in 80 Lines of Python
- 00:13:14 – Using Python for Data Analysis
- 00:18:22 – Sponsor: Intel
- 00:18:53 – Understanding Open Source Licensing
- 00:21:54 – Summary of Major Changes Between Python Versions
- 00:23:19 – What Python automation scripts do you reuse frequently at work?
- 00:34:21 – Video Course Spotlight
- 00:35:52 – hexabyte: A modern, modular, and robust TUI hex editor
- 00:39:56 – ibis: The Flexibility of Python With the Scale of Modern SQL
- 00:43:31 – Thanks and goodbye
News:
Show Links:
- A Bird’s Eye View of Polars – This post on the Polars blog introduces you to how Polars works, showing the steps from queries, plans, optimizations, and then the final execution.
- Polars: Why We Have Rewritten the String Data Type – A large refactor on the string data type is underway in Polars. This deep dive explains why and what is changing.
- A Search Engine in 80 Lines of Python – In this post Alex explains how he built a micro-search engine from scratch using Python. The resulting search engine is used to search in the posts of the blogs he follows.
- Using Python for Data Analysis – In this tutorial, you’ll learn the importance of having a structured data analysis workflow, and you’ll get the opportunity to practice using Python for data analysis while following a common workflow process.
- Understanding Open Source Licensing – This article discusses the importance of open-source licensing in software development and its implications for stakeholders.
- Summary of Major Changes Between Python Versions – This article is a quick reference covering the major changes introduced with each new version of Python. Can’t remember when the walrus operator was introduced? This is the place to look that up.
Discussion:
Projects
Additional Links:
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