Episode 296: Managing Polars Schema Issues & Profiling GitHub Users

The Real Python Podcast

May 22, 2026 42m intermediate best-practices community data-science stdlib

How can you avoid schema problems in your Polars data pipeline when adding new columns? How can you quickly examine a GitHub user’s profile to decide how much to invest in their contributions? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week with another batch of PyCoder’s Weekly articles and projects.

Episode Sponsor:

Christopher shares a recent article about handling schema issues in Python Polars. The piece covers ways that a schema change can break your data pipeline. It provides strategies to avoid and resolve issues.

We cover a recent project from previous guest Eric Matthes to investigate GitHub profiles of a potential contributor. With the rise of AI-slop pull requests, the tool can provide valuable background on the user.

We also share other articles and projects from the Python community, including recent releases, exploring four different “get” special methods, what’s new in Pip 26.1, inverse Sapir-Whorf and programming languages, and a Python scripting framework for CAD.

This episode is sponsored by Six Feet Up.

Course Spotlight: Working With Python Polars

Welcome to the world of Polars, a powerful DataFrame library for Python. In this video course, you’ll get a hands-on introduction to Polars’ core features and see why this library is catching so much buzz.

Topics:

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:02:51 – Python 3.14.5 is out!
00:03:16 – Python 3.15.0 beta 1 is here!
00:03:34 – PyPy v7.3.22 Released
00:03:45 – Django Security Releases: 6.0.5 and 5.2.14
00:04:04 – 2026 Django Developers Survey
00:04:24 – PEP 797: Shared Object Proxies (Deferred to 3.16)
00:04:40 – PEP 828: Supporting ‘Yield From’ in Asynchronous Generators
00:05:59 – Do You Get It Now?
00:11:54 – Sponsor: Six Feet Up
00:12:47 – Handling Schema Issues in Polars
00:17:10 – What’s New in Pip 26.1
00:24:27 – Video Course Spotlight
00:25:39 – Inverse Sapir-Whorf and Programming Languages
00:34:04 – cadquery: CAD Scripting Framework
00:38:16 – gh-profiler: Examine a GH user’s profile
00:40:46 – Thanks and goodbye

News:

Topics:

Do You Get It Now? – Learn about Python’s .__getitem__(), .__getattr__(), .__getattribute__(), and .__get__(): how they’re different and where to use them.
Handling Schema Issues in Polars – You’ve got this great data pipeline going until one day it stops working. A schema error caused by a column upstream has stopped you in your tracks. This post talks about the four different causes of schema errors and what to do about them.
What’s New in Pip 26.1 – pip 26.1 adds support for dependency cooldowns, experimental support for reading/installing from standard lockfiles (pylock.toml), fixes several long-standing limitations of the 2020 resolver, and drops support for Python 3.9.
Inverse Sapir-Whorf and Programming Languages – The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the idea that the languages you speak influence the thoughts you can have. The inverse is the idea that your language limits what you can’t say. When applied to programming, this has subtle results determining core ideas like execution order.

Projects:

Additional Links:

Level Up Your Python Skills With These Courses:

Introduction to Git and GitHub for Python

Python Polars: A Lightning-Fast DataFrame Library

Working With Python Polars

Working With Missing Data in Polars

← Previous All Episodes