The Real Python Podcast: It's Been a Year!

PyCon Speakers Shared Their Expertise

PyCon is an important hub for the Python community, so we absolutely had to bring you the experts who are sharing their expertise at this conference. Here are some of the speakers you heard from this past year:

• Kimberly Fessel discussed her excellent tutorial created for PyCon 2020 online, It’s Officially Legal so Let’s Scrape the Web. We discussed how to get started with web scraping and covered tools and techniques. Kimberly gave advice on how to find elements inside HTML and shared techniques for cleaning your data. She also got into recent changes to the legal landscape of scraping the web. To learn more, check out Episode 12: Web Scraping in Python: Tools, Techniques, and Legality.

• Łukasz Langa discussed his talk for PyCon 2020 online, AsyncIO + Music. In the talk, he showed live examples of coroutines, gathering, the event loop, and events being triggered to create a piece of music. We also talked about his role as the release manager for Python 3.8 and 3.9. Łukasz gave some background on the origins of his very popular, uncompromising code formatter, Black, and the types of problems it can solve in an organization. To learn more, check out Episode 7: AsyncIO + Music, Origins of Black, and Managing Python Releases.

• Hannah Stepanek discussed her talk at PyCon US 2019, Thinking Like a Panda: Everything You Need to Know to Use Pandas the Right Way. She shared techniques for getting more performance when you’re working with data in pandas. We also talked about her recent PyCon US 2020 online presentation, Let’s talk Databases in Python: SQLAlchemy and Alembic. To learn more, check out Episode 16: Thinking in Pandas: Python Data Analysis the Right Way.

Python Project Leads Gave You an Inside Look

Leaders in open source Python projects came on the show to give us the inside scoop. Here are some of the guests we had on:

• Armin Ronacher talked about the first ten years of Flask. Armin covered the origins of Flask and the components that make up the framework. He also discussed what goes into documenting a framework or API and talked about the community working on the ongoing development of Flask. To learn more, check out Episode 18: Ten Years of Flask: Conversation With Creator Armin Ronacher.

• Georgia Bullen and Sumana Harihareswara talked about pip. Sumana is the project manager for pip, and Georgia has been working on the package installer’s user experience. We talked about how you can help, from updating to the latest release to testing out the new resolver with your projects and answering surveys about your experiences. To learn more, check out Episode 29: Resolving Package Dependencies With the New Version of Pip.

• Russell Keith-Magee is the founder and maintainer of the BeeWare project. Russell talked about Briefcase, a tool that converts a Python application into native installers on macOS, Windows, Linux, and mobile devices. He also got into some of the intricacies of converting graphical user interface components from across multiple computing platforms. To learn more, check out Episode 22: Create Cross-Platform Python GUI Apps With BeeWare.

You Found the Next Step in Your Learning Journey

Real Python authors love to teach and love to write, so it’s only natural that they’ve published some thorough and reliable books to help you get over humps in your learning journey. Here are some of the authors who came on the podcast this past year:

• David Amos is a regular on the podcast, but he also took the time to discuss his book Python Basics: A Practical Introduction to Python 3. This book breaks down the core concepts you really need to know into bite-sized chunks. Step by step, you’ll master fundamental Python concepts that will help you get started on your journey to learn Python and level up from beginner to intermediate. To learn more, check out Episode 32: Our New “Python Basics” Book & Filling the Gaps in Your Learning Path.

• Anthony Shaw discussed his book CPython Internals: Your Guide to the Python 3 Interpreter. In CPython Internals, you’ll unlock the inner workings of the Python language, learn how to compile the Python interpreter from source code, and cover what you’ll need to know to confidently start contributing to CPython yourself! To learn more, check out Episode 11: Advice on Getting Started With Testing in Python.

• Dane Hillard discussed his book Practices of the Python Pro. He went into what it really takes to go from a hobbyist Python programmer to a real professional and what changes you need to make when you start writing code for others. To learn more, check out Episode 49: The Challenges of Developing Into a Python Professional.

You Took a Guided Tour of Learning Resources

Every two weeks, Chris Bailey and David Amos have taken you on a deep dive into Python tutorials that have been published at Real Python and elsewhere so you can stay up to speed on what’s happening in the world of Python.

Thanks to a question from a listener, we also started featuring Python projects that are great models for you to study and learn from so you can use best practices in your own projects. Now, at the end of every second episode after Episode 15: Python Regular Expressions, Views vs Copies in Pandas, and More, we share projects for you to study and learn from.

Here are some of the projects we’ve featured:

• ERPNext: A free and open source alternative to SAP
• Colorpedia: A command-line tool for looking up colors, shades and palettes
• Django Unicorn: A magical full-stack framework for Django
• Jupylet: A Python library for programming 2D and 3D games, graphics, music, and sound synthesizers
• Nikola: A static website and blog generator
• toolz: A functional standard library for Python
• Evennia: An online multiplayer text-based game framework
• Sorting-Algorithms-Visualizer: A program made with Pygame to show how sorting algorithms work
• Python-Adventure: The original Colossal Cave Adventure game, but in Python 3
• clifford: A numerical geometric algebra package for Python
• Pippi: A library of computer music modules for Python
• SDV: A synthetic data generator for tabular, relational, and time series data
• SkyAR: A tool for dynamic sky replacement and harmonization in videos
• Google Research Football: A reinforcement learning environment where agents learn to play football
• zxcvbn-python: Dropbox’s realistic password strength estimator
• Manim: An animation engine for explanatory math videos

What’s Next?

Conferences season is almost upon us! We’ll be attending some (virtual) conferences and will be bringing you the latest news from PyCon US, PyCascades, and the Python Web Conference. If you can’t attend those conferences yourself, then stay tuned to the podcast for the next best thing.

We’re going to keep bringing you:

• Interviews with Python experts
• Practical tips to help you learn effectively and efficiently
• An inside look into what’s happening in the Python community

If there’s anything you’d like us to cover on the podcast, then let us know! We love it when listeners tell us that they’d like to learn more about security, hear more from Python teachers, or anything else that will help you keep leveling up your Python.

Happy Pythoning!