Talk Python To Me

Let's say you want to create a web app and you know Python really well. Your first thought might be Flask or Django or even FastAPI? All good choices but there is a lot to get a full web app into production. The framework we'll talk about today, Reflex, allows you to just write Python code and it turns it into a full web app running FastAPI, NextJS, React and more plus it handles the deployment for you. It's a cool idea. Let's talk to Elvis Kahoro and Nikhil Rao from Reflex.dev.

Do you struggle to make sure your code is always correct before you check it in? What about your team members' code? That one person who never wants to run the linter? Tired of dealing with tons of conflicts and spurious git changes? You need git pre-commit hooks. We're lucky to have Stefanie Molin on this episode who has done a bunch of writing and teaching of git hooks.

Hynek has been writing and speaking on some of the most significant topics in the Python space and I've enjoyed his takes. So I invited him on the show to share them with all of us. This episode really epitomizes one of the reasons I launched Talk Python 9 years ago. It's as if we run into each other at a bar during a conference and I ask Hynek, "So what are your thoughts on ..." and we dive down the rabbit hole for an hour. I hope you enjoy it.

If you work in data science, you definitely know about data frame libraries. Pandas is certainly the most popular, but there are others such as cuDF, Modin, Polars, Dask, and more. They are all similar but definitely not the same APIs and Polars is quite different. But here's the problem. If you want to write a library that is for users of more than one of these data frame frameworks, how do you do that? Or if you want to leave open the possibility of changing yours after the app is built, same problem. That's the problem that Narwhals solves. We have Marco Gorelli on the show to tell us all about it.

You're about to launch your new app or API, or even just a big refactor of your current project. Will it stand up and deliver when you put it into production or when that big promotion goes live? Or will it wither and collapse? How would you know? Well you would test that of course. We have Anthony Shaw back on the podcast to dive into a wide range of tools and techniques for performance and loading testing of web apps.

Do you have kids? Maybe nieces and nephews? Or maybe you work in a school environment? Maybe it's just friend's who know you're a programmer and ask about how they should go about introducing programming concepts with them. Anna-Lena Popkes is back on the show to share her research on when and how to teach kids programming. We spend the second half of the episode talking about concrete apps and toys you might consider for each age group. Plus, some of these things are fun for adults too. ;)

Do you have text that you want to process automatically? Maybe you want to pull out key products or topics of conversation? Maybe you want to get the sentiment? The possibilities are many with this week's topic: NLP with spaCy and Python. Our guest, Vincent D. Warmerdam, has worked on spaCy and other tools at Explosion AI and he's here to give us his tips and tricks for working with text from Python.

A couple of weeks ago, Charlie Marsh and the folks at Astral made another big splash with a major release of uv called "uv: Unified Python packaging" which has many far reaching features. We had to have Charlie on the show to give us the inside look into this development. Let's get to it.

Every year the core developers meet to discuss and propose the major changes and trends in Python itself. This invite-only conference of about 50 people happens inside PyCon in the US. Because it's private, we rarely get detailed looks inside this event. On this episode, we have Seth Michael Larson here to give us his account of the sessions and proposals. It's a unique look into the zeitgeist of CPython.

Python performance has come a long way in recent times. And it's often the data scientists, with their computational algorithms and large quantities of data, who care the most about this form of performance. It's great to have Stan Seibert back on the show to talk about Python's performance for data scientists. We cover a wide range of tools and techniques that will be valuable for many Python developers and data scientists.

Do you feel like ADHD is holding you back? Maybe you don't personally have ADHD but you work with folks who do and you'd like to support them better. Either way, how ADHD interplays with programming and programmers is pretty fascinating. On this episode we have Chris Ferdinandi who himself has ADHD and has written a lot about it to share his journey and his advice for thriving with ADHD as a programmer or data scientist.

Flask is one of the most important Python web frameworks and powers a bunch of the internet. David Lord, Flask's lead maintainer is here to give us an update on the state of Flask and Pallets in 2024. If you care about where Flask is and where it's going, you'll definitely want to listen in.

If you want to get better at something, often times the path is pretty clear. If you get better at swimming, you go to the pool and practice your strokes and put in time doing the laps. If you want to get better at mountain biking, hit the trails and work on drills focusing on different aspects of riding. You can do the same for programming. Reuven Lerner is back on the podcast to talk about his book Pandas Workout. We dive into strategies for learning Pandas and Python as well as some of his workout exercises.

Python is special. It's used by the big tech companies but also by those you would rarely classify as developers. On this episode, we get a look inside how Python is being used at a Children's Hospital to speed and improve patient care. We have Dr. Somak Roy here to share how he's using Python in his day to day job to help kids get well a little bit faster.

Python is one of the most popular languages of the current era. It dominates data science, it an incredible choice for web development, and its many people's first language. But it's not super great on front-end programing, is it? Frameworks like React, Vue and other JavaScript frameworks rule the browser and few other languages even get a chance to play there. But with pyscript, which I've covered several times on this show, we have the possibility of Python on the front end. Yet it's not really a front end framework, just a runtime in the browser. That's why I'm excited to have Ken Kinder on the podcast to talk about his project PuePy, a reactive frontend framework in Python.