Talk Python To Me

The world of AI is changing fast. And the AI / ML space is a bit out of the ordinary for software developers. Typically in software, we can prove that given a certain situations, the code will always behave the same. We can point to where and why a decision is made.

ML isn't like that. We set it up and then it takes on a life of its own.

Do we talk about running Python in production enough? I can tell you that the Talk Python infrastructure (courses, podcasts, APIs, etc.) get a fair amount of traffic, but they look nothing like what Google, or Instagram, or insert [BIG TECH NAME] here's deployments do. Yet, mostly, we hear about interesting feats of engineering at massive scale that is impressive but often is also outside of the world most Python devs need for their companies and services.

Two frameworks that have taken the Python world by storm are FastAPI and Pydantic. Once you already have your data exchange modeled in Pydantic, you might want to use that code for storing it in the database. And, if you have DB models you might want to somehow use them to power and document the APIs built with FastAPI.

But the popular ORMs, such as SQLAlchemy and others, far predate Pydantic. But could they be put together?

When you think about the power of Python, the clean language or powerful standard library may come to mind. You might certainly point to the external packages too. But what about the relative ease of picking up new libraries or even parts of the standard library? Documentation plays an important role there. And the tools in the Python space for building solid documentation and even publishing articles and books involving live code are huge assets.