Platform Week and Some Fun New Python Tools

I’m back with a few new Talk Python To Me episodes that are pretty awesome, a couple of excellent tools, and a short summary of Platform Week at Talk Python.

Since we last spoke, I released a few really fun and inspiring. Ian Maurer and I talked about his work building GPT actions with FastAPI and Pydantic and how it relates back to his cancer research. Charles Coggins and I riffed on supply chain issues and Python from a security researcher’s perspective. While I have been a holdout on the serverless world, I learned a lot from Tony Sherman talking about Serverless Python in 2024. And finally, I marveled at Fred’s work to build a full Python-based SaaS with paying customers completely using ChatGPT and AI.

I hope some of those episodes are as interesting to you as they were to me.

I’ve come across some excellent tools and articles I’d like to share with you as well.

I’m really impressed with CloudFlare’s Python-based web workers. I don’t use CloudFlare (I use Bunny.net) but the idea of pushing some of your compute all the way to the PoPs (points of presence) on a modern CDN and run pure Python within a millisecond of your users is pretty awesome.

Cecil, Brian, and I recently finished our VS Code AMA. We were honored to be joined by Luciana and Karthik from the VS Code team too. I learned a lot about VS Code and if you used it yourselves, you should check out the video. And if you like that, also Brian and Cecil’s course at Talk Python. Best comment (live and post) goes to Mr Magnetic: We all know the power button is the best way to close VIM.

If you, like me, lean more towards the PyCharm side of things, you really should check out their new local LLM for coding assistance. Paul posted a 3 minute video that shows it all. It’s really quite impressive and privacy-preserving.

Platform Week. <– Yeah, that’s a term I made up, but it’s awesome.

If you find yourself juggling many responsibilities as I do, you probably find you get pulled away from all the big and important initiatives before you can make much headway. So a month ago, I scheduled what I called “Platform Week”. It was a week I blocked on the calendar, took no meetings, answered all the pending emails in my inbox, and even parked the motorcycle and just worked on deep software problems at Talk Python. Loren, the talented guy working on our mobile apps, also unwittingly joined.

It was a massive success. While there are two of the biggest and most important additions still pending, I was able to knock out 15 bugs and features (mostly for Talk Python Training but also for the podcasts). 15 closed GitHub issues in one week is a big deal in my book. Some of these have been on the back burner for almost 5 years and I was finally able to tackle them during Platform Week. Loren also fixed a couple of issues in the mobile apps.

Over the week, Talk Python Training deployed 45 new versions of the website and we survived the harrowing experience of getting the mobile app through Apple’s AppStore review. I’ll write more about this in a different venue for those who are interested and want to know more.

As always, if you or your team is looking to level up your Python, check out our over 250 hours of courses at Talk Python.

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