python

Armin Ronacher's EuroPython 2017 keynote examining how the CPython interpreter's leaky abstractions affect language design and how Python could evolve, drawing on JavaScript and Rust experience.

Armin Ronacher, creator of Flask, explains how CPython's internals and C API leak into the language's semantics. Using examples like the complexity of the add operation, he shows why Python is hard to optimize or reimplement.

Raymond Hettinger's PyCon 2013 talk on transforming code into idiomatic Python through a series of before-and-after refactorings. It shows how to use iterators, dictionaries, named tuples and other language features well.

Larry Hastings explains what Python's GIL is, what problems it solves and how it works, and presents his Gilectomy project to remove it, including the performance and C-extension obstacles.

Brandt Bucher presents his prototype JIT compiler for CPython at the 2023 Core Developer Sprint. He explains the copy-and-patch approach, the implementation and its performance.

A PyData London 2018 talk on how JPMorgan scaled its Athena Python platform over ten years to about 35 million lines of code and thousands of developers. It covers infrastructure, tooling and culture for analytics and visualization at that scale.

James Powell's nearly two-hour PyData talk builds up Python's data model, decorators, generators and context managers, coding live in Vim. It aims to take intermediate programmers toward real Python expertise.

Brandon Rhodes' PyOhio 2014 talk on applying the Clean Architecture in Python. He shows how this high-level design pattern fits Python's features and addresses maintainability problems in large applications.

David Beazley's PyCon 2010 talk explains how the Python Global Interpreter Lock works and shows experiments where multithreaded code runs slower, even on more cores, due to lock contention and context-switching overhead.

Alex Martelli's Google Developers Day talk on classic design patterns (creational, structural and behavioral) and how they appear in Python. He stresses that patterns must be studied in the context of the implementing language.

Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2019 talk on the mental habits behind effective programming, drawn from coaching, teaching and StackOverflow. He covers problem decomposition, chunking, managing working memory and getting unstuck.

Tavis Rudd describes how RSI forced him to program by voice, and shows the Python and Emacs Lisp system he built with voice recognition. A live demo creates and deploys a small system without touching the keyboard.

David Schachter describes how he made a data-collection Python program run 114,000 times faster, drawing on decades of experience. The talk covers pipelining, cache effects and other optimization lessons.

Charlie Marsh of Astral explains how uv, a Rust Python package manager, got so fast. He covers allocators, concurrency, zero-copy tricks and the challenges of Python packaging.

A PyCon 2012 talk by Kurt Grandis on building an automated water-squirting turret that uses Python and computer vision to detect and drive off squirrels from a bird feeder.

Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2019 talk on the mental strategies he uses when programming in Python, such as chunking, solving a simpler related problem, and repeating tasks manually until patterns emerge. This version is re-synced with the slides.

David Beazley's PyCon India closing keynote, in which he live-codes a stack machine and grows it into an interpreter that runs WebAssembly, then uses it to play a Rust-written game. It requires no prior WebAssembly knowledge.

John Kitchin shows how Emacs org-mode with Python lets researchers combine narrative, math, figures and executable code in one document. It exports to LaTeX, HTML and PDF, and he used it for papers and e-books.

Python core developer Raymond Hettinger explains how Python's dictionary implementation evolved into the compact, ordered dict in Python 3.6. He uses pictures and small bits of pure Python, and covers key-sharing, compaction and versioning.

Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2017 keynote on concurrency in Python. It covers threads, processes, asyncio, locks and the GIL, with live shell-based examples.

Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2018 keynote on preventing, finding and fixing bugs under a time budget. He covers testing practice, type annotation tradeoffs and the limits of coverage metrics.

David Beazley's PyData Global 2021 keynote, an oral history of early scientific Python. He tells how Python ended up running on a Connection Machine supercomputer at Los Alamos.

Ned Batchelder's PyCon 2012 talk gives a quick overview of what Unicode is, then focuses on what a Python programmer needs to handle text correctly. It presents the 'Unicode sandwich' strategy: decode bytes at input, work with Unicode internally, encode at output.

Raymond Hettinger explains Python's dataclasses module, showing the problem it solves and its key design decisions. He places it in a progression from tuples and dicts through named tuples and attrs.

Anthony Scopatz presents xonsh at PyCon 2016, a shell that is a superset of Python combining the best features of bash, zsh and fish. It covers rich history, tab completion, and how the language compiles to a Python AST.

A PyCon 2012 talk by early YouTube engineer Mike Solomon on how YouTube scaled its architecture, which is mostly Python.

Jack Diederich's PyCon 2012 talk argues that classes are overused in Python and walks through real code, refactoring away unnecessary classes, exceptions and modules. It popularized the heuristic that a class with two methods, one being __init__, should be a function.

Robert Erdmann, a materials scientist at the Rijksmuseum, gives a PyCon keynote on the ultra-high-resolution imaging of Rembrandt's Night Watch. He covers the automated gantry camera system, the Python software that drives it, and the large volumes of image data involved.

Nathaniel J. Smith's PyCon 2018 talk introducing Trio, a Python concurrency library designed around usability and structured concurrency. He live-codes a problem and analyzes pitfalls in other async libraries.

Cory Benfield's PyCon 2016 talk on building protocol libraries that can be reused widely, using the Python Hyper HTTP project as the example. He argues for separating protocol parsing from I/O.

Felienne Hermans presents Hedy, a gradual programming language for teaching kids that moves through levels from almost no syntax toward full Python. The talk covers why error messages and syntax are scary for beginners.

A PyCon 2013 block of Friday evening lightning talks. It includes the debut of Hy, a Lisp dialect that compiles to Python AST, and Solomon Hykes's first public talk on Docker.

Hillel Wayne's PyCon 2018 talk on testing beyond pytest and mypy. It introduces property-based testing with the Hypothesis library and design-by-contract with dpcontracts, and shows how to combine them with an existing test suite.

Brian Warner, author of magic-wormhole, presents the tool at PyCon 2016. He explains how a few secret words let two computers securely transfer files, covering the cryptography (NaCl, SPAKE2) and library use.

K Lars Lohn's PyCon 2016 keynote weaves together music theory, programming, biking road trips and fractals. It is a personal, wide-ranging talk rather than a Python how-to.

Richard Feldman's GOTO Copenhagen 2022 talk on why dynamic languages like Python, Ruby, PHP and JavaScript rose in the 1990s and why each now has a popular static type checker. It argues that modern static typing recovers the advantages that made dynamic languages attractive.

Joel Grus's JupyterCon talk explaining why he dislikes Jupyter notebooks. He covers hidden state, trouble with reproducibility and testing, and how notebooks frustrate teaching. He shows his preferred workflow and what Jupyter could change.

Jake Vanderplas's PyCon 2016 talk shows how sampling-based methods such as simulation, shuffling and bootstrapping make statistics intuitive. His pitch is that if you can write a for-loop, you can do statistics.

Jim Weirich's RubyConf 2012 talk derives the Y combinator step by step, live-coding in Ruby lambdas. It builds up an understanding of functional programming and lambda calculus from first principles.

Sandi Metz takes an ugly section of conditional code and refactors it into a few simple objects, bridging object-oriented theory and practice. The talk includes her take on the Gilded Rose refactoring kata and the idea that duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction.