Python Weekly (Issue 688 February 27 2025)

Author

Rahul Chaudhary
February 27, 2025

Welcome to issue 688 of Python Weekly. We have a packed issue this week. Enjoy it!

The #1 AI Meeting Assistant

  • Summarize 1-hour meetings into one-page recaps

  • Say goodbye to post-meeting data entry

  • Claim 30 days of unlimited AI notes today

News

SciPy 2025, held in Tacoma, WA, is accepting proposals for talks, tutorials, and posters until February 26th, focusing on scientific computing with Python.

DjangoCon Africa 2025 is seeking proposals from speakers of all backgrounds to share their knowledge and perspectives on Django, Python, and related technologies.

Articles, Tutorials and Talks

This video demonstrates how to use uv, a modern Python tool, to transform a simple script into a production-ready application with an optimal project structure. It guides viewers through creating a well-organized FastAPI project, leveraging advanced packaging features like dependency groups, resulting in a scalable and easily shareable codebase.

This article advocates using Parquet files, paired with the Polars library in Python, as an efficient and portable alternative to vector databases for storing and querying text embeddings in smaller projects. It demonstrates how this approach enables fast similarity searches and metadata filtering, outperforming traditional methods like CSV files and offering a balance between simplicity and performance.

What makes a good API for a library? How can you design an API that is delightful to use? This post walks through the principles of what goes into user-centered design and how best to apply those principles when writing a Python library for fellow developers.

In this video, Sentdex offers tips and tricks for building with modern LLM agents, using OpenHands as an example but applicable to other web-based UIs and agents. It covers practical advice for leveraging LLMs effectively, with resources including the OpenHands GitHub repository, a neural networks book, and community channels for support and discussion.

A guide for Python programmers who want to dive into GPU programming with CUDA.

The article explores UV, a fast and reliable Python packaging tool that simplifies dependency management and installation. While it has some hurdles for legacy projects and corporate environments, the author sees it as a strong alternative to pip and venv, recommending it for most users

The author discusses SPy, a Python-like language that compiles to native binaries or WebAssembly, aiming for performance improvements over Pyodide and MicroPython in web-based applications. A generative art demo using SPy achieved over 100x speedup compared to its original PyScript implementation, showcasing SPy's potential for demanding computations in the browser.

This post introduces Notebook Intelligence (NBI), an AI coding assistant framework for JupyterLab, and demonstrates how to build AI Agents using NBI's tool-calling capabilities with examples of tools for geo-coordinate lookup, map generation, notebook creation, and sharing. It provides a guide for developers to integrate custom AI-powered functionalities into JupyterLab's Copilot Chat.

Programmatically create an F1 race analysis table using the FastF1 API, the Great Tables library, and Polars.

The article explains how to create a Django Admin bookmarklet that pre-fills form fields when adding new items, like bookmarks, using a web page's URL, title, and selected text. It walks through setting up the JavaScript snippet, customizing it for your Django app, and adding it as a browser bookmark for quick data entry.

This article introduces Flask-SQLAlchemy, a Flask extension simplifying database management by integrating SQLAlchemy with Flask applications. It explains SQLAlchemy's core components (Core and ORM) and demonstrates how Flask-SQLAlchemy streamlines configuration, session management, and querying in Flask-based projects with a practical example.

Explore how Python gets new functionality and how PEPs have a huge role in this, by looking at PEP484 and its interesting backstory.

In this Python tutorial, we'll build a typing assistant with Mistral 7B and Ollama that's running locally. You'll also learn how to implement a hotkey listener and keyboard controller with Python. Follow along in this step-by-step coding tutorial.

This article explores using uv and Dagger to manage Python monorepos, aiming to solve challenges like slow CI/CD pipelines and complex dependency management. It details setting up a monorepo with these tools, achieving efficient end-to-end pipeline caching and easy local/CI execution.

Building a Django Admin-like dashboard with automatic refresh using FastHTML and HTMX.

In part one of two part tutorial, we explore how to use Flyde, a visual programming tool, to build a web scraper that feeds into a Retrieval Augmentation Generation (RAG) system. We will cover the process of scraping web content and storing it locally, setting the stage for more advanced AI engineering tasks.

  • Part 2 - Building an LLM RAG with PyFlyde & LangChain

    This part builds upon the Scraper app that we created in the part 1 and uses our visual programming skills to dive deeper in the LLM engineering world. This time we turn our article database into a RAG app, making use of LangChain, Vector Store and local LLaMA3 or OpenAI API.

Python Jobs of the Week

One of the YC companies I know is seeking an AI/ML Engineer with experience in TensorFlow, PyTorch, Python, and cloud-based AI deployments to develop and optimize AI agents for real-world logistics challenges. Ideal candidates have a B.S. in Computer Science or related field, expertise in model fine-tuning, NLP, and multi-step AI reasoning, and a passion for solving complex problems with AI. This is an in office job in San Francisco and not a remote one. If you think you are a fit and interested, reply back to this email with your latest resume and LinkedIn profile.

Interesting Projects, Tools, and Libraries

Train your own O1 preview model within $450.

FlashMLA is an efficient MLA decoding kernel for Hopper GPUs, optimized for variable-length sequences serving.

Turn any python function into a real-time audio and video stream over WebRTC or WebSockets.

A python library for manipulating codebases.

A Python API for your car.

Minions is a communication protocol that enables small on-device models to collaborate with frontier models in the cloud. By only reading long contexts locally, we can reduce cloud costs with minimal or no quality degradation.

Turn your git commit history into a scientific log.

A Flexible Framework for Experiencing Cutting-edge LLM Inference Optimizations.

CRAW4LLM is an efficient web crawling method that prioritizes webpages based on their potential influence on LLM pretraining, replacing traditional graph-connectivity-based priorities. By crawling only 21% of URLs, it achieves the same downstream performance as previous methods, significantly reducing data waste and website burden.

A hub for various industry-specific schemas to be used with VLMs.

Cost-efficient and pluggable Infrastructure components for GenAI inference.

Writing a compiler in a week-end.

Upcoming Events and Webinars

There will be following workshops

  • Interacting with Multimodal models in GitHub Models and Microsoft Copilot

  • Build your first agent with Azure AI Agent Service

  • Building a RAG with PostgreSQL

  • Keynote "Embracing New Skills and Responsibilities"

There will be a talk, Pandas That Don’t Just Sit and Chew Bamboo: Advance techniques using Pandas.

There will be following talks

  • Chunking for RAG: Preserve Meaning, Not Just Pieces

  • Deploying self-hosted LLM applications for the workplace

There will be following talks

  • Bridging Causal thinking and Media Mix Modeling

  • Tips and tricks for bringing AI features to production

  • Large scale VectorDB powering ML applications

There will be following talks

  • Exploring Multi-Agent Systems with AutoGen

  • Data and AI for the common good

Our Other Newsletters

Programmer Weekly - A free weekly newsletter for programmers.

Founder Weekly - A free weekly newsletter for entrepreneurs featuring best curated content, must read articles, how to guides, tips and tricks, resources, events and more.