Python Weekly (Issue 690 March 13 2025)

Author

Rahul Chaudhary
March 13, 2025

Welcome to issue 690 of Python Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

News

Startup Row at PyCon US offers early-stage companies using Python free booth space, conference passes, and exposure to the Python community, with applications closing on March 14, 2025 (though the form will remain available through the weekend). Since its inception in 2011, the program has showcased over 150 startups, with recent participants achieving significant success, including two unicorns, $950M+ in venture funding, and multiple acquisitions by major tech companies.


Articles, Tutorials and Talks

This post shares practical tips for using LLMs to write code effectively, emphasizing that it's not always easy and requires managing context, setting expectations, and thorough testing. The author suggests thinking of LLMs as over-confident, lightning-fast pair programming assistants and provides a detailed example of building a tool with Claude Code.

Explore 12 of the most interesting and useful built-in functions, with examples, gotchas, and a few nerdy details you may not be aware of.

This blog post investigates the performance gains of CPython's new tail-call interpreter and reveals that much of the initial 10-15% speedup was due to inadvertently working around a regression in LLVM 19. The author concludes that while the tail-call interpreter is still a good improvement, the gains are more modest (1-5%) and highlights challenges in benchmarking and software engineering.

This video explains how to create a web portfolio and resume from a single JSON data source using Python and Jinja2, ensuring both versions are always up-to-date. It covers structuring the data, setting up HTML templates with placeholders, and using a Python script to bridge the data and templates, outputting static HTML files.

Learn how to build a Google Docs-like platform with real-time collaboration, modern authentication using Google OAuth, and rich text editing via CKEditor. It covers production-ready configurations, database setup, and secure user management, emphasizing a balance between a stable backend and a cutting-edge frontend.

This post details how to create static maps with points overlaid using OpenStreetMap tiles and Pillow, bypassing complex data visualization libraries for a simpler, more understandable approach. It provides Python code for downloading map tiles and converting lat/lon coordinates to pixel positions for drawing points on the map.

This article demonstrates how to use Diffbot's Knowledge Graph API to automate sentiment analysis of news articles, specifically targeting negative mentions of a product (Xbox). It outlines the process of designing a DQL query, writing Python code to fetch results, and automating the entire workflow using Pipedream to receive weekly email reports.

Isolating Python and Jupyter using firejail

This article outlines a method for running isolated Python processes using Firejail, ensuring they can only access a specified project directory and limiting network access. The setup involves creating a virtual environment, installing packages with temporary internet access, and running Jupyter Notebooks via a Unix socket to maintain isolation.

This post uses Python and the American Community Survey (ACS) data to analyze immigration trends in Great Neck, NY, revealing a shift from Iranian to Chinese immigrants and a significant increase in the "Asian alone" population between 2009 and 2023. The author provides code for others to analyze immigration in their own hometowns.

Building a Secure Python RAG Agent Using Auth0 FGA and LangGraph

Learn how to use Auth0 FGA to secure your LangGraph RAG agent in Python.


Interesting Projects, Tools, and Libraries

The Multi-Agent Framework: First AI Software Company, Towards Natural Language Programming.

Pydoll is a library for automating chromium-based browsers without a WebDriver, offering realistic interactions. It supports Python's asynchronous features, enhancing performance and enabling event capturing and simultaneous web scraping.

ShortsMaker is a Python package designed to facilitate the creation of engaging short videos or social media clips. It leverages a variety of external services and libraries to streamline the process of generating, processing, and uploading short content.

This is an open source, community-driven, native audio turn detection model.

An neural full-band audio codec for general audio sampled at 48 kHz with 7.5 kps or 4.5 kbps.

Build autonomous, resilient and observable AI agents with built-in workflow orchestration, security, statefulness and telemetry.


New Releases

Upcoming Events and Webinars

There will be following talks

  • Extract structured product & deal information from PDFs on scale via LLM

  • Airweave, an Open-Source Tool To Turn Any App Into Accessible Agent Knowledge

There will be following talks

  • Defect detection in X-ray images of solid tablets. Data augmentation with Stable diffusion

  • AI-Generated Tabular Synthetic Data: What It Is, How It’s Created, and Its Applications

There will be a talk, How to Hack an Agent - or not.

There will be following talks

  • Developments in the Scikit-Learn Ecosystem

  • AI Coding Agents and How to Code Them


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