Podcast profile
By Michael Kennedy
Talk Python to Me is a weekly podcast hosted by developer and entrepreneur Michael Kennedy. We dive deep into the popular packages and software developers, data scientists, and incredible hobbyists doing amazing things with Python.
Latest episode
1 hr 8 min
Topics
Language design, runtimes, compilers, syntax, and language-specific engineering practice.
Major technology platforms, companies, ecosystems, leadership, and competitive behavior.
Application architecture, modularity, APIs, maintainability, and technical design decisions.
Formats
Detailed technical, architectural, or research-oriented examination.
Audience level
Regularly assumes specialist knowledge and discusses implementation, architecture, protocols, code, or research in depth.
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Episodes shown — 10 of 25
Every ship in EVE Online eventually undocks and leaves the station. This time, it's the whole game. EVE has run on Python 2 since it launched in 2003, all 2.4 million lines of it, on a custom Stackless interpreter that stopped at 3.8 and was archived last year. Destination: Python 3.12.
Lint the entire CPython code base from scratch. It takes 0.3 seconds. Three blinks of an eye. That is ruff, and it is written in Rust. So are Pydantic, Polars, uv, and Granian. Rust shows up in Python three ways: tools that happen to be Rust, libraries Python imports, and servers that run Python inside Rust.
How many files does your query read before it reads any data? On some data lakes, you go through JSON and metadata files first, just to learn which Parquet files matter. DuckLake asks one SQL question instead. The metadata lives in a real database. The data stays in plain Parquet. That's the entire format.
How many cores does your machine have, 10, 18? Your async Python code uses just one of them. That isn't a bug in asyncio. That's the design, and optimizing event loops to be faster by 20% doesn't change it. So Giovanni Barillari started over. Joe is the creator of Granian, the Rust-based server that powers Talk Python.
In 2020, a gastroenterologist in Glasgow did the math on his new research study and came up with 30,000 samples, arriving over two years from three cities and a dozen hospitals. He asked around about how researchers keep track of that. The answer was Microsoft Excel.
Your site is down. It's 3am. Is it a bug, a bill, or a breach? You can't tell yet, and everyone is watching you find out.
Every company has one. The little internal tool that Jane built back in 2021, and then Jane left. Nobody understands it, nobody will touch it. There are two unwritten rules around it: don't change it, it's working. And if you break it, you bought it. That's dark-matter enterprise software.
Security has always been the vegetables of software. Everyone agrees it matters, and somehow it never quite makes it onto the plate. At PyCon US this year, that changed. For the first time ever, security got its own dedicated, day-long track, one of just two at the whole conference, sitting right next to AI.
For years, "Django and async" came with an asterisk. The docs themselves warned you off it. Scary performance notes, a story that felt half-finished. Well, that story just got rewritten, literally, and the person who rewrote it is here to tell you why the old framing was wrong.
Coding agents have gotten really good at one kind of work. You scope a feature, edit some files, run the tests, ship it. It all happens on disk. But that is not how data work feels.