Planet Python
Last update: March 30, 2026 01:44 PM UTC
March 30, 2026
Mike Driscoll
Vibe Coding Pong with Python and pygame
Pong is one of the first computer games ever created, way back in 1972. If you have never heard of Pong, you can think of it as a kind of “tennis” game. There are two paddles, on each side of the screen. They move up and down. The goal is to bounce a ball between […]
The post Vibe Coding Pong with Python and pygame appeared first on Mouse Vs Python.
Real Python
Quiz: Using Jupyter Notebooks
Test your Jupyter Notebook skills: cells, modes, shortcuts, Markdown, server tools, and exporting notebooks to HTML.
March 29, 2026
"Michael Kennedy's Thoughts on Technology"
Fire and Forget at Textual
If you read my Fire and Forget (or Never) about Python and asynchronous programming, you could think it’s a super odd edge case. But a reader/listener, Richard, pointed me at Will McGugan’s article The Heisenbug lurking in your async code. This is basically the same article, but in Will-style.
Will does say “This behavior is well documented, as you can see from this excerpt.” True, but the documentation got this emphasis and warning in Python 3.12 whereas the feature create_task was added in Python 3.6/3.5 timeframe. So it’s not just a matter of did we read the docs carefully. It’s a matter of did we reread the docs carefully, years later?
Luckily Will added some nice concrete numbers I didn’t have:
https://github.com/search?q=%22asyncio.create_task%28%22&type=code
This appears in over 0.5M separate code files on GitHub. To be clear, not every search result for create_task uses the fire-and-forget pattern, but just on the first page of results there are 5 instances.
If the design pattern to fix this is to:
- Create a global set
- When a task is added to the event loop, add it to the set
- Remove it from the set when it’s done
Wouldn’t it have been better for the Python team to add this to the event loop internally once and solve this problem for everyone globally across the entire Python ecosystem?
It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. So make sure you double check your code for create_task. And don’t let the Heisenbugs bite.
And yes, I know about task groups. Several people told me that we could use task groups to hang on to the task. Yes, that’s true. But task groups are incongruent with the fire-and-forget design pattern. Why? Because you create the group in a context manager and then you wait for all the tasks in the group to be finished. That doesn’t allow you to fire off a task and then continue working. So task groups may or may not have fixed Will’s problem, but they don’t solve the one I was originally talking about.
March 28, 2026
EuroPython
Humans of EuroPython: Jodie Burchell
What does it take to run Europe’s largest Python conference? 🐍 Not budgets or venues—it’s people.
EuroPython isn’t powered by code alone, but by a vibrant network of volunteers who shape every session and welcome every attendee. From ensuring talks run seamlessly
March 27, 2026
Real Python
The Real Python Podcast – Episode #289: Limitations in Human and Automated Code Review
With the mountains of Python code that it's possible to generate now, how's your code review going? What are the limitations of human review, and where does machine review excel? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week with another batch of PyCoder's Weekly articles and projects.
Quiz: Interacting With REST APIs and Python
Test your Python REST API knowledge: consuming, building, HTTP methods, status codes, Flask, FastAPI, and Django basics.
March 26, 2026
Real Python
Quiz: Getting Started With Django: Building a Portfolio App
Test your Django basics: frameworks, projects, views, templates, models, URLs, and migrations with practical questions.
EuroPython
March Newsletter: Sponsorship Early Bird Ending, Programme Due Soon
Hey there! 👋
Hope you&aposre all having a fantastic March. We sure have been busy and we’ve got some exciting updates for you as we gear up for EuroPython 2026. This year the conference will take place in Kraków, the city of castles
Brett Cannon
Why pylock.toml includes digital attestations
A Python project got hacked where malicious releases were directly uploaded to PyPI. I said on Mastodon that had the project used trusted publishing with digital attestations, then people using a pylock.toml file would have noticed something odd was going on thanks to the lock file including attestation data
March 25, 2026
Talk Python to Me
#542: Zensical - a modern static site generator
If you've built documentation in the Python ecosystem, chances are you've used Martin Donath's work. His Material for MKDocs powers docs for FastAPI, uv, AWS, OpenAI, and tens of thousands of other projects. But when MKDocs 2.0 took a direction that would break Material and 300 ecosystem plugins, Martin went back to the drawing board. The result is Zensical: A new static site generator with a Rust core, differential builds in milliseconds instead of minutes, and a migration path designed to bring the whole community along.
PyCharm
Expanding Our Core Web Development Support in PyCharm 2026.1
With PyCharm 2026.1, our core IDE experience continues to evolve as we’re bringing a broader set of professional-grade web tools to all users for free. Everyone, from beginners to backend-first developers, is getting access to a substantial set of JavaScript, TypeScript, and CSS features that were previously only available with a Pro subscription. React, JavaScript, […]
Real Python
How to Use Git: A Beginner's Guide
Learn how to track your code with Git using clear, step-by-step instructions. Use this guide as a reference for managing projects with version control.
Quiz: Using Data Classes in Python
Test your knowledge of Python data classes, namedtuple, immutability, auto-generated methods, inheritance, and slots.
Kevin Renskers
Building modern Django apps with Alpine AJAX, revisited
Nine months after adopting Alpine AJAX with Django, I've gone through template partials, Jinja2, and landed on an approach that's both fast and clean.
Antonio Cuni
Inside SPy, part 2: Language semantics
Inside SPy 🥸, part 2: Language semantics
This is the second post of the Inside SPy series. The firstpost was mostly about motivations andgoals of SPy. This post will cover in more detail thesemantics of SPy, including the parts which make it different from CPython.
We will talk about phases of execution, colors, redshifting, the very peculiar waySPy implements static typing, and we will start to dive into metaprogramming.
!!! Success "" Before diving in, I want to express my gratitude to my employer, Anaconda, for giving me the opportunity to dedicate 100% of my time to this open-source project.
March 24, 2026
PyCoder’s Weekly
Issue #727: Sunsetting Jazzband, Spyder, A/B Testing, and More (March 24, 2026)
Mike Driscoll
The Python Show – Python Illustrated
In this episode, we hear from two sisters who put together a beginner’s book about Python. The unique hook for their book is that one sister wrote the text while the other did the illustrations. Listen in as we learn about these incredible sisters and how they got into software programming, writing, and technical education. […]
The post The Python Show – Python Illustrated appeared first on Mouse Vs Python.
Ari Lamstein
Upcoming O’Reilly Workshop: Building Data Apps with Streamlit and Copilot
On April 14, I’ll be teaching a new 4‑hour live workshop for O’Reilly: Building Data Apps with Streamlit and Copilot. If you work in Python and want to turn your analyses into interactive, shareable tools, this workshop is designed for you. We’ll start from a Jupyter notebook and build a complete Streamlit app that lets […]
The Python Coding Stack
3 • 7600 • 33 • 121 • When Python Stacks Up
When I was a child, I used to pace up and down the corridor at home pretending to teach an imaginary group of people.
Real Python
Understanding CRUD Operations in SQL
Learn how CRUD operations work in SQL by writing raw SQL queries with SQLite and using SQLAlchemy as an ORM in Python.
Rodrigo Girão Serrão
Ask the LLM to write code for it
This article covers a useful LLM pattern where you ask the LLM to write code to solve a problem instead of asking it to solve the problem directly.
The problem of merging two transcripts
I had two files that contained two halves of the transcript of an audio recording and I wanted to use an LLM to merge the two halves. There were three reasons that stopped me from simply copying part 2 and pasting it after part 1:
- the two transcripts overlapped (the end of part 1 was after the start of part 2);
- the timestamps for part 2 started from 0, so they were missing an offset; and
- speaker identification was not consistent.
I uploaded the two halves into ChatGPT and asked it to merge the two transcripts, fix the timestamps and the speaker identification, but to not change the text.
The result I got back was a ridiculous attempt at providing the full transcript, with two sections that supposedly represented parts of either transcript I could just copy and paste confidently, and a couple of other ridiculous blunders.
Instead of fighting ChatGPT, I decided to use a very useful pattern I learned about last year.
Ask the LLM to write code for it
Instead of asking ChatGPT to merge the transcripts, I could ask it to analyse them, find the solutions to the three problems listed above, and then write code that would merge the transcripts.
Since I was confident that ChatGPT could
- identify the overlap between the two files;
- use the overlap information to compute the timestamp offset required for part 2; and
- figure out you had to swap the two speakers in part 2,
I knew ChatGPT would be able to write a Python script that could read from both files and apply a couple of string operations to the second part.
This yielded much better results in two ways. ChatGPT was able to find the solutions for the three problems above and write a script that fixed them automatically. That was the goal.
On top of that, since ChatGPT had a very clear implicit goal — get the final merged transcript — and since running Python code is something that ChatGPT can do, ChatGPT even ran the script for me and produced two artifacts at the end:
- the full Python script I could run against the two halves if I wanted; and
- the final, fixed transcript.
This is an example application of a really useful LLM pattern:
Don't ask the LLM to solve a problem. Instead, ask it to write code that solves the problem.
As another visual example, it's much easier to ask an LLM to write a Python script that draws a path that solves a maze (that's just a couple hundred of lines of code) than it is to upload an image and ask the LLM to draw a valid path on the picture of a maze. Try it yourself!
Real Python
Quiz: Python Modules and Packages: An Introduction
Test your knowledge of Python modules and packages. Learn about imports, namespaces, the dir() function, and more.
Nicola Iarocci
Eve 2.3.1
I just released Eve v2.3.1. In the unlikely event that you’ve been using JSONP callbacks with Eve, you’ll want to update as this patch improves on their security (changelog).
Seth Michael Larson
LAN Party Calculator (Mario Kart, Kirby Air Riders, F-Zero)
March 23, 2026
Talk Python Blog
Updates from Talk Python - March 2026
There have been a bunch of changes to make the podcast and courses at Talk Python just a little bit better. And I wrote a few interesting articles that might pique your interest. So I thought it was time to send you all a quick little update and let you know what’s new and improved.
Talk Python Courses
Account Dashboard for courses
I spoke to a lot of users who said that it’s a bit difficult to jump back into your account and see which courses you were last taking. I can certainly appreciate that, especially if you have the bundle with every class is available. So I added this cool new dashboard that sorts and displays your progress through your most recent course activity as well as courses that you have finished.