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Python Bytes

Python Bytes

Written by: Michael Kennedy and Calvin Hendryx-Parker
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Python Bytes is a weekly podcast hosted by Michael Kennedy and Calvin Hendryx-Parker. The show is a short discussion on the headlines and noteworthy news in the Python, developer, and data science space.Copyright 2016-2026 Politics & Government
Episodes
  • #485 Creating memories

    #485 Creating memories
    Jun 23 2026
    Topics covered in this episode: Backup Docker volumes locally or to any S3Pyodide 314.0 Releasenb-cli: A Command-Line Interface for AI Agents and Notebook AutomationHindsight Agent Memory That LearnsExtrasJokeWatch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us! Support our work through: Our courses at Talk PythonAWS Community Day Midwest tomorrow Wednesday the 24th in downtown Indianapolis, Six Feet Up is sponsoring and there are 2 Sixies presenting Connect with the hosts Michael: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedInCalvin: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedInShow: Mastodon / BlueSky / X Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Tuesday at 7am PT. Older video versions available there too. Finally, if you want an bonus digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it. Michael #1: Backup Docker volumes locally or to any S3 Via Bryan Weber (thanks Bryan!), who spotted it over on Virtualization HowTo. Find Bryan at bryanwweber.com.offen/docker-volume-backup is a lightweight companion container that backs up the volumes your apps actually depend on, then ships them somewhere safe.It's tiny: written in Go and about 25MB compressed, roughly 1/20th the size of the shell-based image (jareware/docker-volume-backup) that inspired it.Drop it into your docker compose file as a backup service, mount the volumes you care about as read-only, and you're off.Push backups to a pile of destinations: a local directory, plus any S3, WebDAV, Azure Blob Storage, Dropbox, Google Drive, or SSH-compatible target. Mix and match as many as you want in one run.Recurring cron-style backups in a Compose setup, or one-off backups straight from the Docker CLI.Production-friendly touches worth calling out: Rotates away old backups so you don't quietly fill the disk.GPG encryption for your archives.Notifications on finished and failed runs (so you find out about failures before you need the backup).Stop a container during backup for a consistent snapshot using a simple docker-volume-backup.stop-during-backup=true label, then auto-restart it.Run custom commands during the backup lifecycle (great for a database dump before the file copy).Docker Swarm support, plus arm64 and arm/v7 builds. Hello, Raspberry Pi homelab.Fun aside from Bryan: he searched our back catalog for this tool and the search came back so fast he thought it hadn't run. Love to hear it. Calvin #2: Pyodide 314.0 Release PEP 783 is the real news — Pyodide maintainers used to hand-build 300+ packages. Now anyone can publish Pyodide wheels to PyPI with cibuildwheel.The version jump from 0.29 to 314.0 is intentional — it now tracks the Python version, so 314.x = Python 3.14. Binary compatibility is locked per Python cycle, meaning packages you build today won't break on the next Pyodide release.sqlite3, ssl, and lzma are back in the default stdlib — no more await pyodide.loadPackage("sqlite3"). Bigger download, but a much smoother experience for newcomers.bigint precision bug is fixed — values above 2^53 were silently losing precision when crossing the Python/JS boundary. The new JsBigInt type makes the roundtrip correct. Worth flagging if anyone is doing numeric work in a browser app.Experimental TCP sockets in Node.js — you can now connect Pyodide to a real database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis tested) when running server-side. Blurs the line between "Python in the browser" and "Python runtime anywhere Wasm runs." Michael #3: nb-cli: A Command-Line Interface for AI Agents and Notebook Automation From Piyush Jain (Jupyter and LangChain maintainer) on the Jupyter blog: nb-cli: A Command-Line Interface for AI Agents and Notebook Automation.nb-cli is an experimental, Rust-based CLI to read, write, execute, and search Jupyter notebooks. The premise: agents are great at CLIs but terrible at hand-editing the nested JSON in an .ipynb, so let them operate on the notebook from the outside instead of running inside it.Works with or without a Jupyter server. No server? It reads/writes .ipynb files directly and talks to kernels over ZeroMQ. Connected to a live JupyterLab, your edits show up instantly via Y.js (the same CRDT Jupyter uses).Smart output format: instead of token-heavy JSON or ambiguous plain markdown, it uses @@cell / @@output sentinels with inline metadata. Less wasted context, unambiguous structure, and it degrades gracefully on truncation.The payoff is composability. "Add a summary section and run it" becomes one shell pipeline instead of six agent tool calls. And nb search notebook.ipynb --with-errors returns only the failing cells, so the agent skips the cells that worked.Claude Code tie-in: it ships as an agent skill. npx skills install jupyter-ai-contrib/nb-cli and your agent can drive notebooks via nb.Out of jupyter-ai-contrib, which aims to become an official Jupyter AI subproject. Still early (crates.io is at v0.0.5), so kick the tires before anything...
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    38 mins
  • #484 All our tools

    #484 All our tools
    Jun 16 2026
    Topics covered in this episode: pi + superpowersTerminal: Warp.dev + OhMyZSH{Blink,kitty} + mosh + tmuxClaude codeMacWhisper or HandyTailscaleExtrasJokeWatch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us! Support our work through: Our courses at Talk Python TrainingSix Feet Up is hosting a LinkedIn Live Connect with the hostsMichael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky)Calvin: @calvinhp@sixfeetup.social / @calvinhp.com (bsky)Show: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky) Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Tuesday at 7am PT. Older video versions available there too. Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it. Calvin #1: pi + superpowers terminal-first, open-source coding agentSession management is a first-class citizenExtension model is what makes pi special — it's aggressively composableSuperpowers brings a structured software development methodology as loadable skillsSteps back and asks you what you're really trying to do“hand you the keys to the car” mode vs guardrails might not be for everyone Michael #2: Terminal: Warp.dev + OhMyZSH If you’re using the base terminal with default settings, you have so much head-room for improvement.I’ve been using Warp.dev since Elvis talked me into it. ;)Remarkable terminal but the AI side of things is a bit junky, can be turned offOhMyZSH gives better autocomplete e.g. git branch [HTML_REMOVED] lists all branches in the local repo!Commandbookapp.com is excellent to keep the terminal focused on terminal things and more server commands and other automation in Command Book. Calvin #3: {Blink,kitty} + mosh + tmux Kitty Terminal — GPU-accelerated terminal emulator for macOS, Linux, and Windows with support for graphics, ligatures, and a powerful tiling layout system built right in.Blink Shell — The go-to terminal for iPad/iPhone power users; full SSH and Mosh client with a gorgeous interface built specifically for mobile professional workflows.Mosh — Mobile Shell replaces SSH for remote connections, surviving network switches, sleep cycles, and flaky Wi-Fi with zero dropped sessions — essential for staying connected to long-running agentic jobs.tmux — Terminal multiplexer that keeps sessions alive on your Linux server indefinitely; detach from a Mosh session on your Mac, reconnect from your iPad, and your agent is right where you left it.The combo — Kitty or Blink + Mosh + tmux creates a "persistent remote brain" pattern: your beefy Linux homelab runs the compute-heavy agent sessions 24/7, and any device becomes a thin client to drop in and out at will. Michael #4: Claude code I prefer the IDE experience, the new PyCharm + Claude integration is really good. VS Code too. Why IDE? Because we should still be present with our code and managing context is much easier.Use the best/latest models on high thinking. “Speed” is not your friend, it’s just shortcuts.Create skills and agents and use them.Curate your own rules (e.g. Talk Python’s Claude.md)Works well on non-coding things. Just create a folder, put a ton of files in there and it’s like NotebookLM + Chat + more. Calvin #5: MacWhisper or Handy Transcribes your speech using your choice of Whisper or Parakeet models.All transcription is done on your device, no data leaves your machine.Automatic Speaker Recognition with local models.Handy is more basic, but open source and runs on all platforms. Michael #6: Tailscale No need to open ports at all, Tailscale makes machines inside the same network accessible to each otherWorks great for laptops, desktops, etc. But also available for servers. Though I still use cloud firewalls for servers.How I use it: My dev database server, preloaded with QA data, is always running on my home mac mini m4 pro. All my apps look for that server before looking locally and tailscale makes them always accessible to each otherMy local LLMs expose OpenAI API compatible APIs. Tailscale makes these accessible even while traveling or at a coffee shop.Use my mini as an exit node. All traffic is routed outbound from my local fiber network. Great to restricted IPs like accessing my servers without caring about the local IP.Screen share back to my home machines even while traveling.Listen to the Talk Python episode with Alex for a deeper conversation. Extras Calvin: Telescopo great Mac Markdown viewer/editor. Michael:One more: Typora markdown editor.Created formal documentation for many of my open source packages using Great Docs.Via Mark Little: Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 Joke: No second date
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    50 mins
  • #483 Thanks Brian

    #483 Thanks Brian
    Jun 9 2026
    Topics covered in this episode: Vulnerability and malware checks in uvHTTP GET requests with the Python standard libraryMillions of AI agents imperiled by critical vulnerability in open source packagealembic-git-revisionsExtrasJokeWatch on YouTube About the show Goodbye and Thanks Brian Thanks Calvin for being part of this and future episodes! Also new time for the live show. Thanks Brian for all the hard work over the years. Calvin #1: Vulnerability and malware checks in uv release just yesterday by Astral https://astral.sh/blog/uv-audituv audit scans dependencies for known vulnerabilities and abandoned packages via the OSV database — runs 4–10x faster than pip-auditMalware check runs on every install/sync, catching actively malicious packages (credential stealers, etc.) before they execute — including ones PyPI quarantined but lockfiles can still referenceEnable malware scanning with UV_MALWARE_CHECK=1 — it's opt-in and in previewFuture roadmap includes a resolver that steers toward vulnerability-free versions and install-time warnings scoped to newly added deps only Michael #2: HTTP GET requests with the Python standard library If you’re doing HTTP in Python, you’re probably using one of three popular libraries: requests, httpx, or urllib3.There have been issues with httpx lately.Niquest is another option: Drop-in replacement for Requests. Automatic HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and HTTP/3. WebSocket, and SSE included.But maybe less is more, especially in the age of agentic AIA good candidate needs two things to be true at once, not one: the used surface is small, and the behavior behind that surface is shallow. Calvin #3: Millions of AI agents imperiled by critical vulnerability in open source package "BadHost" (CVE-2026-48710) is a critical vulnerability in Starlette — the ASGI framework underlying FastAPI — with 325 million weekly downloads; also affects vLLM, LiteLLM, and most MCP server toolingThe exploit is trivial: injecting a single character into an HTTP Host header bypasses path-based authentication, and can lead to credential theft, SSRF, and in some cases remote code executionMCP servers are a prime target since they store credentials for external services (email, databases, cloud accounts) — exposed data in the wild includes biopharma clinical trial DBs, full mailboxes, HR/PII pipelines, and AWS topologyFix is available — patch to Starlette 1.0.1 immediately; use the free scanner at mcp-scan.nemesis.services to check if your servers are still running a vulnerable versionOpen source sustainability footnote: the maintainer triages near-daily security reports solo, in his free time — most are AI-generated noise, and real ones like this still compete for the same evenings and weekends Michael #4: alembic-git-revisions By Julien Danjou from MergifyAutomatic Alembic migration chaining based on git commit history. No more Multiple head revisions are present for given argument 'head'.See the introductory articleCaused by two migrations landed with the same down_revision, and Alembic doesn’t know which one comes first. The fix is always the same: someone manually edits the migration file to re-chain the revisions.The insight: git already knows the order Extras Calvin: GNU make can do pattern matching in the target. Not new at all, mentioned in the 1994-era docs. just and task don’t have this super power on the target name yet. train-%: uv run ./train.py $* --save-hyper-params --overwrite $(TRAIN_ARGS) Michael: Updated my HTTP client using packages from httpx to httpx2: listmonk, umami, and memberful. For motivation, see this reddit thread. Joke: Accurate
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    29 mins
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