Learn coding in Python, Go and Rust from Serdar Yegulalp, software dev specialist and senior writer at InfoWorld.
Dioxus is a relatively new library for building cross-platform applications with Rust, using web frontends. Everything in your app, including the web interface, is created declaratively with Rist code. This video shows how a basic Dioxus app can be created, and also compares and contrasts Dioxus's approach with Tauri, another cross-platform library that works with Rust and other languages. Tauri, a Rust-powered Electron alternative | InfoWorld https://www.infoworld.com/video/2156953/tauri-a-rust-powered-electron-alternative.html Intro to Tauri: The Electron alternative | InfoWorld https://www.infoworld.com/article/2338125/intro-to-tauri-the-electron-alternative.html
Python 3.14 now features changes to the interpreter to make Python applications run faster with no changes to your code. This video graphically demonstrates how much of a speedup to expect with a benchmark we've used before — and how these new changes to 3.14 also work with the "free-threaded" or "no-GIL" builds of Python.
The LLVM compiler infrastructure project lives at the heart of the Clang C/C++ compiler, and the compilers for languages like Rust and Zig. This video shows in detail the concepts behind LLVM, such as how code in one language is translated into LLVM's own internal language.
A software bill of materials, or SBOM, describes the contents of a given software package for allowing enforcement of software licenses and conducting security audits for known vulnerabilities. This video demonstrates what SBOMs look like, how they're compiled, and what tools are used to generate them, both from source code and from binary artifacts.
A relatively new language in the systems-programming space has been drawing more attention over the past few years. The Zig language is intended to compete with, and also complement, the C language. It's also potential competition for some of the same use cases as Rust and C++, as this video shows.
Ever committed sensitive information to a git repository and realized it all too late? You can always erase the repo and start over, but there are other, more elegant solutions. In this video we explore a few options for deleting confidential data from git repositories, both built into the git tool and available as third-party solutions.
Testing web apps is tedious, time-consuming work, even when you have an automation framework to handle the heaviest of the lifting. Playwright, a web app test system originally developed by folks at Microsoft, simplifies many common web-app testing tasks by way of its intuitive syntax and object model. This video demonstrates using Playwright in Python to test a simple web app (although many other languages are supported for test suites, too).
Cython converts ordinary Python programs into C by way of type hints and other special syntax. In this video we'll show how the newest version in development, Cython 3.1, offers some powerful new type hinting features for declaring pointers or working with "volatile" values, and adds forward compatibility for Python's forthcoming free-threaded or "no-GIL" bulds.
A common problem: you have a directory full of files and want to take some action every time something changes in it. The "Watchdog" library for Python gives you tools to observe changes in a directory structure and take action based on any generated events. Learn how to set up and work with Watchdog in this simple demonstration.
Python's "abstract base class" system gives you a way to create types that serve as the abstract foundation for another, more concrete type. This example shows how an abstract base class from the Python standard library can be used as the basis for a custom dictionary type, one where the entries expire after a given length of time, and where the implementation is less clumsy and unpredictable than just subclassing the built-in dict type.
Python's Pillow library, for image manipulation, has features above and beyond merely resizing, rotating, cropping, or recoloring images. In this video we'll see how Pillow can be used to add text captions to image, take snapshots of the screen, or work with image data copied to the system clipboard.
Python packages are typically things you pip install and run by importing into your code. But you can make packages runnable from the Python command line using the \"-m\" option — and by configuring your package with a \"__main__\" module. This video steps you through the basics of using \"__main__\" in a package, and how it differs from \"__init__\" in a package (and elsewhere, too).
The "wheel" format in Python lets you bundle up and redistribute a Python package you've created. Others can then use the "pip" tool to install your program from your wheel file, which can include binary components (like Python extension modules written in C). This video walks through the basics of how to build wheels with a "pip install"-able project.
It's not hard to write a Python package that can be installed into an interpreter or virtual environment with pip. This video shows a simple example of how to lay out a project's source code and set up its pyproject.toml file to allow pip to use it as an installation source. (In future videos we'll explore actions like creating Python wheels or uploading such projects to PyPi, too.)
If you use Python for accessing API endpoints or web scraping, odds are you're using either Python's native http libraries or a third-party module like requests. In this video, we take a look at the httpx library — an easy, powerful, and future-proof way to make HTTP requests. It provides tools for everything from sending form data to handling multipart file uploads, and works with both synchronous and async code.
Python can interface with C code using the built-in ctypes library, but ctypes is notoriously clunky. The third-party CFFI project offers a more streamlined way to build interfaces between Python programs and C libraries. This video shows the basics of using CFFI, including how talking to a C library can be as easy as copying and pasting a C library header into your Python code.
Everyone uses the .zip archive format to compress and store files, but sometimes you need more flexibility and power than a command-line or GUI archiving tool gives you — or you want to create archives programmatically. Python's got built-in functions for creating and working with zip files, by way of its standard library's zipfile module. This video walks through the basics of using zipfile to create new archives, load files into them, extract files from them, and do other operations.
In software development, there's the concept of a "mode" – a distinct set of behaviors for a program that changes the way it receives user input. In this video we'll demonstrate a simple video game (using the PyGame framework) that uses three distinct modes of behavior, and use it as an example for how to implement modal behaviors in a program. The code shown in this video is available at https://gist.github.com/syegulalp/ab5ccf257381344ea6c3f29bf36936bc - you are free to use it as you see fit.
Python's "ast" module transforms the text of Python source code into an object stream. It's a more powerful way to walk through Python code, analyze its components, and make changes than working manually with code as text. This video shows some basic "ast" techniques, like selectively replacing imports and performing other targeted modifications to code.
The \\\"enum\\\" type in Python lets you create variables constrained to a predefined range of values. Learn how this built-in Python type can be used to express the state of something, whether as a string, an integer, or some other type – and how to ensure the values you create remain consistent both inside and outside your program.
Python comes with many things, but by default it does not have tools for manipulating images. The third-party Pillow library, formerly known as PIL (the Python Imaging Library), provides a slew of modules for reading various image formats, processing image data, performing common manipulations like thumbnailing, and saving images back to files. In this video we'll walk through the basics of using Pillow, and also single out some of the caveats of working with it, such as its internal inconsistencies and quirks.
Sometimes with a program you just need a quick and dirty way to persist values across to disk. The dbm module in Python provides a native way to do this across platforms, with no more effort than you'd need to save values in a dictionary. Learn in this video the basics of how it works, and how it's been updated to use SQLite as a storage backend.
Python's type hinting system makes it easier to check your programs for correctness and consistency, but adding type hints to an existing code base can be grueling work. MonkeyType, created by Instagram, runs your code and automatically generates type hints for code, which you can apply directly to your source or list alongside it as type stubs. This video shows a simple example of MonkeyType in action, along with some use cases and caveats.
Python programs can use a web frontend with HTML to create GUIs conveniently. In many cases you don't even have to know HTML, CSS, or JS: you can use a Python framework that generates your interactive frontend programmatically. With NiceGUI, HTML apps with complex web controls aren't hard to implement in a few lines of Python. This video walks through the basics of how NiceGUI apps work, and compares and contrasts with similar frameworks like Streamlit.
Python 3.13 provides early access to some groundbreaking new features in CPython, the default Python interpreter. A new JIT can enable speedups in "hot spots" in Python code, by selectively replacing generic instructions with specialized versions and by using a new second-stage bytecode – without having to rewrite any existing Python code. And the new "free-threaded", or "no-GIL" build, lets Python threads run with true parallelism. However, none of these features are enabled by default yet. To use them, you need to build a custom edition of the Python interpreter. In this video, we've done just that, and we show some examples of where both of these new features add real value to Python. Twitter: @syegulalp LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/serdar-yegulalp-136a483/
In previous videos we covered Cython (for translating Python into C for speed), Numpy (for working with numerical arrays at scale), and parallelism in Cython (for doing work in multiple threads). In this video we look at how all three of these things can be used at once: writing Cython that runs in parallel for operating on Numpy arrays. We'll also cover how to ensure Cython uses Numpy arrays correclty, and why parallelism with Numpy arrays doesn't always result in linear speedups.
Many different data libraries in Python work with dataframes – Polars, Pandas, DuckDB, and so on. But they all sport highly dissimilar APIs and feature sets, and some have features the others don't. Ibis provides a common, unified front end for over a dozen Python dataframe libraries – a common way to read data, query it, pass dataframes between different processing engines, and report the results. This video shows an example of how this works using a single common dataframe derived from a CSV, using DuckDB, Polars, and Ibis's native dataframe processing.
Asynchronous programming in any language can be tricky, and Python is no exception. The AnyIO library simplifies many common patterns in async programming in Python, such as how to start async tasks or manage them. AsyncIO also adds many behaviors and features for async not found in Python's standard library, like performing asynchronous work with files.
Analytics databases, or column-oriented DBs, speed up analytics jobs on big datasets. But most such DBs are big products with a lot of setup and management overhead. DuckDB bucks that trend: it's a single, self-contained executable and library that brings SQL-query-powered analytics DB functionality to most any programming language, workflow, or data trove. This video shows how you can use DuckDB with Python to work with big, multi-megabyte JSON or CSV datasets, and query the data using conventional SQL syntax.
As WebAssembly gains in popularity, one possible application is to embed a WASM runtime into applications to extend the app's functionality. Extism lets you write WASM extensions for your own applications, creating in effect a WASM-powered plugin system for your apps without the overhead of embedding a full language runtime like Lua. This video shows the basics of how to write a WASM add-on in AssemblyScript, and add it to a Python application, all in a few lines of code.
Cython's used to take existing Python code and translate it to C for speed. It can also be used to make some operations on C types faster by performing them in parallel, and without using the overhead of Python's threading or multiprocessing mechanisms. Instead, you can write Cython code that makes use of the industry-standard OpenMP interface for writing parallel-processing code. This video goes through the basics of using OpenMP in Cython, using the "prange" object, and gives you an idea of what's involved to make operations parallel.
If you've ever needed to compile something from C/C++ source in Microsoft Windows, odds are you've also been aggravated by how complex it can be to set up the Visual Studio C++ Build Tools. Turns out there's a simple, one-command way to do it using the Winget package manager, with minimal babysitting and fuss. Watch this video to learn how to install the Build Tools from the command line, and how to customize the setup to include more than the basic components if needed.
Writing a web app in Python isn't hard, as long as you understand the frontend components – HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It's harder when you don't know those things, especially if you want to write a Python app that lets users freely explore data through interactive components. Streamlit lets you write web apps in pure Python, and outfit them with a wide-ranging gallery of interactive data exploration widgets. This video shows the basics of Streamlit in action, demonstrates how Streamlit apps are typically written and how they behave, and also walks through a few caveats worth knowing about.
Normally, Visual Studio Code is a text editor, but its panoply of add-ons can transform it into a versatile development tool for working with many aspects of software development. In this video we look at some examples of how VS Code can be made into a database exploration and workbench tool by way of various free add-ons.
The creators of the "ruff" linter have a new Rust-powered tool for Python – an all-in-one project creation and management tool named "uv". See in this video how "uv" performs the same jobs as "pip" and many other Python tools, but a great deal faster. But how much of a future is there for Python tools written in Rust?
Got ambitions about getting into game development? This video walks you through some specific steps to take towards that goal: laying a proper foundation with knowing software development generally; how to not let ambitions to create your dream game derail things; how to choose the kinds of games to make; and more.
The PyScript project offers the promise of being able to run Python programs as-is in a web page, as transparently as one runs JavaScript programs. The project's been through some major revisions since we last looked at it, as it's now somewhat easier to set up and work with. Watch as we set up a few basic Python programs in PyScript, which interact with the web page they're embeded in, or even use an embedded in-browser console for interactivity with the user.
Video games have become a massive and lucrative market, bigger even than the movie industry. If you've considered video game development as a career move, it's worth knowing what kind of prerequisites are involved. In this video we look at a few things you'll need to know before considering video game development as a career – not just skills, but habits and expectations.
All Python developers write loops in their code. But sometimes the built-in looping mechanisms aren't enough – sometimes you want to write loops that handle sophisticated scenarios. What if you want to loop through multiple things of different lengths together? Or loop through all the possible combination of some things? Learn how the itertools module in Python lets you do all these things and more, without having to write your own custom code to do them.
Your Python programs shouldn't be black boxes – they should be able to tell you about what's going on inside them as they run. The logging module for Python gives you convenient ways to write log messages to the console, to use different levels of verbosity for logging, and to configure defaults for logging behavior. Learn the basics of the logging module in this video, with a few easy examples to get you started.
Python projects that use modern tooling and standards work best when the files in the project repository follow a certain layout. Learn in this video how to organize a Python project's files and directories, including: using the pyproject.toml file to describe a project's metadata, setting up .gitignore for Python projects, and where to place tests or documentation.
Developers who use Microsoft Windows as their main platform often grouse about how Windows's malware protection can interfere with their work. The new Dev Drive feature in Windows 11 lets you create a special volume, either on a physical disk or a virtual drive, where your files are only minimally scanned for malware. Learn how to set up and use Dev Drive in this video, and what scenarios it's best for.
A new API introduced in Python 3.12 provides developers with efficient, low-impact ways to hook events in Python code, monitor behavior, and write powerful profiling and coverage tools. Watch this video to see a quick tour of the new API and how to use it, with an example where we write a hook function that fires on every function call in an application. For further information on the new API, see PEP 669: https://peps.python.org/pep-0669/
Python's linting and code formatting tools are typically written in Python, and can slow down significantly on large code bases. Ruff, a new linter and code formatter for Python, is written in Rust, and runs many times faster than comparable Python tools. But it also adheres closely to existing Python standards for code-checking and formatting. This video shows Ruff in action, and how it stacks up against existing Python tools for speed.
Cython compiles Python to C for high performance, and Cython modules can be redistributed with your code in a Python package -- a source distribution or "wheel" file -- so others can use it, too. You can deliver both the generated C source code, and a precompiled binary for a specific platform, for the widest possible re-use. Learn in this video how to set up your project when Cython code is present, and what tools you'll need to build wheels and source distributions from it. Also be sure to check out some of our other videos about Cython: https://www.infoworld.com/video/116719/cython-3-0-compiling-python-to-c-the-next-generation https://www.infoworld.com/video/112519/cythons-new-pure-python-syntax-faster-python-made-easier
WebAssembly has been described as the future of the web, and so much more besides. But for a long time it's been a little hard to work with because of its toolchain. In this video we'll look at AssemblyScript, a JavaScript-like language, based on Microsoft's TypeScript, that makes writing and deploying WebAssembly modules as easy as writing JavaScript itself.
How do you do more than one thing at a time in Python? In this video we lay out the two main ways we can do more than one thing at a time -- parallelism, and concurrency -- and show how Python has three mechanisms for doing those things. Learn how threading, async, and multiprocessing all make it possible to juggle multiple tasks or run them side by side.
Writing interactive web apps requires JavaScript, and often a lot of it. Too much of the time spent developing a web app gets eaten by creating many of the same behaviors across sites, like fetching content from an endpoint and inserting it into a page. The Htmx JavaScript library makes it easy to add common interactive behaviors on web pages, often with nothing more than a couple of custom HTML tags. This video shows a few basic examples, from type-to-search input boxes to infinite-scroll displays.
NumPy, the Python library for fast array and matrix math, is a staple presence in the data science world. A new major revision of NumPy, version 2.0, is on the horizon. Here's what breaking changes to expect with this new version, what new features might be offered, and how to prepare your projects for them.
Want an all-in-one way to create, manage, and package Python projects -- which even automates fetching and setting up Python itself? Rye, an experimental new project written in Rust, provides a command-line tool for obtaining Python runtimes, setting up new projects, adding requirements, publishing to PyPI, and many other common tasks that normally have to be done manually. In this video, you'll see a quick example of Rye in action, and what kinds of tasks it can automate.
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