Episode Details

How often have you heard about the speed of Python? What’s actually being measured, where are the bottlenecks—development time or run time—and which matters more for productivity? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week, bringing another batch of PyCoder’s Weekly articles and projects.

Christopher shares an article titled “The Uselessness of ‘Fast’ and ‘Slow’ in Programming.” It digs into how the different aspects of software performance span a wide range of orders of magnitude, and how developers can obsess over irrelevant performance details, often losing more time working in suboptimal environments than building what they need with tools they already know.

We also discuss an article about why uv is fast, which explains how most of its speed comes from engineering decisions rather than just being written in Rust.

We then share several other articles and projects from the Python community, including a roundup of 2025 year-end lists, an explanation of why Python’s deepcopy can be so slow, serving a website with FastAPI using Jinja2, Python numbers every programmer should know, a discussion of spec-driven development and whether waterfall is back, a tool to detect whether a PDF has a bad redaction, and a CLI for measuring HTTP request phases.

Topics:

• 00:00:00 – Introduction
• 00:02:53 – Top Python Libraries of 2025
• 00:04:43 – 2025 Python Year in Review
• 00:04:58 – PyPI in 2025: A Year in Review
• 00:05:36 – Join in the PSF Year-End Fundraiser & Membership Drive!
• 00:06:10 – How uv Got So Fast
• 00:12:29 – Why Python’s deepcopy Can Be So Slow
• 00:17:03 – Serve a Website With FastAPI Using HTML and Jinja2
• 00:23:19 – The Uselessness of “Fast” and “Slow” in Programming
• 00:27:06 – Python Numbers Every Programmer Should Know
• 00:28:17 – Video Course Spotlight
• 00:29:43 – Spec-Driven Development: The Waterfall Strikes Back
• 00:49:21 – x-ray: A Tool to Detect Whether a PDF Has a Bad Redaction
• 00:52:20 – httptap: CLI Measuring HTTP Request Phases
• 00:54:19 – Thanks and goodbye

2025 Top List Roundup

• Top Python Libraries of 2025 – Explore Tryolabs’ 11th annual Top Python Libraries roundup, featuring two curated Top 10 lists: one for General Use and one for AI/ML/Data tools.
• 2025 Python Year in Review – Talk Python interviews Barry Warsaw, Brett Cannon, Gregory Kapfhammer, Jodie Burchell, Reuven Lerner, and Thomas Wouters, and the panel discusses what mattered for Python in 2025.
• PyPI in 2025: A Year in Review – Dustin summarizes all the happenings with the Python Packaging Index in 2025, including 130,000 new projects and over 2.5 trillion requests served.
• Join in the PSF Year-End Fundraiser & Membership Drive!

Topics:

• How uv Got So Fast – uv’s speed comes from engineering decisions, not just Rust. Static metadata, dropping legacy formats, and standards that didn’t exist five years ago