Python News Brief (Q3 2021)

Honeybadger's quarterly briefings keep you up to date on the most important developments in your programming communities. We curate the news so you can spend more time focusing on what's really important.

• Events: Conferences and meetups. Upcoming and recently completed.
• Security: Recent vulnerability reports
• Projects: News about major community projects
• Trending Topics: Summaries of the big topics everyone's talking about
• Standout Content: Content that didn't fit in other sections, but that was too cool to leave out.

Events

EuroPython 2021 on Jul 26 - Aug 1 (online).

The largest Python Conference in Europe.

• Aug 2: We got reports of some attendees of EuroPython 2021 that a company is trying to sell personal data of EuroPython attendees, which includes name, email, phone number, physical address, company name and more: it is a scam. We have contacted this company already and asked them to stop. In the meantime we are asking all our attendees to ignore the message and treat it as spam.

• Jul 23: Optiver, the keystone sponsor of the event, is running a free workshop into the fascinating world of algorithmic trading.

• Jul 22: Some practical tips to make the event as productive and enjoyable as possible.

• Jul 22: It has become a tradition at EuroPython to include a special data science track. This year, they have expanded on the theme and included more data science related content than ever before, including keynotes and workshops. More info here.

• Jul 20: JetBrain is the Gold Sponsor for EuroPython 2021.

• Jul 20: a post to highlight two specific workshops available for those who want a deeper dive: "Django Girls Workshop" that will teach you how to build your own blog from scratch, and "Beginner's Day Workshop by HumbleData" serving as an introduction to how Python is used in the data science community.

• Jul 19: a presentation of the keynote speakers and of the conference booklet.

• Jul 16: free and discounted tickets are available for other conferences organizers around Europe.

• Jul 13: Bloomber is the Diamond Sponsor for EuroPython 2021.

• Jul 09: Microsoft is the Diamond Sponsor for EuroPython 2021.

• Jul 08: the merchandise shop opens (shipping worldwide).

• Jul 06: Optiver is the Keystone Sponsor for EuroPython 2021.

• Jul 06: training and workshops tickets.

DjangoCon US 2021 on Oct 21 - Oct 23

An online event dedicated to teaching, inspiring and sharing with members of the Django community (tickets available here).

• Sep 10: speaker presentation of Anna Makarudze, the President of the Django Software Foundation Board of Directors and Fundraising Coordinator for the Django Girls Foundation.

• Aug 26: announcement including all the talks for this year's event.

PyCon India 2021 on Sep 17 - Sep 20

The largest gathering of Pythonistas in India for the Python programming language (schedule here).

• Sep 15: the poster presentation session details. A poster is a graphical summary of projects or ideas. The poster session provides an opportunity to network with the conference attendees and acts as a starting point for further discussions. While talks generally need to appeal to a wide section of the community, posters can cover niche topics.

• Sep 12: the birds of a feather session details are out for the this year's premier Python conference. BoFs are discussions about a particular topic within a group of interested folks.

• Sep 12: details for the Computer Science panel discussion.

• Sep 12: Following the trend of PyCon India 2020, we are continuing with .Extend track providing one more opportunity to the people to present their submissions in an additional track that we call the .Extend track on Stage 4. You can read about this track and the concept behind it in this blog post from 2020. Below is the schedule for the same.

• Sep 12: this year, they're bringing more ideas and insights to the forefront of the Python community by introducing talks about neurodiversity, and experience sharing with Stage 5.

• Sep 11: the workshop selection for this year's event.

• Sep 3: In-Kind sponsors announcement: Packt, Viprush Technologies, and Toyota Connected India.

• Aug 25: first 4 In-Kind sponsors announcement: DeepSource, EPAM, Fulfil.IO, and IBM Quantum.

• Aug 04: PyCon communities acroos India are coming together again to organize a series of mega meetups as a precursor to PyCon India 2021.

• Aug 02: the final schedule is presented, including 28 talks, 6 workshops, 4 keynotes and much more.

• Jul 01: keynote speaker announcement: Luciano Ramalho, the author of Fluent Python (O'Reilly).

SciPy 2021 on Jul 12 - Jul 18 (online)

The annual SciPy Conference brings together attendees from industry, academia, and government to showcase their latest projects, learn from skilled users and developers, and collaborate on code development.

• date-unknown: a YouTube playlist with some of the conferences from the event.

PyTorch developer day 2021

Developer Day is designed for developers and users to discuss core technical developments, ideas, and roadmaps.

• Aug 23: opening call for content.

Real Python Office Hours

Real Python Office Hours is a weekly hangout where members of Real Python get the chance to meet fellow Pythonistas to chat about your learning progress, ask questions, and discuss Python tips & tricks via screen sharing.

Security

• Sep 03: The package pillow 5.2.0 and before 8.3.2 are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via the getrgb function.
• Jul 13: Pillow through 8.2.0 and PIL (aka Python Imaging Library) through 1.1.7 allow an attacker to pass controlled parameters directly into a convert function to trigger a buffer overflow in Convert.c.

Projects

Python

• Aug 3: the first Python 3.10 preview can be downloaded and tested. Download it now or simply use pyenv if your eager to try the structural pattern matching feature.

FastAPI

FastAPI is a modern, fast, web framework for building APIs with Python 3.6+ and based on standard Python type hints.

• Aug 24: version 0.68.1 released with support for read_with_orm_mode, to support SQLModel relationship attributes.

• Jul 29: version 0.68.0 released with support for extensions and updates to the OpenAPI schema in each path operation, additonal OpenAPI metadata parameters to FastAPI class, shown on the automatic API docs UI, description parameter to all the security scheme classes, OpenAPI models, supporting recursive models and extensions.

Flask

Flask is a micro web framework.

• No new releases or particular news on the project.

Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

• Sep 21: Django 4.0a1 pre release is available on Pypi.
• Sep 1: Django 3.2.7 was released (minor fixes).
• Aug 2: Django 3.2.6 was released (minor fixes).
• Jul 1: Django 3.2.5 was released fixing a high severity issue (CVE-2021-35042) and several bugs.

TensorFlow

TensorFlow is an end-to-end open source platform for machine learning. It has a comprehensive, flexible ecosystem of tools, libraries and community resources that lets researchers push the state-of-the-art in ML and developers easily build and deploy ML powered applications.

• Sep 13: introducing TensorFlow Similarity, a python package designed to make it easy and fast to train similarity models using TensorFlow.
• Aug 11: TensorFlow 2.6.0 released (release details here).
• Aug 10: TensorFlow 2.5.1 released (release details here).

PyTorch

An open source machine learning framework that accelerates the path from research prototyping to production deployment.

• Sep 8: announcing PyTorch Annual Hackaton 2021. Join here.
• Aug 3: an article describing the details of the new 1.9 PyTorch profiler.

Pandas

pandas is a fast, powerful, flexible and easy to use open source data analysis and manipulation tool, built on top of the Python programming language.

• Sep 12: version 1.3.3 was released (see the changelog for more).
• Aug 15: version 1.3.2 was released (see the changelog for more).
• Jul 25: version 1.3.1 was released (see the changelog for more).
• Jul 2: version 1.3.0 was released (see the changelog for more).

Numpy

NumPy is the fundamental package for scientific computing in Python.

• Aug 15: version 1.21.2 released (see release notes here).
• Jul 18: version 1.21.1 released (see release notes here).

Trending Topics

There weren't any big news or debates in the community in this period. Performance remains probably the most important focus among developers (here's a podcast around that topic). Moreover PEP 665 confirmed the efforts being made in order for a better standardization of installation requirements and dependencies for Python projects (see this discussion on Reddit for more): on August 18 the Python Software Foundation let us know that Shamika Mohanan has joined the PSF as Packaging Project Manager.

Type Hints. (5)

• Protocol Types in Python 3.8
  • Vincenzo Chianese
  • An interesting article about Protocol Types in Python 3.8.
• Python 3.10 – Simplifies Unions in Type Annotations
  • @driscollis
  • The focus of this tutorial is to talk about PEP 604, which makes writing union types easier when adding type annotation (AKA: type hinting) to your codebase.

Łukasz Langa. (8)

• I am the New CPython Developer In Residence
  • Łukasz Langa
  • A blog post suggested by Guido Van Rossum himself on what does it means being the CPython Developer In Residence and the main targets for the upcoming Python releases.
• Black Team AMA: Łukasz Langa is also the creator of Black, the uncompromising Code Formatter. Here's the team's AMA on Reddit.
• Łukasz Langa Is the Inaugural CPython Developer-in-Residence: the Python Software Foundation post on the news.
• AsyncIO + Music, Origins of Black, and Managing Python Releases: a podcast/interview by Real Python with Łukasz Langa.
• Łukasz wrote also some interesting (and very detailed) weekly reports.

Standout Content

Worth a star:

• pedalboard: add cool effects to your sounds. By Spotify.
• prettymaps: give a fancy style to any map.
• borb: probably the coolest PDFs creation library out there.
• tryceratops: handle exceptions like a pro.
• pyreports: create complex reports from different data sources.

Articles:

• The Walrus Operator: Python 3.8 Assignment Expressions.
• Reddit AMA With Will McGugan, Author of Rich and Textual.
• Python Behind the scenes: how async/await works in Python.