The power of genuine human connection

Bite-Sized Python News & Updates

Connection, Community and Showing Up

Hey Pythonista,

A quick note because I want you to get straight into listening to this podcast.

We're in a bit of a weird situation these days: we're more connected than ever, but we're almost completely disconnected from eachother.

Loneliness is rampant and many of our conversations are surface level platitudes. It's becoming increasingly rare to have a deep conversation with another person.

It's not something that's just miraculously going to change either.

We need to make the effort. We need to make the time for connecting with other people.

Listen to this week's podcast episode where I have an incredibly fun chat with one of my best mates, and ex-AWS colleagues, Huy Nguyen.

Huy's one heck of a communicator and connector. He has one of the widest networks of friends that I've ever seen. And I don't just mean "connections on LinkedIn". I mean real relationships that he can count on when he needs them most.

This kind of thing comes from years of making time for people and being truly interested in them and what they care about.

It's something we should all be doing to stay connected, and to satisfy that deep human need for community.

You can listen on your favourite podcast app, or better yet watch it on YouTube where you'll be able to see more happy snaps of Huy and I in Vietnam last year.

Finally, take the first step and go text someone you've been "meaning to message but haven't gotten around to it". I guarantee they'll love hearing from you.

Julian

(Photo: Huy and I celebrating my last actual day at AWS while in Saigon, Vietnam)

Watch the Episode

You only need a few debugging tools

Fancy tools come and go, but I keep reaching for the timeless classics when it comes to debugging + inspecting my Python 🐍🚀

- dir()
- help()
- often used inside pdb (the Python debugger)

What are your favorite inspection / debugging tools you don't leave the house without? 💡

(profiling is also incredibly useful, see below...)

Learn pdb in just 6 minutes

Rust for Python devs 🐍🦀 - are you interested in a new Pybites cohort?

Rust is everywhere lately, powering tools like uv, ruff, Pydantic, Polars. Even the Linux kernel now contains Rust! 🤯

If you're a Python dev curious about performance, safety, or just want to level up with a systems / compiled language, this might be for you.

We’re exploring a 4–6-week cohort, starting with beginner-friendly Rust exercises (on our own platform) and ending with a real app using Rust + PyO3.

📅 Tentative start: July/August 2025

🧑‍💻 Small group (~5), learn-by-doing / JIT (just in time) learning, and support by an expert Rust coach 😍

👉 Let us know you're interested to help us shape it. If there's enough demand, we’ll make it happen.

Let’s explore Rust together, the Pybites way. 💡 💪

I am interested in this (interest form)

Visualize slow code 🔥

Last week I profiled some slow Pandas code as a candidate to refactor using Polars.

One tool I learned about is snakeviz, a visual profiler that helps you spot performance bottlenecks fast.

To get started, it's as simple as this:

uv run python -m cProfile -o profile.out -m your_script_or_package
uv add --dev snakeviz
uv run snakeviz profile.out

From there, you can visually zoom in on hot paths in your code 🔥(see example to the left).

Thanks to this I could identify which part was slow and make it faster using Polars 📈

Interested in more Polars, reply to this email ...

Worried AI is eroding your coding skills?

Go code some Bites! 🐍 💪

Seriously, I (Bob) solved a bunch of them this week (also live-coding two), and it's really good to go 'minimal tooling' if you're using AI a lot. 💡

You're watching syntax closer, spot and correct silly mistakes, interpret error outputs, think deeper about the code, debug, refactor, etc.

And I am not the only one, I know Python experts that are longing for this deliberate practice again and enjoy putting some limits in place to stress the coding muscles (with AI there's higher risk of code muscle atrophy!)

The bite sized nature of these exercises makes that you can nicely slot them in like if they were gym sessions. 🏋️

Bonus: you'll also write more performant code

Code Python (without AI)

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