Python Weekly Issue 151

Curated Python news, tools, and insights — weekly.

Welcome to the 151st issue of Python Weekly — your weekly roundup of the most useful news, tools, tutorials, and discussions from the Python ecosystem.

This week: Python is getting more efficient (event-driven subprocess waits in 3.15), more correct (new regex \z in 3.14), and faster (Pillow I/O optimizations). Django devs get practical memory profiling with Memray plus debate on class-based views. Tooling remains hot with an uv cheatsheet, pandas 3.0 updates, and a handful of new utilities and releases.

📚 Articles, Tutorials & Analysis

• Ending 15 Years of subprocess Polling: Python’s subprocess wait logic has historically relied on busy-loop polling. Python 3.15 moves toward event-driven process waiting using OS-level mechanisms, reducing wasted CPU cycles.

• Django: Profile Memory Usage With Memray: A practical walkthrough of using Memray to find Django memory bloat, with a focus on profiling startup/import-heavy code paths.

• Create Callable Instances With Python’s .__call__(): A clear introduction to what “callable” means in Python and how to build objects that behave like functions using __call__.

• The C-Shaped Hole in Package Management: Deep dive into the messy overlap between system package managers and Python package management, especially when Python packages depend on native/system libraries.

• Use \z Not $ With Python Regular Expressions: Why $ is a footgun for end-of-string matching in Python (it may match before a trailing newline), and how Python 3.14’s \z improves correctness and portability.

• Speeding Up Pillow’s Open and Save: Profiling Pillow image I/O with the upcoming Tachyon profiler (Python 3.15) and the resulting optimization work + PR details.

• Some Notes on Starting to Use Django: Julia Evans shares early Django learnings and “what surprised me” notes, with an associated Hacker News discussion.

• How Long Does It Take to Learn Python?: Realistic timelines and suggested study pacing for learning Python, from beginner to job-ready.

• uv Cheatsheet: Handy list of high-signal uv commands covering project setup, scripts, tool installs, and dependency workflows.

• What’s New in pandas 3: pandas 3.0 highlights explained via a real example, focusing on what actually changes from pandas 2.x.

• GeoPandas Basics: Maps, Projections, and Spatial Joins: Tutorial intro to GeoPandas fundamentals including CRS/projections and spatial joins.

• Things I’ve Learned in My 10 Years as an Engineering Manager: A collection of hard-earned engineering management lessons, plus an HN thread.

• Django Views Versus the Zen of Python: Argument for why Django’s base View can feel more “Pythonic” than heavy generic class-based views.

💻 Code (Tools & Libraries)

• oban: Job Orchestration Framework for Python: A Python job orchestration framework for building background workflows and structured task execution.

• cmd-chat: Peer-to-Peer Encrypted CLI Chat: A P2P encrypted chat tool that runs in the terminal, built for direct CLI-to-CLI messaging.

📦 Releases & Updates

• calgebra v0.10.6: Set Operations for Calendar Intervals: Utility library for performing set-style operations over calendar interval ranges.

• dj-celery-panel v0.3.3: Django Admin panel for inspecting Celery tasks, now updated to v0.3.3.

• jetbase v0.17.2: Database migration tool for Python with a new v0.17.2 release.

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