Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Travis Oliphant, creator of NumPy and SciPy, joins Ryan to explore the development of Python as a data science tool, the evolution of these foundational libraries, and the importance of community and collaboration in open-source projects, including Travis’ current work to support sustainable open-source through the OpenTeams Incubator. 

Episode notes: 

NumPy and SciPy are the fundamental packages and algorithms for scientific computing with Python. NumPy 2.3.0 and SciPy 1.16.0 are out now. 

The OpenTeams Incubator helps start, grow, and sustain open-source software communities.

Quansight is a data, science, and engineering firm rooted in the work of the Python Data, Science, and AI/ML open-source communities.

Connect with Travis on LinkedIn or email him at travis@OTincubator.com

Today we’re shouting out user RobinFrcd for answering pytest-asyncio has a closed event loop, but only when running all tests and winning a Populist badge.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Chris Cullerot, Vice President for Technology and Innovation at iTech AG joins the show to unpack the massive savings potential outlined in a recent GAO report—over $100 billion—through better IT asset management and consolidation. He shares real-world examples of how federal agencies are addressing duplicative systems, overcoming change management hurdles, and building scalable platforms that improve efficiency, reduce costs, and strengthen security.

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Alex Kihm just turned 40, and has been into computers for 36 years. He was given his first hand me down computer at the age of 4 by his parents, and also grew up with lego bricks and building things. He is an engineer by training, but eventually switched to econometrics on the big data side. Outside of his professional life, he is married and describes himself as water affectionate. He enjoys swimming, diving - and free diving. In fact, he studied diving during his semester abroad. His free diving is mainly a hobby, but he has deep respect for the professional free divers of the world.

At his original startup, Alex started to dive into LLMs and immediately ran into RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation). When he observed the wrong information being returned, along with a ton of resource consumption in the process - IE cost - he set out to solve the problem, and figured out the solution was in the chunks.

This is the creation story of POMA AI.

Sponsors

• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch
• Mailtrap
• .TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)

Links

• https://poma-ai.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-kihm-27a902338/

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donations

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Sally Adee is the author of We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds. Adee joins Big Technology Podcast to pull back the curtain on the body’s hidden wiring and brain-computer interfaces. We dig into how electricity drives every thought and twitch, why Neuralink’s first patient blew our minds, and what it will take to keep implants working long after the hype cycle fades. Tune in for a tour of limb-regrowing tadpoles, cancer cells that short-circuit, and the uncomfortable ethics of pleasure buttons and startup bankruptcies. We also tackle the hard numbers—electrode counts, word-per-minute Hit play and get current.

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Today, I'm talking with Dan Eyman, the Managing Director at Meld Valuation, specializing in independent, audit ready valuations for VC backed startups and VC firms. He is an expert in the valuation of complex instruments such as convertible debt and SAFEs. Dan is going to illuminate the common mistakes of founders, how valuations differ, and what founders should understand about dilution and how fundraising affects their cap table.

Questions

• What are the most common mistakes you see founders make when it comes to valuations or equity structuring?
• Can you break down how SAFEs and convertible debt actually work—and how do they impact ownership over time?
• At what point should a startup bring in a valuation firm, and what are the risks of waiting too long?
• How do 409A and ASC 820 valuations differ, and why do they matter for venture-backed companies?
• What should founders understand about dilution and how fundraising rounds affect their cap table long-term?
• What are your general observations around venture capital investing, and the market for investment right now?
• You’ve worked with thousands of startups—what separates those who scale successfully from those who stall?

Links

• https://meldvaluation.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/danieleyman

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donations

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

SPONSORED BY AWS

Ryan welcomes Darko Mesaroš, Principal Developer Advocate at AWS and all around computer history buff, to chat about history of software development improvements and how they made developers made more productive. They discuss the technologies and breakthroughs that created greater abstractions on the underlying bit manipulations and made software development more powerful. 

Episode notes:

If you’re looking to take advantage of the breakthroughs mentioned in this episode, check out AWS Builder Center, a place for you to learn, build, and connect with builders in the AWS community.

If you want to connect with Darko, find him on social media including LinkedIn. 

Congrats to Lundin for being curious and asking about Implicit type promotion rules.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Avi Perez has been in the data and analytics space for more than 25 years. He began his career in banking and finance in Australia, but quickly grew tired of crunching numbers for the big wigs, wanting to find a better way to calculate this information. Outside of tech, he enjoys a wide array of music, from classical to modern trance. He's a big science fiction nut, enjoying shows like Aliens and the Matrix, and cooks up some exquisite cuisine on occasion.

Within his prior startup, Avi and his co-founders built out a way to make intelligent decisions for their business using data. After they exited the business, they wanted to continue their data stint, but in particular, commercialize the analytics solution they built.

This is the creation story of Pyramid Analytics.

Sponsors

• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch
• Mailtrap
• .TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)

Links

• https://www.pyramidanalytics.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/avi-perez-cto/

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donations

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Rich Harris, creator of Svelte and software engineer at Vercel, joins Ryan on the show to dive into the evolution and future of web frameworks. They discuss the birth and growth of Svelte during the rise of mobile, the challenges of building robust and efficient web applications, how companies can back more open-source community projects, and the dirty little secret about asynchronous operations and component frameworks. 

Episode notes:

Svelte is a UI framework that uses a compiler to let you write components using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It’s ranked as one of developer’s most admired web frameworks in this year’s Developer Survey. 

Keep up with the Svelte community on the Svelte Society page. 

Find Rich on Blue Sky and GitHub.

Congrats to Paul Pladijs, who won a Populist badge for answering the question How can one change the timestamp of an old commit in Git?.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Topics covered in this episode:

• * pypistats.org was down, is now back, and there’s a CLI*
• * State of Python 2025*
• * wrapt: A Python module for decorators, wrappers and monkey patching.*
• pysentry
• Extras
• Joke

Watch on YouTube

About the show

Sponsored by us! Support our work through:

• Our courses at Talk Python Training
• The Complete pytest Course
• Patreon Supporters

Connect with the hosts

• Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky)
• Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org / @brianokken.bsky.social
• Show: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky)

Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too.

Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it.

Brian #1: pypistats.org was down, is now back, and there’s a CLI

• pypistats.org is a cool site to check the download stats for Python packages.

• It was down for a while, like 3 weeks?

• A couple days ago, Hugo van Kemenade announced that it was back up.

• With some changes in stewardship

  • “pypistats.org is back online! 🚀📈

    Thanks to @jezdez for suggesting the @ThePSF takes stewardship and connecting the right people, to @EWDurbin for migrating, and of course to Christopher Flynn for creating and running it for all these years!”

• Hugo has a CLI version, pypistats

  • You can give it a command for what you want to search for
    • recent,overall, python_major, python_minor, system
  • Then either a package name, a directory path, or if nothing, it will grab the current directory package via pyproject.toml or setup.cfg
  • very cool

Michael #2: State of Python 2025

• Michael’s Themes
  • Python people use Python: 86% of respondents use Python as their main language
  • We are mostly brand-new programmers: Exactly 50% of respondents have less than two years of professional coding experience
  • Data science is now over half of all Python
  • Most still use older Python versions despite benefits of newer releases: Compelling math to make the change.
  • Python web devs resurgence
• Forward-looking trends
  • Agentic AI will be wild
  • Async, await, and threading are becoming core to Python
  • Python GUIs and mobile are rising
• Actionable ideas
  • Action 1: Learn uv
  • Action 2: Use the latest Python
  • Action 3: Learn agentic AI
  • Action 4: Learn to read basic Rust
  • Action 5: Invest in understanding threading
  • Action 6: Remember the newbies

Brian #3: wrapt: A Python module for decorators, wrappers and monkey patching.

• “The aim of the wrapt module is to provide a transparent object proxy for Python, which can be used as the basis for the construction of function wrappers and decorator functions.

  An easy to use decorator factory is provided to make it simple to create your own decorators that will behave correctly in any situation they may be used.”

• Why not just use functools.wraps()?

  • “The wrapt module focuses very much on correctness. It therefore goes way beyond existing mechanisms such as functools.wraps() to ensure that decorators preserve introspectability, signatures, type checking abilities etc. The decorators that can be constructed using this module will work in far more scenarios than typical decorators and provide more predictable and consistent behaviour.”

• There’s a bunch of blog posts from 2014 / 2015 (and kept updated) that talk about how wrapt solves many issues with traditional ways to decorate and patch things in Python, including “How you implemented your Python decorator is wrong”.

• Docs are pretty good, with everything from simple wrappers to an example of building a wrapper to handle thread synchronization

Michael #4: pysentry

• via Owen Lamont

• Install via uv tool install pysentry-rs

• Scan your Python dependencies for known security vulnerabilities with Rust-powered scanner.

• PySentry audits Python projects for known security vulnerabilities by analyzing dependency files (uv.lock, poetry.lock, Pipfile.lock, pyproject.toml, Pipfile, requirements.txt) and cross-referencing them against multiple vulnerability databases. It provides comprehensive reporting with support for various output formats and filtering options.

• Key Features:

  • Multiple Project Formats: Supports uv.lock, poetry.lock, Pipfile.lock, pyproject.toml, Pipfile, and requirements.txt files

  • External Resolver Integration: Leverages uv and pip-tools for accurate requirements.txt constraint solving

  • Multiple Data Sources:

    • PyPA Advisory Database (default)
    • PyPI JSON API
    • OSV.dev (Open Source Vulnerabilities)

  • Flexible Output for different workflows: Human-readable, JSON, SARIF, and Markdown formats

  • Performance Focused:

    • Written in Rust for speed
    • Async/concurrent processing
    • Multi-tier intelligent caching (vulnerability data + resolved dependencies)

  • Comprehensive Filtering:

    • Severity levels (low, medium, high, critical)
    • Dependency scopes (main only vs all [optional, dev, prod, etc] dependencies)
    • Direct vs. transitive dependencies

  • Enterprise Ready: SARIF output for IDE/CI integration

  • I tried it on pythonbytes.fm and found only one issue, sadly can’t be fixed:

    PYSENTRY SECURITY AUDIT
    =======================
    
    SUMMARY: 89 packages scanned • 1 vulnerable • 1 vulnerabilities found
    
    SEVERITY:  1 LOW
    
    UNFIXABLE: 1 vulnerabilities cannot be fixed
    
    VULNERABILITIES
    ---------------
    
    1. PYSEC-2022-43059  aiohttp v3.12.15  [LOW] [source: pypa-zip]
                AIOHTTP 3.8.1 can report a "ValueError: Invalid IPv6 URL" outcome, which can lead to a Denial of Service (DoS). NOTE:...
    
    Scan completed
    

Extras

Michael:

• I’ve been rumbling with rumdl.
  • Ruben fixed one of my complaints about it with issue #58.
  • Config seems like it might be off. Here’s mine .rumdl.toml.
  • I’ve been using it on the upcoming Talk Python in Production book
    • Read the first third online and get notified when its out.
    • 20 or so Markdown files
    • 45,000 words of content
• I asked if 3.13.6 would be the last 3.13 release? No.
  • Thanks Hugo.
  • Python 3.13.7 is now out.

Joke: Marked for destruction