Spiderweb, Building RAG with Postgres and more
The Essential Guide to Large Language Models Structured Output, and Function Calling, Web Scraping With Scrapy and MongoDB with some more interesting news, articles, packages and projects
News
Python 3.13.0rc3 released
This is the third release candidate of Python 3.13.0 This release, 3.13.0rc3, is the final release preview (I guess) of 3.13. The official release of 3.13.0 is now scheduled for Monday, 2024-10-07.
This extra, unplanned release candidate exists because of a couple of last-minute issues, primarily a significant performance regression in specific workloads due to the incremental cyclic garbage collector (introduced in the alpha releases). The team decided to roll back the garbage collector change in 3.13 (and continue work in 3.14 to improve it), apply several other important bug fixes and roll out a new release candidate.
NVIDIA Webinar - Accelerating Python with GPUs
Graphics processing units (GPUs) are now used for much more than just visual tasks. They help speed up scientific research, train artificial intelligence in many areas, analyze medical images and predict new proteins. This free, one-hour webinar will explain how researchers and professionals can use Python software, tools and frameworks to work with NVIDIA GPU-based systems for these purposes.
Python 3.12.7 released
This latest maintenance release contains about 120 bug fixes, build improvements and documentation changes to 3.12.6.
Vulture 2.13 released
Python 3.13 and the Latest Trends: A Developer’s Guide to 2025
JetBrains folks did a live stream with some of the PSF team. Watch it to get ready for the Upcoming Python 3.13 Release, as well as learn a bit about what goes into Python behind the scenes!
Articles
Spiderweb: The Tiny Web Framework
When we build a website, we usually use frameworks like Django or Flask, but we often don’t really understand how they work internally. Joe Kaufeld wanted to learn more about them, so he decided to dive in and create his own from scratch! In this article, he shared his experience and the lessons he learned along the way.
# Joe Kaufeld
The Essential Guide to Large Language Models Structured Output, and Function Calling
In this article, Pavel Bazin explained in detail what structured output and function calling are, using simple examples. He also showed how to build a Q&A system for stock prices using function calling. It's definitely worth reading—you'll get a clear understanding of these topics.
# Pavel Bazin
Beyond the Pause: Exploring the Inner Workings of Python’s `sleep()`
Wondering how sleep() in Python really works? Check out this article by Rupali Kavale. She explained why sleep timing is never undershot and what goes on behind the scenes.
# Rupali Kavale
Building RAG with Postgres
If you’re thinking about building your RAG system using Postgres, you should read this article by Eric Zakariasson. He talked about the data ingestion process and shared tips on chunking, including what worked for him, how much chunk overlap he used, etc.
# Eric Zakariasson
Web Scraping With Scrapy and MongoDB
Scrapy is a powerful Python framework for web scraping. If you want to learn how to scrape websites with it, check out this tutorial by Martin Breuss. Plus, you'll also pick up some basics about MongoDB along the way.
# Martin Breuss
Interesting Packages and Projects to explore
Django-Flags - Feature flags for Django projects.
tiktoken - Fast BPE tokeniser for use with OpenAI's models.
PyPDF2 - A pure-python PDF library capable of splitting, merging, cropping, and transforming the pages of PDF files.
About Upcoming Python Events
Creating Python Communities - Buea
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