tiny-agents, Text Editor in 7 Minutes, Avoid indexes and more
with some more interesting news, articles, packages and projects
News
Python 3.13.5 is now available
PyCon Africa CFP is open!
PyData Virginia 2025 Videos
Articles
Narwhals: Unified DataFrame Functions for pandas, Polars, and PySpark
Pandas
used to be the go-to tool for working with data. But now, there are many other excellent options available, like Polars
and PySpark
. If different teams in your company use different data tools, Narwhals
can help. It allows everyone to work with data in a consistent way, no matter which library they prefer. Marco Gorelli showed this with a helpful example in his article.
# Marco Gorelli
Writing a Text Editor in 7 Minutes using Textual
No Vim? No problem! Fredrik Sjöstrand got your back. You can build your own text editor with syntax highlighting using Textual
and he showed how in his article.
# Fredrik Sjöstrand
Tiny Agents in Python: a MCP-powered agent in ~70 lines of code
The Hugging Face team has created tiny-agents
, a new feature that lets their huggingface_hub
software act as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) Client. This means that your AI models (LLMs) can now easily access and use tools from various MCP servers. In their recent article, they explained how to set up these tiny agents in Python to connect with MCP servers, which then gives your LLMs powerful new abilities to interact with the world and perform complex tasks.
# Hugging Face team
Marimo: A Reactive, Reproducible Notebook
Marimo
notebooks are changing how we use notebooks because they are reactive. If you're interested in learning more, check out the Real Python article by Ian Eyre. He covered a lot about Marimo notebooks, including How to create a Marimo notebook, Marimo's reactivity, Adding interactivity to notebooks, How to share your notebooks.
# Ian Eyre
Avoid indexes in Python
While indexes are useful, relying on them too much can be like Maslow's hammer – if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In other words, you might try to solve every problem with the same tool, even when there are better ways. Trey Hunner has shown some fantastic alternative methods for common tasks like checking if something is in a list, getting specific items from tuples and looping through multiple lists, all without constantly needing to use indexes.
# Trey Hunner
Interesting Packages and Projects to Explore
tqdm - ⚡ A Fast, Extensible Progress Bar for Python and CLI
iPOPO - A service-oriented component model framework
nbconvert - Converting Jupyter Notebooks (.ipynb files) to other formats.
Arrest - Arrest is a wrapper of pydantic and httpx to make your REST api calls type-safe and structured
Ovld - Overloading Python functions