I am happy to announce my latest book, Vibe Coding Video Games with Python. Here’s the announcement from my Kickstarter: Welcome to Vibe Coding Video Games with Python. In this book, you will learn how to use artificial intelligence to create mini-games. You will attempt to recreate the look and feel of various classic video games. The intention is not to violate copyright or anything of the sort, but instead to learn the limitations and the power of AI. Instead, you will simply be learning about whether or not you can use AI to help you know how to create…
Author: drweb
For years, observability was supposed to be the great equalizer. The way every team could understand their systems, debug faster, and ship with confidence. But somewhere along the way, it became the opposite: Complex, expensive, and increasingly constrained. What was meant to empower developers has become a system governed by egress costs, ingestion pricing, and sampling limits. Teams do not stop observing because they want to. They stop because they are forced to make tradeoffs to stay within budget. The good news? The pendulum is swinging back. A quiet architectural revolution is already underway. One that puts observability back inside…
Python has supported type hinting for quite a few versions now, starting way back in 3.5. However, Python itself does not enforce type checking. Instead, you need to use an external tool or IDE. The first and arguably most popular is mypy. Microsoft also has a Python type checker that you can use in VS Code called Pyright, and then there’s the lesser-known Pyrefly type checker and language server. The newest type checker on the block is Astral’s ty, the maker of Ruff. Ty is another super-fast Python utility written in Rust. In this article, you will learn how to switch your project to use ty…
Decorators are a concept that can trip up new Python users. You may find this definition helpful: A decorator is a function that takes in another function and adds new functionality to it without modifying the original function. Functions can be used just like any other data type in Python. A function can be passed to a function or returned from a function, just like a string or integer. If you have jumped on the type-hinting bandwagon, you will probably want to add type hints to your decorators. That has been difficult until fairly recently. Let’s see how to type…
OpenAI announced Thursday that it has reached an agreement to acquire Astral, the startup behind some of Python community’s most popular open-source developer tools. The acquisition marks further escalation in the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted development market, which has led to a coding war between OpenAI and its primary rivals, including Anthropic and the AI-native code editor Cursor. In integrating Astral’s high-performance tooling into its Codex platform, OpenAI intends to solidify its ecosystem as the primary destination for software engineers. Financial terms were not disclosed, but under the deal Astral’s team is expected to join OpenAI to enhance Codex,…
My latest book, Vibe Coding Video Games with Python, is now available as an eBook. The paperback will be coming soon, hopefully by mid-February at the latest. The book is around 183 pages in length and is 6×9” in size. In this book, you will learn how to use artificial intelligence to create mini-games. You will attempt to recreate the look and feel of various classic video games. The intention is not to violate copyright or anything of the sort, but instead to learn the limitations and the power of AI. Instead, you will simply be learning about whether or not you…
Secure Code Warrior (SCW) this week added an artificial intelligence (AI) agent that both identifies code generated by an AI coding tool and automatically applies the appropriate governance policies. Company CEO Pieter Danhieux said the SCW Trust Agent makes it possible for DevSecOps teams to use AI to verify which AI models influenced specific commits, correlate that influence to vulnerability exposure, and take corrective action before insecure code is added to a production environment. DevSecOps teams can also use the AI agent to discover any Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that might have been deployed without permission. Finally, SCW benchmark…
Python has had type hinting support since Python 3.5, over TEN years ago! However, Python’s type annotations have changed repeatedly over the years. In Python Typing: Type Checking for Python Programmers, you will learn all you need to know to add type hints to your Python applications effectively. You will also learn how to use Python type checkers, configure them, and set them up in pre-commit or GitHub Actions. This knowledge will give you the power to check your code and your team’s code automatically before merging, hopefully catching defects before they make it into your products. Support the Book! You…
This article explains how to use the new Java features provided within Project Leyden to speed up Spring Boot application startup. Project Leyden is an OpenJDK initiative focused on making Java applications start faster, warm up quicker, and use less memory. It builds on CDS (Class Data Sharing) and Ahead-of-Time optimizations to move selected computations out of runtime and perform them earlier, reducing work during application startup and execution. It is currently in the experimental phase. So, it is not a part of the standard JDK distribution, and you should definitely not try it in production. To use it, you…
Textual is a great Python user interface package. Textual lets you create a GUI-like interface in your terminal. You can use many different widgets in Textual. However, the widget you will be focusing on in this tutorial is the humble checkbox. Checkboxes are used for Boolean choices. They return a True if checked and a False if unchecked. You can use a checkbox as a clear visual cue to indicate whether one or more options are enabled or disabled. In this tutorial, you will learn the following: How to create a standard checkbox How to customize the checkbox widget Let’s…