We hope that you and your loved ones are staying safe from the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result of its effect on large gatherings, PyCon 2020 was cancelled changed to an online event. Although not being able to gather in person was disheartening for organizers, speakers, and attendees, the Python community shared virtual high-fives and hugs with PyCon US 2020 Online. We recorded our planned Heroku workshop for the event, on which this blog post is based.

If you're like me, or like many other Python developers, you've probably lived (and maybe migrated) through a few version releases. Python 3.7(.3), one of the latest releases, includes some impressive new language features that help to keep Python one of the easiest, and most powerful languages out there. If you're already using a Python 3.x version, you should consider upgrading to Python 3.7. Read on to learn more about some of the exciting features and improvements.

Data Classes

One of the most tedious parts about working with Python prior to 3.7 in an object-oriented way was creating classes to represent data in your application.

Prior to Python 3.7, you would have to...

Andrey Petrov is the author of urllib3, the creator of Briefmetrics and ssh-chat, and a former Googler and YCombinator alum. He’s here to tell us of a dangerous expedition his requests undertook, which sent them from Python, through the land of C, to a place called Go (and back again).

Today we're going to make a Python library that is actually the Go webserver, for which we can write handlers in Python. It makes Python servers really fast, and—more importantly—it’s a bit fun and experimental. This post is a more detailed overview of my PyCon 2016 talk of the same title. If you'd like to play along at home, this code was written in Go 1.6 and Python 3.5 and the entire complete...

Today, we're thrilled to host Jacob Kaplan-Moss. Jacob's a former Herokai and long-time core contributor to Django, and he's here to share an in-depth look at something that he believes will define the future of the framework.

Django Channels allows Python developers to build real-time, asynchronous web apps with Python and JavaScript. It augments Django’s robust response-request architecture with asynchronous protocol handling, including WebSockets support. In this Django Channels tutorial, we’ll show you how to build a real-time chat app with Django, Channels, Redis, and Heroku Dynos.

What are Django Channels?

When Django was created, almost 20 years ago, the web was a...

A big update to the beloved Python web framework known as Django was released recently: Django 1.9. This release contains a long list of improvements for everything from the graphical styling of the admin to the ability to run your test suite in parallel.

Our favorite improvements to the framework were, of course, all about our favorite database: Postgres. Here are some of the highlights from the official release notes (highly recommended reading).

Renamed PostgreSQL Back-end

Django's fantastic built-in Postgres database back-end received a nice name change. Previously known as django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2, the back-end will now be officially available as the much easier...