fidzu : python

There is a bit of schadenfreude on Twitter right now about Anthropic being hit by the US government's export control directive to suspend access to Fable and Mythos. Anthropic and their leadership have spent a lot of time and effort describing its own technology as dangerous and in need of strict controls and regulation. Now that the US government appears to have taken that framing seriously and told them to turn it off for foreign nationals I can see why people are making fun of that situation.

I understand the reaction, but I urge you to not entertain it for too long because it is a giant distraction. The important part is not that Anthropic's safety language came back to bite them but the line the US government is drawing: this technology is apparently so powerful that only Americans should have it.

We are on a clear path towards a world of division. One should think that if a model is too dangerous for everyone, then it is too dangerous for Americans too. Instead the US is treating these models like weapons that need to be controlled. It is not just about capabilities, it is about racism and nationalism. If you have the wrong passport, you are not to be trusted. This is a very different thing from safety, and Europeans should pay close attention to it.

Safety and National Control

The directive, as Anthropic describes it, applies to foreign nationals whether they are inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. That is an astonishing boundary if you think about it. We moved from "do not sell this model to hostile governments" to nationality itself being the defining boundary. This should be a wake-up call to Europeans in and outside the US, and quite frankly, any non US citizen.

A lot of AI safety discourse presents itself as universal: humanity, catastrophic risk, safeguards, responsible deployment. Even Anthropic's own writings start out that way, but yet every time regulation is discussed there is an overtone of national security and that it cannot get into the wrong hands. It's not just Anthropic, it's the entire US based discourse on AI. The foundation is that the US has moral superiority and others are not to be trusted. That there are other countries are authoritarian, that they lack freedoms.

That should make us uncomfortable, not just Europeans, but particularly us. It is also a situation you cannot regulate yourself out of. European technology policy is entirely unprepared for this, because this is not a question of regulation but a question of might and power, something that Europe lacks.

Europe has spent years trying to regulate large American technology companies, sometimes for good reasons. I am not reflexively against that. The DMA matters because access matters. Users should have agency over their devices, their data, and the software they run. But regulation is a useless substitute for capability and we are lacking that. Regulation might try to force open doors but if those doors only come from American or Chinese companies, then that accomplishes very little.

Also let's not be naive in that this is a negotiation of money and force. The US is in that position because the US has a mighty military. The US can bomb nations anywhere in the world, force international trade routes closed and get away with it. That's true leverage.

Oh Europe

Europe is dependent on the United States in ways that are becoming increasingly impossible to ignore. We depend on American cloud providers, operating systems, developer platforms and now AI models and internet from satellites. We also depend on global semiconductor supply chains we do not control. If access to frontier AI becomes a matter of American national security policy, Europe is not a peer in that conversation and might not even be a market.

That is a humiliating position, but one that happened entirely intentionally.

European citizens and politicians still have not managed to move beyond blaming the EU for its failures. We built and maintained fragmented markets and then pretended we had a single one. We let company formation, hiring, equity compensation, tax, notaries, KYC, banking, and cross-border services remain much harder than they need to be and we are playing these rules against each other. Not just on the European level, but within every single member state. We protect the trusts and established enterprises, who are risk averse and entrenched, instead of trusting the next generation to build great companies. We created a culture where process becomes an excuse for low agency. We made it hard to build new and large companies and then act surprised when our most ambitious founders move somewhere else or just decided to incorporate their companies in the US.

Increasingly, Europeans who want to build very large technology companies move to the United States. They do it because the capital markets are better, the startup infrastructure is better, employee equity is better understood. I cannot blame anyone doing it, and I'm guilty of this myself as we have incorporated our holding in Delaware. If you are trying to raise serious money, hire aggressively, and move quickly, the US often looks like the only game in town. Because quite frankly: it is.

But this is why we are on a dangerous death spiral already. Talent leaves because the ecosystem is weak and the ecosystem stays weak because talent leaves. Infrastructure makes the world: build excellent swimming pools and you will grow a generation of great swimmers.

The temporary task is straightforward but uncomfortable: Europeans need to believe in themselves enough not to surrender to American gravity. Moving to the US as a founder or tech employee is rational and individually it is often the right decision. But if every ambitious person treats Europe as a lost cause, then Europe becomes one. If everyone with agency leaves, the only people left to shape the system are the people most comfortable with the system as it is. Then we really should not be surprised when nothing changes.

Europe needs more ambition, more ownership, more urgency, and more willingness to build. It needs less resignation. It needs to stop confusing regulation with strategy and dependency with virtue. We need to deregulate where rules serve mostly as protectionism. We need capital markets that can fund companies at the scale modern technology requires. We need employee ownership to become normal rather than exotic. We need a real single market for services, not just speeches about one. We need countries to stop fighting each other while claiming to act in the European interest.

Most importantly: we need to stop blaming the politicians. Too many European companies are adding to that bureaucracy entirely out of their own choice. They drown you in paperwork. At one point I had to sign a four page contract for a 120 Euro lamp at an Austrian retailer, just to pick up from their store 15 minutes later. Sometimes I cannot get a speaking engagement at a European event without someone sending me complex rights waivers over. It's all just paperwork protection against potential downsides.

When we do not have the power to influence, we should at least understand why and where things are failing. Too many entrepreneurs are blaming EU regulation for failures that are originating within the member states. EU regulation is the result of a democratic process between countries that are lobbying in favor of their local industries against others in the same economic bloc. No amount of abolishment of the EU is going to fix this harsh reality. Nothing more demonstrates this as the inability for cross-border M&A in the European Union. It's not the EU that blocks it, it's the country that loses out.

Strengthening Europe is necessary because weakness makes us pawns. A Europe that cannot build, cannot finance, cannot coordinate and cannot defend its own interests will not be treated as an equal. It will be regulated around, export-controlled around, consulted after the fact or not consulted at all.

The American Trap

I do not want the lesson to be that Europe simply needs to turn itself into a copy of the United States. The US has solved some things that Europe has not. It has deep capital markets, a much stronger culture of ownership, a greater tolerance for risk, and institutions that often try to make progress possible rather than explain why it cannot happen. It also has achieved an internal level of integration that is unparalleled in Europe. Tremendous advantages!

But the American path is not obviously a healthy one in all aspects. It tends to take paths with a lot of conflict and wars, a lot of internal societal division and deep inequalities. It centralizes powers away from citizens in the presidency and people with money. You are still trading one set of failures for another. You are at the whim of the US government and its strict rules and regulations. The US barely manages to uphold the rights for its own citizens today.

We should be honest about both sides. You do not win by pretending that Europe is fine. You also do not win by pretending that America has figured everything out.

We must not be blind to all the signs of how international cooperation is falling apart around us. The US no longer talks to European governments before implementing orders that directly affect Europeans. It is threatening to take Greenland, the territory of Denmark, one of its oldest allies. Treaties, alliances and institutions have lost all their worth.

All that matters even if our own lives are focused on building companies, creating wealth, hiring people and making things. Our individual path to success is one thing, but it depends on a world where contracts work, visas work and don't change on a moment's notice, trade routes stay open, payment systems function, and families are not torn apart by border regimes or wars. If the world descends into chaos, our basic needs cannot be considered met just because we have a great salaries or equity or investors that trust us.

This is why strengthening Europe cannot be the final goal. A stronger EU is, at best, a temporary defense against a darker world and not an excuse to replace American nationalism with European nationalism. The long-term answer cannot be bigger and bigger blocs fighting over who may use which model, which chip, which cloud or which trade route.

The Way Out Is Cooperation

I'm not asking here for Europeans to get their shit together just to compete with the US or China. Maybe I hope that this is a thing that develops, but the goal absolutely cannot be that we accept the deterioration of international relationships long term.

I truly believe that Open Source matters and international cooperation matters. It is not a magical answer to every problem, but it is one of the few paths we have that does not naturally lead to total concentration of power.

If frontier AI becomes something only large corporations and governments can control, then everyone else becomes dependent on their judgment. That is a bad place to be. Corporations will optimize for their incentives, as well structured as they might be, and governments will optimize for more and more power. Right now we're on a path in which access to general-purpose capability is mediated by a small number of actors with tremendous powers.

I'm not naive in pretending AI cannot carry inherent risks. Open systems are messy, they can be misused and they create uncomfortable questions about dual-use capabilities. I do not want to wave that away but closed systems do not make those questions disappear either. Moving the power to decide into fewer hands is not a solution I believe in. And I would have the same opinion if I was a US citizen living in the US.

Any path that puts large blocs in a constant fight against each other has despicable downstream effects that result in the removal of individual rights. It's entirely pointless for the US to talk about freedoms that do not extend to non-US citizens and the same is true for Europe or any other country. We might accept these restrictions temporarily, but we absolutely cannot accept them long term for the inhumane effects that they can cause.

If we believe this technology can be used for good, then broad access matters and our goal should be to restore the international rule of law, and not to further weaken it. If we find ourselves in a war against our friends from other countries, cold or hot, we have failed as society.

The world we should be working back toward is one of international cooperation, globalization in the best sense of the word, and human dignity. The internet has made our lives irreversibly international: every day people fall in love across borders, marry across languages, move across continents, and work with friends they may never meet in countries they may never visit. Identifying too strongly with any one country in that world is a fool's errand.

Over the last decade too many of the people I got to know through Open Source were directly dragged into a war. I want to believe there is a way for us to break this cycle. We should be repairing failed states, rebuilding trust between people, and finding ways to cooperate again instead of letting the richest countries arm themselves and fight over who gets to control the future and narrative. Of course I want Europe to become stronger so it can stop being a pawn, but if we mistake that temporary need for the destination, I will be deeply disappointed.

The way out is not American supremacy, Chinese supremacy or European supremacy. The way out is to climb back toward cooperation before the alternative becomes war.

Artificial Intelligence is quickly becoming another instrument of militarization and national rivalry, when it could be one of the most powerful tools for cooperation we have. We should be using it to help people across societies and languages understand one another, not fighting over who gets to control it.

13 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT

News

DSF 2026 Fundraising Goals

The Django Software Foundation is raising its 2026 annual fundraising goal from $300,000 to $500,000. The money supports the Django Fellows program, legal and trademark work, community grants and events, ongoing infrastructure, and progress toward hiring an Executive Director.

Announcing Our DjangoCon US 2026 Talks!

DjangoCon US 2026 released its tutorial and talk lineup for Aug 24 to Aug 26, with live access for online-only ticket holders and free YouTube uploads after the conference. Expect sessions spanning Django 6.1 and modern ORM patterns, performance testing, Wagtail routing, Postgres updates, and deployment topics, with the final schedule to follow soon.

Vulnerability and malware checks in uv

uv introduces uv audit to scan locked dependencies for known vulnerabilities and adverse statuses, positioned as a faster uv-native alternative to pip-audit.

Updates to Django

Today, "Updates to Django" is presented by Hwayoung from Djangonaut Space! 🚀

Last week we had 16 pull requests merged into Django by 11 different contributors - including 5 first-time contributors! Congratulations to jodizzle, Bankai, Chris Rose, esperonus-karolis and Wes P. for having their first commits merged into Django - welcome on board!

This week's Django highlights: 🦄

• Made DjangoJSONEncoder consistently omit the .000 fractional-second suffix when serializing datetime and time values that have no meaningful microseconds. (#37108)
• Added a new listurls management command to display all registered URL patterns in a Django project. 🐍 (#28800)
• Limited the number of related objects shown in inline formset validation error messages to prevent excessively long error output. (#36984)
• Changed SIGNED_COOKIE_LEGACY_SALT_FALLBACK to default to False and began deprecating the transitional compatibility setting. (CVE-2026-6873)

Releases

Python 3.14.6 and 3.13.14 are now available!

Python 3.14.6 is out as the sixth 3.14 maintenance release, with about 179 bugfixes plus build and documentation updates since 3.14.5. Python 3.13.14 follows as the fourteenth 3.13 maintenance release, adding around 240 bugfixes along with build and documentation changes since 3.13.13.

Core Dispatch #5

Python 3.15.0 beta 2 landed June 2, with another round of milestones due June 9 and June 23. Expect the practical stuff in 3.15 including a fixed O(n^2) blowup in unicodedata.normalize, XML multi-byte encoding support, and fresh deprecation warnings around ast and abc abstract* helpers, alongside an initial documented Python security policy in the Devguide.

Sponsored Link

Middleware, but for AI agents

Django middleware composes request handlers. Harnesses do the same for AI agents - Claude Code, Codex, Gemini in one coordinated system. Learn what a harness actually is, why it's a new primitive, and how to engineer one that holds in production. Apache 2.0, open source.

Articles

My Local LLM Setup - Fast Agentic Development with No Token Bill

From Peter Grandstaff, a write-up of his maxxed-out local LLM setup using an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 video card. A very cool setup and one which many of us will likely be using some version of in the future.

Logical optimizations

Nested if blocks can often be rewritten as a single conjunction, but only when each if fully owns the body with no else or trailing code.

Browser Push Notifications for a Django Website

Set up browser push notifications end to end: store push subscriptions in Django, register/unregister via authenticated endpoints, and send notifications from a Huey background task using pywebpush with VAPID.

Anything new?

Maintainer Matthias Kestenholz explains why stepping away from django-mptt is hard, and how entitlement in issue trackers turns "free labor" into a burnout trap.

PyCon US 2026 - Open Source Community in Long Beach - Peter Grandstaff

Another one from Peter Grandstaff, a day-by-day PyCon US 2026 trip focused on building Django connections, sponsorship work for DjangoCon US, and catching talks on developer experience and open source community support.

Django Forum

Switch to Playwright tests for integration testing

This project aims to modernize Django's integration testing by introducing Playwright as an alternative to Selenium.

Proposal: Leverage Oracle Test Pilot for Django CI

A proposal from the Oracle Test Pilot for Third-Party Software program building Oracle Test Pilot to provide access to the latest versions of the Oracle databases to Django on GitHub, for free.

Django Fellow Reports

Natalia Bidart

This week was quite intense, with most of the focus 🔍 on getting the security release out the door 🚪. Issuing the release for the 5 CVEs took a fair amount of coordination and attention to detail, and definitely consumed a good chunk of brain power 🧠 ⚡.

Alongside that, there were a number of meetings throughout the week, so overall it was a mix of high-focus release work and keeping in sync with the different groups 🤝. Bonus: the final DEP 0018 for MAILERS was approved, moved to the accepted folder, and merged ✅.

Jacob Walls

A highlight this week was landing the listurls command modeled on django-extensions. Many tickets triaged, reviewed, authored, and discussed.

Events

Announcing Our DjangoCon US 2026 Talks!

The complete lineup of talks, August 24-26, is now live! So many great talks coming up.

Django Meetup Vol. 78 / Beyond Boilerplate: Building Maintainable CRUD in Django

Django Meetup Cologne Vol. 78 will take place on the 16th of June 2026, online and in person.

Django Job Board

Founding ML/Data Scientist (Remote, UK) at MyDataValue 🆕

Projects

django-helpdesk/django-helpdesk

A Django application to manage tickets for an internal helpdesk. Formerly known as Jutda Helpdesk.

emmett-framework/granian

A Rust HTTP server for Python applications.

12 Jun 2026 3:00pm GMT

What's happening at EuroPython 2026? The conference celebrates its 25th anniversary this year in Kraków, Poland. This week on the show, organizers Mia Bajić and Daria Linhart Grudzien join me to discuss this year's conference.

[ Improve Your Python With 🐍 Python Tricks 💌 - Get a short & sweet Python Trick delivered to your inbox every couple of days. >> Click here to learn more and see examples ]

12 Jun 2026 12:00pm GMT

Hi all Pythonistas! 👋

We have just one month left until we all meet up in Kraków, and we've got a lot of new stuff to tell you: the schedule is available, new keynote announcements, our 25 years of EuroPython celebrations (win a free ticket!), the release of our Speaker's Orientation Workshop video on YouTube (in case you missed it!), remote ticket availability, a reminder about ticket prices (going up on June 26th!), plus plenty more 💚

🎉 Talk Schedule Available

Let's start with the big one: the programme team have been working tirelessly to get the talk schedule finalised, and you can now read it, in full, over on our website. The talks this year were selected from a record breaking number of submissions, and we are really excited about the number of topics covered from such a wide range of speakers.

👉 Start noting down your 'must see' favourites now, and plan out your &aposjourney&apos through the conference: https://ep2026.europython.eu/schedule/

🎤 Keynote Announcements

Guido van Rossum, Łukasz Langa, Pablo Galindo Salgado, and Leah Wasser were already on the schedule as keynote speakers, but we've now confirmed three more! We are very excited to have the following speakers joining us in Kraków:

William Woodruff is a Member of Technical Staff at Astral, where he works on building high-performance, secure tooling that is modernising the Python developer experience. Prior to Astral, he was an Engineering Director at Trail of Bits, leading high-impact security initiatives across open-source ecosystems.

Marlene Mhangami is a Senior Developer Advocate at Microsoft and GitHub, where she focuses on the cutting edge of Python and AI. As a computer scientist, keynote speaker, and explorer, she is a massive driving force behind community growth across the globe.

Imogen Wright is a Senior Engineer at Amazon EC2, where they focus on making incredibly complex systems behave. Their career spans over two decades of solving high-stakes challenges across theoretical physics, HIV drug resistance, COVID genomics, cloud technologies, and even ad tech!

All of our keynote speakers are some of the most respected leaders in the industry and in their specific fields, and we are privileged to have them join us at EuroPython 2026. We are so pleased to be able to put together such an incredible line up! 🐍💚

⌛ Get Your Ticket Before Prices Increase

We know that many of you have already purchased tickets (thank you!) but a quick reminder to those who have yet to do so: ticket prices will increase on June 26th and our Late Bird prices will apply, so if you're thinking of coming, it definitely makes sense to secure your ticket before then!

👉 Purchase your tickets today on the EuroPython 2026 website: https://ep2026.europython.eu/tickets/

💻 Remote Ticket Sales

If you are joining us remotely this year, just a heads up that remote sales will start next Monday, 15th June. The tickets will be available to purchase on our website as soon as Monday rolls around!

🎂 25 Years of EuroPython

We are celebrating 25 years of EuroPython this year (I know, we can't believe it either!), and we have a few fun things planned to make it special, including a chance to win a free ticket - which you can transfer to someone else, if you've already got yours!

📜 The Oldest Badge Contest

Are you one of those people who keeps your badges from previous conferences? It might be about to pay off: we will be having a contest to find the Oldest EuroPython Badge amongst all attendees this year! Dig around in your drawers, boxes, attic or other archive and find the oldest EuroPython badge (with your name on it…) that you can. Whoever has the oldest will win the contest!

🎫 Free Ticket Competition: Your EuroPython Experiences

We're running a competition - open to anyone who has attended EuroPython in the past - who can record a short video telling us about their most impactful EuroPython experience! The competition is open to anyone who has attended EuroPython before, and is really easy to enter. No need for anything very fancy: just record yourself talking and tell us why your particular experience at EuroPython made such an impact on you.

The competition will be closing on June 21st (extended!), so you've still got plenty of time to enter.

👉 For the details, see the entry form: https://forms.gle/WNPErwWtpE1oPVhD9

💭 Taking a Trip Down Memory Lane

Finally, we thought you might appreciate a little video we've posted on YouTube recently: Jonathan Hartley spoke to us at PyCon US about one of his favourite EuroPython experiences of the past:

🦄 Django Girls Workshop Sign Up

We are sure many of you are already aware of Django Girls and the great work that they do in making Python and Django more accessible to people around the world (often but not only girls!), and we are super pleased to announce that they will be running a workshop at EuroPython 2026 in Kraków!

👉 The workshop is a full day, on 18 July (a sprint day), and you can register on the Django Girls website: https://djangogirls.org/en/krakow2/

🏃‍♀️ Women in Python 5K Run

On Thursday 16th July there will be a group run with the aim of enabling some friendly networking and friendship building between women in the Python community.

It is open to runners of all experience levels, and will be a nice route around Kraków - along the river and at walking distance from the conference venue. If you are interested, please fill out the form below to help us prepare better (no commitment required - yet!), and we will send details of how to confirm your place closer to the time.

We'd like to thank our sponsor Arm for supporting this run.

👉 Register your interest here: https://forms.gle/bcsBTtNX1crEQhbw8

⭐ On-Site Volunteering

A big thank you to all who responded to our call for on-site volunteers, and we are now considering the applications. We had over 110 applications (far more than last year), and we loved to see applications from countries all over the world! 💚

We are now selecting volunteers, and you will receive notification of the status of your application in the following week (13-19th June). We will contact everyone who applied, even if you were not selected.

Thanks again to all of you - volunteers are the heart of EuroPython and we could not run the conference without you. ✨

👩‍🏫 Speaker Orientation Workshop

The EuroPython Speaker Orientation ran on the 3rd June 2026, and contained valuable tips from some of the most experienced speakers in our community. The panel spent an hour and a half giving practical advice on preparing talks, creating effective slides, managing nerves, engaging audiences, and handling Q&A sessions.

Cheuk Ting Ho, Rodrigo Girão Serrão, and Sebastian Witowski answered questions from new and returning speakers, sharing insights and lessons from their own conference speaking journeys.

Thank you to our amazing panel and everyone who joined us - we can't wait to see you in Kraków!

💚 Financial Aid Round Up

This year, we received a record-high 217 financial aid applications across two rounds. We know how much care, hope, and effort goes into every application, and our financial aid team have worked hard to review them all with the attention they deserve.

We're happy to share that all financial aid decisions have been sent out. With the €35,000 budget provided by the EuroPython Society, we have issued 84 grant offers. We are grateful to be able to support so many members of our community, and sincerely hope that all grantees will be able to join us in Kraków this summer to learn, connect, and celebrate the 25th anniversary of EuroPython.

To everyone who applied but was not offered a grant: we are very sorry for the disappointing news. If we miss you in Kraków, we still very much hope you'll be part of the conference and connect with us remotely.

📺 EuroPython YouTube Channel

We&aposve been posting a lot of new content over on the EuroPython YouTube Channel, including some fun short interviews from PyCon US:

• Carol Willing talks about her favourite EuroPython moment
• Can you believe that some people have attended this many EuroPython conferences?
• What fun things were planned at PyCon Italia this year?

👉 Subscribe and keep up with our latest videos: https://www.youtube.com/@EuroPythonConference

💬 Last Call for Sponsor Booths

We&aposre down to our last few sponsorship slots with booths! Want to meet the Python community face-to-face at EuroPython 2026? This is your final chance to connect with our thousands of attendees.

👉 Email sponsoring@europython.eu before the slots are gone!

⚙️ Reminder: Rust Summit

Registration is still open for the full-day Rust summit, exploring the intersection of Rust and the Python ecosystem - it is a 'must-see' for anyone interested in how Rust is turbocharging Python tooling and Python computational libraries in 2026.

This summit is designed for developers who already possess some practical experience in these topics and are looking to deepen their expertise, share lessons learned, and contribute to the community&aposs collective knowledge.

👉 Register for the Rust Summit: https://ep2026.europython.eu/session/rust-summit-at-europython

🤝 Community Partners

🦬 PyStok

PyStok #83 lands on June 17th at 18:00 at Zmiana Klimatu in Białystok - and free registration is officially live!

Between the "speed dating" networking, JetBrains giveaways, and the legendary "Podlaskie afterparty", it's the perfect spot to soak up those unique North-East Polish vibes and talk Python and AI with the local crowd.

👉 Grab your spot at https://pystok.org/najblizsze-wydarzenie

📣 Community Outreach

The EuroPython Society has continued our world tour of Python events, and as always, thank you to everyone that came to speak to us!

🇺🇸 PyCon US

Several members of the EuroPython Society were at PyCon US in Long Beach, and we were very happy to have a stand at the conference and meet friends old and new. We know many of you will be joining us in Kraków as well, and we look forward to seeing you again!

👉 For more information about what we got up to PyCon US, check out our post on the EuroPython Society blog: https://europython-society.org/europython-society-at-pycon-us-2026/

🇮🇹 PyCon Italia

The EuroPython Society also had a stand at PyCon Italia, which we shared with the Django Software Foundation, and we were pleased to see such interest in our stickers, which we managed to 'sell out' of on the 2nd day of talks! If you want more stickers, you know where to go!

🎁 Sponsor Spotlight

We&aposd like to thank our three Platinum sponsors for supporting EuroPython:

View job openings at Manychat

Manychat builds AI-powered chat automation for 1M+ creators and brands at real production scale.

Open Source enables Microsoft products and services to bring choice, technology and community to our customers.

Vercel provies Agentic Infrastructure for every app and agent. They are the creators of AI SDK, Next.js, Turborepo, and v0.

👋 Stay Connected

Follow us on social media and subscribe to our newsletter for all the updates:

👉 Sign up for the newsletter: https://blog.europython.eu/portal/signup

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/europython/
• X/Twitter: https://x.com/europython
• Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@europython
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/europython.eu
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/europython/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@EuroPythonConference

Okay, what a packed edition this one has been! It's all go here at EuroPython and as you can see, we have so much in store for you. Don't forget: get your tickets before the prices increase, and we can't wait to see you really, really soon! 🐍💚

Cheers,

The EuroPython Team

12 Jun 2026 9:41am GMT

I'm a huge Fallout fan, and Fallout London is one of the most impressive mods I've seen in years: a full DLC-sized expansion set in post-apocalyptic London, made by a community team. Running it on Bazzite (my gaming OS of choice) wasn't completely straightforward, so here's what actually worked for me. Consider this a note to future me, but hopefully it saves someone else an afternoon of trial and error.

What you'll need

• Bazzite installed on your machine
• Heroic Games Launcher
• Fallout 4 (the mod requires it as a base)
• The "Fallout London One Click Mod" (available through Heroic)

The steps

1. Install Heroic Games Launcher

If you don't have it yet, install Heroic from the Bazzite app store or via Flatpak. It's a fantastic open-source launcher that handles GOG, Epic, and Amazon games, and it plays very nicely with Proton.

After you install it, login with your GOG account

2. Install the Fallout London One Click Mod

Search for "Fallout London" in Heroic and install the One Click Mod version. This bundles everything together so you don't have to manually manage mod files. Let it do its thing.

3. Disable UMU (yes, it needs to be disabled)

This is the counterintuitive part. Once the mod is installed, go to its settings in Heroic, then the Advanced tab. You'll see an option called "Disable UMU". Enable it (meaning: check the checkbox to disable UMU). I know, "enable the disable" is a confusing way to phrase it, but that's what it says.

Without this, the game won't launch correctly on Bazzite.

4. Run it once in Desktop Mode

Before adding it to Steam, launch the game once directly from Heroic while you're in Desktop Mode. This lets everything install and configure properly: shaders, redistributables, the works. Wait until you're actually in the game and confirmed it runs without issues, then close it.

5. Add to Steam

Click the three-dot menu on the game in Heroic and select "Add to Steam". From this point on you can launch it from Game Mode like any other game in your library.

Play!

That's it. Boot into Game Mode, find Fallout London in your library, and enjoy one of the best Fallout experiences made outside of Bethesda.

See you in the next one!

10 Jun 2026 5:00am GMT

The second article in the series. The first was about control flow; this one stays with the same tactic - reshaping code - one layer down, at the condition. Here: merging ifs, factoring shared decisions, and dropping checks that earn nothing. The Boolean algebra of conditions - De Morgan and friends - is a different lever, and gets its own installment next time.

09 Jun 2026 11:00am GMT

Codecov's unreliability breaking CI on my open source projects has been a constant source of frustration for me for years. I have found a way to enforce coverage over a whole GitHub Actions build matrix that doesn't rely on third-party services.

09 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT

Let's say you're writing a Python library.

In this library, you have some collection of state that represents "options" or "configuration" for a bunch of operations. Such a set of options is a bundle of potentially ever-increasing complexity. Thus, you will want it to have an extremely minimal compatibility surface, with a very carefully chosen public interface, that is either small, or perhaps nothing at all. Such an object conveys state and might have some private behavior, but all you want consumers to be able to do is build it in very constrained, specific ways, and then pass it along as a parameter to your own APIs.

By way of example, imagine that you're wrapping a library that handles shipping physical packages.

There are a zillion ways to do it ship a package. There are different carriers who can ship it for you. There's air freight, and ground freight, and sea freight. There's overnight shipping. There's the option to require a signature. There's package tracking and certified mail. Suffice it to say, lots of stuff.

If you are starting out to implement such a library, you might need an object called something like ShippingOptions that encapsulates some of this. At the core of your library you might have a function like this:

1
2
3
4
5

async def shipPackage(
        how: ShippingOptions,
        where: Address,
    ) -> ShippingStatus:
    ...

If you are starting out implementing such a library, you know that you're going to get the initial implementation of ShippingOptions wrong; or, at the very least, if not "wrong", then "incomplete". You should not want to commit to an expansive public API with a ton of different attributes until you really understand the problem domain pretty well.

Yet, ShippingOptions is absolutely vital to the rest of your library. You'll need to construct it and pass it to various methods like estimateShippingCost and shipPackage. So you're not going to want a ton of complexity and churn as you evolve it to be more complex.

Worse yet, this object has to hold a ton of state. It's got attributes, maybe even quite complex internal attributes that relate to different shipping services.

Right now, today, you need to add something so you can have "no rush", "standard" and "expedited" options. You can't just put off implementing that indefinitely until you can come up with the perfect shape. What to do?

The tool you want here is the opaque data type design pattern. C is lousy with such things (FILE, pthread_*_t, fd_set, etc). A typedef in a header file can easily achieve this.

But in Python, if you expose a dataclass - or any class, really - even if you keep all your fields private, the constructor is still, inherently, public. You can make it raise an exception or something, but your type checker still won't help your users; it'll still look like it's a normal class.

Luckily, Python typing provides a tool for this: typing.NewType.

Let's review our requirements:

1. We need a type that our client code can use in its type annotations; it needs to be public.
2. They need to be able to consruct it somehow, even if they shouldn't be able to see its attributes or its internal constructor arguments.
3. To express high-level things (like "ship fast") that should stay supported as we add more nuanced and complex configurations in the future (like "ship with the fastest possible option provided by the lowest-cost carrier that supports signature verification").

In order to solve these problems respectively, we will use:

1. a public NewType, which gives us our public name...
2. which wraps a private class with entirely private attributes, to give us an actual data structure, while not exposing the constructor,
3. a set of public constructor functions, which returns our NewType.

When we put that all together, it looks like this:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17

from dataclasses import dataclass
from typing import Literal, NewType

@dataclass
class _RealShipOpts:
    _speed: Literal["fast", "normal", "slow"]

ShippingOptions = NewType("ShippingOptions", _RealShipOpts)

def shipFast() -> ShippingOptions:
    return ShippingOptions(_RealShipOpts("fast"))

def shipNormal() -> ShippingOptions:
    return ShippingOptions(_RealShipOpts("normal"))

def shipSlow() -> ShippingOptions:
    return ShippingOptions(_RealShipOpts("slow"))

As a snapshot in time, this is not all that interesting; we could have just exposed _RealShipOpts as a public class and saved ourselves some time. The fact that this exposes a constructor that takes a string is not a big deal for the present moment. For an initial quick and dirty implementation, we can just do checks like if options._speed == "fast" in our shipping and estimation code.

However, the main thing we are doing here is preserving our flexibility to evolve the related APIs into the future, so let's see how we might do that. For example, let's allow the shipping options to contain a concrete and specific carrier and freight method:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35

from dataclasses import dataclass
from enum import Enum, auto
from typing import NewType

class Carrier(Enum):
    FedEx = auto()
    USPS = auto()
    DHL = auto()
    UPS = auto()

class Conveyance(Enum):
    air = auto()
    truck = auto()
    train = auto()

@dataclass
class _RealShipOpts:
    _carrier: Carrier
    _freight: Conveyance

ShippingOptions = NewType("ShippingOptions", _RealShipOpts)

def shipFast() -> ShippingOptions:
    return ShippingOptions(_RealShipOpts(Carrier.FedEx, Conveyance.air))

def shipNormal() -> ShippingOptions:
    return ShippingOptions(_RealShipOpts(Carrier.UPS, Conveyance.truck))

def shipSlow() -> ShippingOptions:
    return ShippingOptions(_RealShipOpts(Carrier.USPS, Conveyance.train))

def shippingDetailed(
    carrier: Carrier, conveyance: Conveyance
) -> ShippingOptions:
    return ShippingOptions(_RealShipOpts(carrier, conveyance))

As a NewType, our public ShippingOptions type doesn't have a constructor. Since _RealShipOpts is private, and all its attributes are private, we can completely remove the old versions.

Anything within our shipping library can still access the private variables on ShippingOptions; as a NewType, it's the same type as its base at runtime, so it presents minimal¹ overhead.

Clients outside our shipping library can still call all of our public constructors: shipFast, shipNormal, and shipSlow all still work with the same (as far as calling code knows) signature and behavior.

If you need to build and convey some state within your public API, while avoiding breakages associated with compatibility churn, hopefully this technique can help you do that!

Acknowledgments

Thanks for reading, and thank you to my patrons who are supporting my writing on this blog. If you like what you've read here and you'd like to read more of it, or you'd like to support my various open-source endeavors, you can support my work as a sponsor.

22 May 2026 12:33am GMT

Here is a useful trick that is unreasonably effective for simple computer use goals using modern terminal agents. On macOS, there has been a terminal osascript command since the original release of Mac OS X. All you have to do is suggest your agent use it and it can perform any application control action available in any AppleScript dictionary for any Mac app. No MCP set up or tools required at all. Agents are much more adapt at using rod terminal commands, especially ones that haven't changed in 30 years. Having a computer control interface that hasn't changed in 30 years and has extensive examples in the Internet corpus makes modern models understand how to use these tools basically Effortlessly. macOS locks down these permissions pretty heavily nowadays though, so you will have to grant the application control permission to terminal. But once you have done that, the range of possibilities for commanding applications using natural language is quite extensive. Also, for both Safari and chrome on Mac, you are going to want to turn on JavaScript over AppleScript permission. This basically allows claude or another agent to debug your web applications live for you as you are using them.In chrome, go to the view menu, developer submenu, and choose "Allow JavaScript from Apple events". In Safari, it's under the safari menu, settings, developer, "Allow JavaScript from Apple events". Then you can do something like "Hey Claude, would you Please use osascript to navigate the front chrome tab to hacker news". Once you suggest using OSA script in a session it will figure out pretty quickly what it can do with it. Of course you can ask it to do casual things like open your mail app or whatever. Then you can figure out what other things will work like please click around my web app or check the JavaScript Console for errors. Another very important tips for using modern agents is to try to practice using speech to text. I think speaking might be something like five times faster than typing. It takes a lot of time to get used to, especially after a lifetime of programming by typing, but it's a very interesting and a different experience and once you have a lot of practice It starts to to feel effortless.

04 Apr 2026 1:31pm GMT