#481 Ways to die

Topics covered in this episode:

• Dumb Ways for an Open Source Project to Die
• How to create a pylock.toml lockfile
• https://github.com/facebook/Lifeguard
• Choosing a Python Logging Library in 2026
• Extras
• Joke

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Michael #1: Dumb Ways for an Open Source Project to Die

• Core categories
  • The maintainer left
  • The maintainer is still there
  • Sabotage and capture
  • The release pipeline broke
  • Force majeure
  • The world moved on
  • The project split
  -
• Examples
  • Bulma PRs still from 2023, issues and PRs with no maintainer response for years, last release 1.5 years ago
  • diskcache Similar, got hired by OpenAI, crickets after that

Brian #2: How to create a pylock.toml lockfile

• Tim Hopper
• Tim walks through using uv, pip and pdm to create pylock.toml files.
• Recommendation: use uv export --format pylock.toml -o pylock.toml
• He also has How to install from a pylock.toml lockfile with pip but the short version is:
  • use -r because tools treat it like a requirements file

Michael #3: https://github.com/facebook/Lifeguard

• Lifeguard is a static analyzer to detect Lazy Imports incompatibilities and ease the adoption overhead for Lazy Imports in Python.
• I’m more excited about lazy imports after my Cutting Python Web App Memory Over 31% experience
• Some Python patterns depend on imports executing immediately. For example:
  • Module-level side effects — a module that registers a handler or modifies global state at import time will behave differently if that import is deferred.
  • The registry pattern — a module that registers itself (e.g., adding to a global dict) when imported will silently fail to register under Lazy Imports.
  • sys.modules manipulation — code that reads or writes sys.modules assumes prior imports have already executed.
  • Metaclasses and __init_subclass__ — class creation side effects may depend on imports being resolved.
• Project Stage: Beta Lifeguard is in active development. We are aiming to be ready for general use by the Python 3.15 final release.

Brian #4: Choosing a Python Logging Library in 2026

• Ayooluwa Isaiah
• " which libraries matter, how they compare, where they overlap with the standard module, and when each one makes sense.”
• The slant with this article is the need to log json output, which seems reasonable as things like API entry and exit point logging will include json.
• Covered libraries
  • standard library logging with a hat tip to python-json-logger
    • Same site has a guide to setting up python-json-logger
  • structlog
  • Loguru
  • Logbook
  • picologging
• Some benchmarks with structlog, stdlib+json, and Loguru, with structlog coming out faster
• I liked the Loguru example
  • I’m going to have to try @logger.catch and logger.exception() for easily logging exceptions and serialize=True to enable JSON output.

Extras

Brian:

• When Women Stopped Coding - Planet Money segment , spotted on BlueSky from Savannah Ostrowski
• Lean TDD is now leaner
  • Still working on audio version, but some great changes in 0.7.1 version
    • Ch 6, TDD Interpretations, move ATDD and some of BDD to chapter
    • Ch 7, Change name to TDD with Teams: BDD and ATDD
    • Ch 9, Lean TDD, streamline steps and chapter
    • Ch 10, Change name to Lean TDD with Teams: Lean ATDD
    • Ch 11, Lean TDD with AI, Add short discussion about guardrails and security

Michael:

• New course: Python Web Security: OWASP Top 10 with Agentic AI
• All courses now with Spanish subtitles, see announcement

Joke: Stop texting me