Best Python Podcasts

The Python community has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to free and low cost resources for both new and experienced software developers. These great resources include several Python podcasts that are released on regular schedules.

This page contains a list of active Python-specific and software engineering high-quality podcasts.

Python-specific podcasts

These podcasts are run and recorded by Python developers who focus on topics that are important to our field. Each podcast series has a long list of previously-recorded episodes that are still relevant even if they are several years old so you will always have some great material to listen and learn.

• Talk Python to Me focuses on the people and organizations coding on Python. Each episode features a different guest interviewee to talk about his or her work.

• Podcast.__init__ is another regular podcast that presents stories about Python and interviews "with the people who make it great".

• Python Bytes is a new podcast from the creators of the above mentioned "Talk Python to Me" and "Test and Code Podcast".

• Test and Code Podcast focuses on testing and related topics such as mocking and code metrics.

• Django Riffs is a podcast for learning web application development in Python using the Django web framework.

• The Real Python Podcast is a weekly podcast with interviews, coding tips, and conversation with guests from the Python community.

• Teaching Python is a podcast by two teachers about their adventures teaching middle school computer science, problem solving, handling failure, frustration, and success with teaching Python programming.

Favorite podcast episodes

Here are a list of my favorite episodes from various Python podcasts before we dive into entire podcast recommendations in the next section. Dig into these episodes to get a feel for various personalities and styles in podcast presentation.

• SQLAlchemy and data access in Python brought me some much-needed context and understanding for how the object-relational mapping library SQLAlchemy evolved. This episode interviews SQLAlchemy's creator. The show host, Michael Kennedy, asks great questions based on his in-depth research and prior usage of SQLAlchemy.

• Python past, present, and future with Guido van Rossum covers the history of Python, Guido's motivations in creating the language and shepherding it through almost thirty years of releases. Fun fact: the question about whether Python being open source contributed to its success was my question when the podcast host Michael Kennedy asked me what topics they should talk about.

• Deploying Python Web Applications. Spoiler alert: this is the episode I was on Talk Python to Me explaining how Python web application deployments work.

• Python Bytes talked extensively about object-relational mappers (ORMs) on episode #39 where a lot of the discussion was based on the Full Stack Python ORMs page. Thanks guys, it was great to hear the feedback about what worked and what didn't work for you about the explanations!

• The Python at Netflix episode of Talk Python to Me provided an awesome view inside the largest internet site by bandwidth and how Python fits into their polyglot organization.

• Another great Talk Python to Me episode, Python in Finance, explains how Python is used in the broad finance industry for stock trading, quantitative analysis and data analytics. Check this one out if you have wondered how opaque private companies like hedge funds use Python to make (a lot of) money.

General software development podcasts

These podcasts are not specific to Python but cover relevant software engineering topics and often have episodes on Python topics. At the very least you will become a better general software developer by listening and learning from them.

• Software Engineering Daily incredibly has a podcast every day with a different developer on a huge range of relevant development subjects.

• All things Git talks to developers using, building and working with Git with new episodes every two weeks.

• CodeNewbie interviews developers who are early in their software development journey to find out their stories of why they are programming and what they are working on. There are also interviews with experienced developers building well-known projects.

• Developer on Fire interviews programmers, architects and testers with their stories of success, failure and excellence.

• Command_line Heroes covers operating system-level topics as well as DevOps.

• Embedded.fm goes into embedded systems and hardware hacking.

• The Changelog is a weekly podcast on general software development matters.

• Full Stack Radio. No relation to Full Stack Python but another one to check out!

• Exponent is not a software development podcast but it covers the intersection of corporate strategy and technology in an in-depth way that allows me to better understand the decisions businesses make when building and releasing software. I listen to every episode (at 1.5x speed) and it's well worth the 45 to 60 minutes spent listening to Ben Thompson and James Allworth go deep on a weekly topic.

• Test Talks examines a software testing topic each week, usually with a special guest focused on the area being examined.

• The Cloudcast focuses on cloud computing and DevOps-related topics.

Data science and analysis podcasts

The data science community does not only use Python as its core programming language but it plays a big role in almost every organization performing data analysis. The following podcasts cover data science broadly and often get specific into Python ecosystem tools.

• DataFramed is a data science podcast that often covers Python libraries and other areas of interest to people using Python to analyze data.

• Data Skeptic covers data science, statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and "scientific skepticism".

• Data stories is a podcast on data visualization.

• Partially Derivative was a podcast for machine learning, artificial intelligence and the data community. They finished their last episode in late 2017 but the episodes list contains a slew of existing content.

Those podcasts should help you get started. What's next?