Best Python Videos

If you prefer to learn Python programming by watching videos then this is the resource for you. I've watched hundreds of live technical talks and combed through videos to pick out the ones with great speakers who'll teach you the most about the language and ecosystem.

This page links to the best free videos as well as other video lists so you can do your own searching through the huge backlog of conference and meetup talks from the past several years.

Web development videos

The following web development videos cover the broad topics of using web frameworks like Django, Flask, Pyramid and other frameworks, as well as web design and deployments.

• My EuroPython 2014 "Full Stack Python" talk goes over each topic from this guide and provides context for how the pieces fit together. The talk slides are also available. Even though the talk is from 2014, almost all of the general web development principles remain consistent in 2018.

• Kate Heddleston gave a talk at PyCon 2014 called "Full-stack Python Web Applications" with clear visuals for how numerous layers of the Python web stack fit together. There are also slides available from the talk with all the diagrams.

• Taking Django Async is a great overview by Andrew Godwin, who created South (now Django Migrations as part of the core framework) and Django Channels. He discusses the synchronous blocking worker design of WSGI and why it is incompatible with asynchronous protocols like WebSockets. A potential solution could be a new protocol like Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface (ASGI), but how far would the integration into Django need to go and would it be worth the pain? Andrew does a great job of mixing the philosophical questions with technical implementation details throughout the talk.

• Design 101 for Developers covers a difficult topic for many analytic-minded developers to learn: design. The talk is not specific to web development or web design but instead explains general design principles such as spacing, consistency and making interactions obvious for a user.

• How Netflix does failovers in 7 minutes flat by Amjith Ramanujam at PyCon US was an excellent talk on handling network outages and predicting the reliability of failover routes. This talk is worth watching even for the data visualizations alone!

• Kate Heddleston and I gave a talk at DjangoCon 2014 called Choose Your Own Django Deployment Adventure which walked through many of the scenarios you'd face when deploying your first Django website.

• The Discover Flask series is a detailed Flask tutorial on video with corresponding code examples on GitHub.

• Designing Django's Migrations covers Django 1.7's new migrations from the main programmer of South and now Django's built-in migrations, Andrew Godwin.

• DjangoCon US videos from 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, are all available free of charge.

• DjangoCon EU videos are also available from 2017, 2016, and 2015.

• GoDjango screencasts and tutorials are free short videos for learning how to build Django applications.

• The videos and slides from Django: Under the Hood 2015 are from Django core committers and provide insight into the ORM, internationalization, templates and other important web framework topics.

Core Python language videos

The core Python programming language has many new features now that almost all community resources are working on Python 3 instead of split across legacy 2.x branches. The following videos cover topics within the core Python language primarily relevant to Python 3 features although some can be used with Python 2 as well.

• Jessica McKellar's Building and breaking a Python sandbox is a fascinating walk through the lower layers of the Python interpreter.

• Brandon Rhodes' All Your Ducks In A Row: Data Structures in the Std Lib and Beyond goes through how data structures are implemented, how to select a data structure appropriate to your application and how the list and dictionary can be used in many situations.

• Guido van Rossum's Python Language keynote talk from PyCon 2016 reinforced that there would be no Python version 2.8 and that development on backported security releases into the Python 2 branch would end by January 1, 2020. Guido also covered many topics important to the Python language community like expanding the number and backgrounds of core committers.

• The talk Python Descriptors by Simeon Franklin explains the what and why of this core Python language feature.

• David Beazley gives an amazing live coded performance to show Python concurrency using threads, event loops and coroutines. David makes the live coding look easy but a whole lot of work must've gone into that talk.

• What is a Python Core Developer? explains the responsibilities, projects, repositories and expectations of core Python committers as well as how to become one.

• Google's Python Class contains lecture videos and exercises for learning Python.

Video compilations

All major Python conferences, as well as most regional ones, release technical talk videos for free. These sites either aggregate the thousands of videos that have been released or are lists from specific conferences like PyCon US and EuroPython.

• PyVideo organizes and indexes thousands of Python videos from both major conferences and meetups.

• Incredible Technical Speakers is a repository I put together that features software developer speakers talking about programming language agnostic topics. The list is intended to emphasize professional software developers who also have the ability to engage an audience of peers with an exciting talk. These talks are relevant to all software developers even though not every talk is specific to the Python language.

• PyCon US videos from 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 are all available online for free.

• All of the talk videos are available on YouTube for EuroPython 2020, EuroPython 2019, EuroPython 2018, EuroPython 2017, EuroPython 2016, EuroPython 2015, EuroPython 2014 and earlier years.

What's the next topic you want to learn?