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In his DjangoCon debut, Six Feet Up CTO and AWS Community Hero Calvin Hendryx-Parker emphasizes the Zen of Python and how its tenets translate into some very usable best practices. His 37-minute talk, “Bootstrapping your Local Python Environment,” delves into tools and techniques that will help developers of all levels:

• install Python,
• efficiently manage multiple virtual environments, and
• reduce the complexity of developing across versions with a development computer.

Three Zen of Python tenets in particular — “Beautiful is better than ugly,” “Explicit is better than implicit,” and “Simple is better than complex” — are at the core of Calvin’s presentation. To simplify development using Python, and help developers avoid potential pitfalls, Calvin recommends:

• avoiding the use of sudo and any system versions of Python
• using pyenv to install and manage multiple versions and environments
• using pipx to install tools; and
• using Docker and piptools to manage dependencies and create repeatable environments.

Watch the presentation:

For more on bootstrapping your local environments and the Zen of Python, read Calvin’s blog post, “The Zen of Python: Bootstrapping Your Local Python Environment.”

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Links and Resources to Get Started:

• pyenv setup documentation: https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv#installation
• pipx setup documentation: https://pypi.org/project/pipx/
• pip-tools setup documentation: https://pypi.org/project/pip-tools/
• Docker’s Python integration documentation: https://hub.docker.com/_/python/
• Calvin Hendryx-Parker’s talk slides for “Bootstrapping Your Local Python Environment:” https://github.com/calvinhp/2021_DjangoCon_BootstrappingyourLocalPythonEnvironment