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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.” 

Six Feet Up’s team of expert developers use Django to implement custom, cutting-edge solutions for a diverse array of clients, including those in the education, life sciences, transportation, fintech and government sectors. Explore Six Feet Up’s Python case studies, and sign up for our newsletters to get tech tips in your inbox. 

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