Grab your coffee. Here are this week’s highlights.

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📅 Today’s Picks

Narwhals: One Function for pandas, Polars, and DuckDB

Problem

Teams today use multiple DataFrame libraries side by side. Each backend has its own syntax, so your utility functions end up full of if/elif chains checking types.

This makes even small logic changes expensive, since every backend implementation must be updated.

Solution

Narwhals removes this complexity by providing a unified DataFrame API.

How it works:

• Wrap any DataFrame with nw.from_native() (pandas, Polars, DuckDB, PySpark, PyArrow)
• Write transformations once using Polars-style operations
• Convert back to the original type with nw.to_native()
• Zero extra dependencies. Each backend keeps its native performance

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uv: Switch Python Versions Without Rebuilding Environments

Problem

Switching Python versions typically requires recreating virtual environments and reinstalling all dependencies from scratch.

This workflow wastes time and can introduce version conflicts when dependencies need to be resolved again.

Solution

UV allows seamless Python version upgrades with uv python pin while preserving existing dependencies.

The process is simple:

• Pin the version with uv python pin 3.x
• Sync dependencies with uv sync
• All cached packages are preserved automatically

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☕️ Weekly Finds

Airbyte [Data Engineering] – Data integration platform with 600+ connectors for ETL/ELT pipelines from APIs, databases, and files to warehouses and lakes

act [DevOps] – Run GitHub Actions locally for fast feedback without commit/push cycles, using Docker containers

Dash [AI Agents] – Self-learning text-to-SQL agent that grounds answers in six layers of context and improves automatically from failures

Looking for a specific tool? Explore 70+ Python tools →

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📚 Latest Deep Dives

5 Python Tools for Structured LLM Outputs: A Practical Comparison – Compare 5 Python tools for structured LLM outputs. Learn when to use Instructor, PydanticAI, LangChain, Outlines, or Guidance for JSON extraction.

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