Latest Posts (20 found)
miguelgrinberg.com 6 days ago

SQLAlchemy 2 In Practice - Chapter 4 - Many-To-Many Relationships

This is the fourth chapter of my SQLAlchemy 2 in Practice book. If you'd like to support my work, I encourage you to buy this book, either directly from my store or on Amazon . Thank you! Continuing with the topic of relationships, this chapter is dedicated to the many-to-many type, which as its name implies, is used when it is not possible to identify any of the sides as a "one" side.

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miguelgrinberg.com 1 weeks ago

SQLAlchemy 2 In Practice - Chapter 3 - One-To-Many Relationships

This is the third chapter of my SQLAlchemy 2 in Practice book. If you'd like to support my work, I encourage you to buy this book, either directly from my store or on Amazon . Thank you! In the previous chapter you learned how to execute a variety of queries on the table. Interestingly, some of those queries were designed to obtain product manufacturers and not products, and this required duplicates to be removed by grouping the results.

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miguelgrinberg.com 2 weeks ago

SQLAlchemy 2 In Practice - Chapter 2 - Database Tables

This is the second chapter of my SQLAlchemy 2 in Practice book. If you'd like to support my work, I encourage you to buy this book, either directly from my store or on Amazon . Thank you! This chapter provides an overview of the most basic usage of the SQLAlchemy library to create, update and query database tables.

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miguelgrinberg.com 3 weeks ago

SQLAlchemy 2 In Practice - Chapter 1 - Database Setup

Welcome! This is the start of a journey which I hope will provide you with many new tricks to improve how you work with relational databases in your Python applications. Given that this is a hands-on book, this first chapter is dedicated to help you set up your system with a database, so that you can run all the examples and exercises. This is the first chapter of my SQLAlchemy 2 in Practice book. If you'd like to support my work, I encourage you to buy this book, either directly from my store or on Amazon . Thank you!

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miguelgrinberg.com 1 months ago

Introduction to SQLAlchemy 2 In Practice

In 2023 I wrote " SQLAlchemy 2 In Practice ", a book in which I offer an in-depth look at SQLAlchemy version 2 , still the current version today. SQLAlchemy is, for those who don't know, the most popular database library and Object-Request Mapper (ORM) for Python. I have a tradition of publishing my books on this blog to read for free, but this is one that I never managed to bring here, and starting today I'm going to work on correcting that. This article includes the Preface of the book. If you are interested, keep an eye out on this blog over the next few weeks, as I will be publishing the eight chapters of the book in order. If you can't wait for the installments, you can buy the book in electronic or paper format today, and I will be eternally thankful, as you will be directly supporting my work.

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miguelgrinberg.com 1 months ago

How to Host your Own Email Server

I recently started a new platform where I sell my books and courses, and in this website I needed to send account related emails to my users for things such as email address verification and password reset requests. The reasonable option that is often suggested is to use a paid email service such as Mailgun or SendGrid. Sending emails on your own is, according to the Internet, too difficult. Because the prospect of adding yet another dependency on Big Tech is depressing, I decided to go against the general advice and roll my own email server. And sure, it wasn't trivial, but it wasn't all that hard either! Are you interested in hosting your own email server, like me? In this article I'll tell you how to go from nothing to being able to send emails that are accepted by all the big email players. My main concern is sending, but I will also cover the simple solution that I'm using to receive emails and replies.

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miguelgrinberg.com 1 months ago

LLM Use in the Python Source Code

There is a trick that is spreading through social media. If you block the claude user on GitHub, then each time you visit a GitHub repository that has commits by this user you get a banner at the top alerting you of the user's participation. It's an easy way to spot projects that have started to rely on coding agents, in this case on Claude Code specifically. Imagine the surprise when you see that CPython , one of the most popular open-source projects in the world, is now receiving contributions from :

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miguelgrinberg.com 1 months ago

My Courses Site is Moving to a New Home

This is a short blog post to announce that I'm migrating the site in which I host my paid courses to a new platform at https://learn.miguelgrinberg.com . If you have purchased a course or ebook directly from me, this article tells you how to transfer your account to the new site.

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miguelgrinberg.com 2 months ago

Date Arithmetic in Bash

Date and time management libraries in many programming languages are famously bad. Python's datetime module comes to mind as one of the best (worst?) examples, and so does JavaScript's Date class . It feels like these libraries could not have been made worse on purpose, or so I thought until today, when I needed to implement some date calculations in a backup rotation script written in bash. So, if you wanted to learn how to perform date and time arithmetic in your bash scripts, you've come to the right place. Just don't blame me for the nightmares.

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miguelgrinberg.com 2 months ago

How to Add a Quick Interactive Map to your Website

In this article I want to share a technique that I recently learned to display an interactive map on a website. For this, you will need just a few lines of HTML and JavaScript. This solution does not require you to sign up for any accounts or services anywhere, it is completely free and open source, and can be integrated with any front or back end web framework. Give the demo below a try and if you like it, then keep on reading to learn how you can add a map like this one to your website in just 3 quick steps!

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miguelgrinberg.com 3 months ago

CSRF Protection without Tokens or Hidden Form Fields

A couple of months ago, I received a request from a random Internet user to add CSRF protection to my little web framework Microdot , and I thought it was a fantastic idea. When I set off to do this work in early November I expected I was going to have to deal with anti-CSRF tokens, double-submit cookies and hidden form fields, pretty much the traditional elements that we have used to build a defense against CSRF for years. And I did start along this tedious route. But then I bumped into a new way some people are dealing with CSRF attacks that is way simpler, which I describe below.

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miguelgrinberg.com 4 months ago

How to Securely Store Secrets in Environment Variables

You may have seen the recent reports of a malware that stole API keys, tokens and other secrets from a large number of developers. Where were these secrets stolen from? You guessed it, they were mostly stolen from environment variables. We use environment variables to configure information that processes need to run, but this type of storage was not designed for security, so using the environment for secrets always comes with risk. Given how serious this recent attack was, I thought it would be good to write a short article describing how I manage my secrets as part of my open source work.

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miguelgrinberg.com 6 months ago

Python 3.14 Is Here. How Fast Is It?

In November of 2024 I wrote a blog post titled "Is Python Really That Slow?" , in which I tested several versions of Python and noted the steady progress the language has been making in terms of performance. Today is the 8th of October 2025, just a day after the official release of Python 3.14. Let's rerun the benchmarks to find out how fast the new version of Python is!

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miguelgrinberg.com 8 months ago

Benchmarking MicroPython

In the Q&A session following my EuroPython 2025 presentation about the Microdot web framework, a member of the audience asked me what the performance of MicroPython running on a microcontroller is. This took me a bit by surprise, because I really had no way to quantify it, I just knew it was, in vague terms, not great. I never questioned the low performance, because it was never a problem for me. My answer to the question was that microcontrollers cannot replace a computer, and that these devices are only useful for small, focused tasks that are not demanding in any way. But after returning from the conference I kept thinking about this question, which piqued my curiosity. So I decided to build a better mental image of the performance these little machines have. In this blog post I want to share some results that compare Python code running on a few microcontroller boards that I have collected through my experiments with hardware, along with my laptop and a Raspberry Pi 4 to help put things into perspective.

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miguelgrinberg.com 10 months ago

Why Generative AI Coding Tools and Agents Do Not Work For Me

People keep asking me If I use Generative AI tools for coding and what I think of them, so this is my effort to put my thoughts in writing, so that I can send people here instead of having to repeat myself every time I get the question. From the title you already know that this isn't a pro-AI blog post. But it isn't an anti-AI post either, at least I don't think it is. There are already plenty of articles by AI promoters and AI critics, so I don't feel there is a need for me to write one more of those. While I'm definitely not neutral on the subject, in this article I'm just going to share my personal experience with these tools, from a strictly technical point of view.

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miguelgrinberg.com 10 months ago

Create a React + Flask Project in 2025

My article on creating a React + Flask project is one of the most visited on this blog. Can you believe that I wrote it over 5 years ago? In this article and video I'm going to share how I'm building this type of project in 2025. The main change I've introduced since I documented my 2020 process is that now I'm using Vite (French word that is pronounced "veet" and means "quick") instead of to scaffold the React application, since the latter isn't maintained anymore.

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miguelgrinberg.com 1 years ago

Font Ligatures for your Code Editor and Terminal

The other day I shared my code editor window during a video call with a client, and he immediately did a double take. "How did you make your code look like that?", he wanted to know. Have a look at the following screenshot and see if like my client, anything calls your attention: If you are wondering what secret keyboard trick allows you to type , , and other unusual characters, and then how to get Python and other programming languages to accept them then read on, as this is much easier than you think and you can do it too!

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miguelgrinberg.com 1 years ago

A Review of The Quick Python Book, Fourth Edition

I've been given a review copy of The Quick Python Book, Fourth Edition by Naomi Ceder, published by Manning. Since I often get asked for Python book recommendations, I thought it would be a good idea to share a review, in case you are looking for material to sharpen your Python skills.

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miguelgrinberg.com 1 years ago

Dynamic Forms with Flask

A common need in web applications is to create a form that allows the user to enter a list of items, with the number of items not known in advance. This is a pattern often used when entering user information, specifically for phone numbers or addresses, but has a lot of other uses as well. In the example below you can see how the user dynamically adds more phone numbers to the form by clicking the "Add another" link. Implementing this with Flask is surprisingly tricky, as it requires a combination of back and front end techniques working together. In this article I will show you two possible solutions, a basic one that uses only Flask and a more complete one for the Flask-WTF form handling extension.

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