uv without fear: designing your Python platform layer

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve been arguing about the same things in Python for twenty years. Whether to use virtualenv or venv. Whether pip or pip-tools is the right call. Whether Poetry is deprecated or just in a bad mood. Whether pyenv is for serious engineers or just people with too much time on their hands.

Open any repo from three projects ago and you’ll find a Frankenstein held together with duct tape: a Makefile that activates a venv, a hand-maintained requirements.txt, a requirements-dev.txt that nobody’s touched since 2022, and a Dockerfile that does pip install with versions eyeballed into place.

Installing Python "properly" with pyenv (and stop fighting with versions)

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If there’s one thing that unites the Python community above any PEP, it’s the shared pain of having multiple interpreter versions coexisting on the same machine.

One day you install Python 3.8 “for a project,” the next month 3.11 because another project demands it, then some random installer sneaks Python 3.10 into your PATH without asking… and you end up staring at the crime scene:

python --version # 3.11.4
python --version # 3.10.12
pip --version # points to 3.8 somewhere on disk

You run a pip install convinced it’s targeting your project, but it actually lands on the system Python; another project breaks, VS Code gets confused, so do you, and suddenly “I hate Python” when what you actually hate is the dumpster fire you’ve been stoking.

Python on I am Lino

uv without fear: designing your Python platform layer

Installing Python "properly" with pyenv (and stop fighting with versions)