PythonDeck Blog

Long-form posts on Python, Python GUI development, packaging and modern tooling. New posts every few weeks.

• Choosing a Python GUI framework in 2026
  2026-05-12

  Python has more GUI options than ever - Tkinter, CustomTkinter, PyQt / PySide, wxPython, Kivy, Flet, DearPyGui, Toga, Streamlit, Gradio. This post walks through how to pick one based on what you are actually building.

• Visual GUI designers vs hand-coding layouts
  2026-05-05

  Should you draw your interface in a visual designer or type it out by hand? It depends on the size of the project, the team and what you optimise for - but the answer is more nuanced than "real developers code by hand".

• From Tkinter to CustomTkinter: a migration guide
  2026-04-21

  If you have a working Tkinter app that looks stuck in 1998, CustomTkinter is the lowest-effort path to a modern look. The API is deliberately close to Tk's, but with rounded corners, theming, dark mode and HiDPI awareness.

• Building your first Kivy mobile app
  2026-04-10

  Kivy is the easiest way to ship a Python app to Android and iOS. This is a walkthrough of building a tiny note-taking app, packaging it for Android with Buildozer, and the gotchas nobody tells you about.

• Flet vs Streamlit vs Gradio: when to use each
  2026-03-28

  All three let you ship a Python-only web UI with a handful of lines of code, but they aim at different jobs. Picking the wrong one will frustrate you for weeks.

• Python on the desktop: a 2026 reality check
  2026-03-15

  Every year someone declares the Python desktop dead and someone else declares it reborn. The truth in 2026 is more boring and more useful: Python on the desktop is a perfectly fine choice for a clearly defined set of jobs.

• Ten patterns every Python developer should know
  2026-03-02

  These aren't "design patterns" in the Gang-of-Four sense - they're Python idioms that come up week after week. Internalising them will make your code shorter and more readable.

• Async vs threading vs multiprocessing
  2026-02-18

  Three concurrency models, three different problems. The decision rule is short: shape of the workload, not personal preference.

• Type hints in modern Python
  2026-02-04

  Type hints have gone from "optional curiosity" to "expected on serious codebases" in five years. Here's what a working subset looks like in 2026.

• From script to package: publishing on PyPI
  2026-01-20

  You have a working script. Turning it into a pip install-able package takes about an hour the first time and ten minutes every time after that.