Nina Zakharenko - Technical Debt - The code monster in everyone's closet - PyCon 2015

Technical debt is the code monster hiding in everyone's closet. If you ignore it, it will terrorize you at night. To banish it and re-gain your productivity, you'll need to face it head on.

Alex Gaynor - Techniques for Debugging Hard Problems - PyCon 2015

Sometimes your programs have bugs. Often they're shallow things, simple AttributeErrors or TypeErrors. Sometimes they're large, complex, and nearly impossible to debug. This talk explores techniques for figuring these out.

Distributed Systems 101 - PyCon 2015

A very brief introduction to the theory and practice of distributed systems.

A Scenic Drive through the Django Request-Response Cycle

PyCon US 2014, Dan Langer:

A simple "Hello World!" page, served via Django, passes though a surprising number of layers & components. For a newcomer to the language or the platform, this can be overwhelming at the start. Here I'll take you on a drive through Django's request-response cycle, focusing on using its layered model to understand what's going on and get things done.

A practical introduction to unit testing of Python applications using Mock library

Fake it till you make it
A talk by Ravi Chandra:

A practical introduction to unit testing decoupled, service-oriented, Python applications using with Mock library. A three-tiered (server, client, and view) Flask web application is used as a motivating example across the talk. Mock helps to isolate functionality specific to a layer to facilitate fast, compact, unit testing while avoiding writing specific mock classes or using fixtures.

Python Design Patterns

The Python community has learned a lot about how to use our language since we started back in the 1990s, and this talk will use simple one-slide programs to illustrate the crucial refactorings that can help make a large real-life application far more testable and maintainable while making its code easier to re-use. This will not be a re-hash of Gang-of-Four refactorings, but specific to Python.
Brandon Rhodes

Loop like a native: while, for, iterators, generators

Python provides powerful primitives for iterating over your data in ways that let you express yourself clearly and directly. But even programmers familiar with the tools don't use them as fully as they could. This talk will cover Python's iteration tools, from basic loops to generators and how to add iteration to your own classes. Come learn how looping was meant to be!

Ned Batchelder