As part of my efforts in reducing my dependency on Big Tech, I have been researching how to self-host my password manager. One solution that looks very promising is Vaultwarden, an open source clone of the Bitwarden cloud server. An interesting aspect of this server is that it stores all the secrets in a standard SQLite database, so in addition to having the self-hosted password server I could keep a backup copy of the database on my machine and query it directly. But of course, the secrets are encrypted in this database, so they are useless unless I learn how to decrypt them, similar to how the Bitwarden clients do it.

Speaking of the Bitwarden clients, while I was writing this article it came out that the official Bitwarden CLI client was compromised in a supply chain attack. This is a tool that I personally use and have on all my computers, so this feels like a wake up call to me. Luckily I did not install the compromised version myself, but I think there is an argument to be made about rolling your own secret management client instead of relying on the one all the hackers are after!

In this article I'll share how the encryption of secrets works in Bitwarden and its Vaultwarden clone. I'll also include working Python code, in case you want to tinker with this and like myself, would be interested in building your own tooling to keep your secrets safe.

This is the sixth 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!

The goal of this chapter is to use the concepts you have learned to build a web traffic analytics solution. This will serve as reinforcement of the techniques demonstrated in previous chapters as well as an example of a more complex and realistic database design.

This is the fifth 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!

You have now learned the design blocks used in relational databases. Sometimes, however, these building blocks have to be "tweaked" a bit to achieve a desired goal. This chapter is dedicated to exploring a very useful variation on the many-to-many relationship.

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.

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 products 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.

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.

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!

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.

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 claude:

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!