Michael Kennedy

Michael Kennedy is an American Python developer and entrepreneur best known as the host of Talk Python To Me, one of the most popular developer podcasts, and the founder of Talk Python Training, a large library of Python video courses. He is also co-host of the weekly Python Bytes news podcast and a Python Software Foundation Fellow.

Before building his own business, Kennedy worked for years as a professional software trainer, travelling to teach courses in .NET and C++ before moving over to Python. He published the first episode of Talk Python To Me on March 31, 2015, interviewing the creator of the Eve REST framework. The show grew into a weekly fixture of the Python world, with more than 500 episodes; on his site he says it ranked as the second most popular developer podcast on Apple's charts as of January 2026.

In February 2016 he turned the audience into a business with a Kickstarter for a video course, Python Jumpstart by Building 10 Apps, which 796 backers funded with $32,932. That course became the first product of Talk Python Training, which now offers more than 55 courses and 275+ hours of content from about 20 authors, plus a membership. In November 2016 he launched Python Bytes with co-host Brian Okken.

Kennedy runs the podcasts and courses on infrastructure he builds and hosts himself, an approach he documented in his book Talk Python in Production, a guide to deploying Python apps on your own servers without heavy cloud lock-in. He also publishes open-source Python libraries, makes YouTube videos and writes short essays at mkennedy.codes, and has recently added courses on building with AI agents.

He matters as one of the clearest examples of an indie developer-education business built around a single language: a free podcast that brings in listeners, and courses and a book that pay for it, run from Portland, Oregon.