HN user
I didn't get into this in the blog post, but we use io-ts at Pilot, and we generate most of the codecs based on the type annotations on the Python side. It works reasonably well, although I think the io-ts syntax confuses people who are new to TypeScript.
You might be interested in the PEP introducing structural subtyping to Python: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0544/ - there, they use "structural subtyping" and "static duck typing" as synonymous.
HS facilitator here - If you email me (allison at hackerschool), we can give you feedback.
Hacker School employee here. I can confirm that she's been admitted.
Glad you liked it, but that's actually my fork of the original, which was by another Hacker Schooler: https://github.com/bev-a-tron/MyFlaskTutorial
I really liked the way she distinguished arbitrary variable names from mandatory class names etc. So often, tutorials don't make that clear.