The Python Podcast.init

By Tobias MaceyTechnology Education

The Python Podcast.init episodes

October 22, 2018Of Checklists, Ethics, and Data with Emily Miller and Peter Bull
Summary
As data science becomes more widespread and has a bigger impact on the lives of people, it is important that those projects and products are built with a conscious consideration of ethics. Keeping ethical principles in mind throughout the lifecycle of a data project helps to reduce the overall effort of preventing negative outcomes from the use of the final product. Emily Miller and Peter Bull of Driven Data have created Deon to improve the communication and conversation around ethics among and between data teams. It is a Python project that generates a checklist of common concerns for data oriented projects at the various stages of the lifecycle where they should be considered. In this episode they discuss their motivation for creating the project, the challenges and benefits of maintaining such a checklist, and how you can start using it today.
Preface
Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
When you’re ready to launch your next app you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to scale up. Go to podcastinit.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute.
Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, and read the show notes. And if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions I would love to hear them. You can reach me on Twitter at @Podcast__init__ or email [email protected])
To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, tell your friends and co-workers, and share it on social media.
Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at podcastinit.com/chat
Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Emily Miller and Peter Bull about Deon, an ethics checklist for data projects
Interview
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python?
Can you start by describing what Deon is and your motivation for creating it?
Why a checklist, specifically? What’s the advantage of this over an oath, for example?
What is unique to data science in terms of the ethical concerns, as compared to traditional software engineering?
What is the typical workflow for a team that is using Deon in their projects?
Deon ships with a default checklist but allows for customization. What are some common addendums that you have seen?
Have you received pushback on any of the default items?

How does Deon simplify communication around ethics across team boundaries?

What are some of the most often overlooked items?

What are some of the most difficult ethical concerns to comply with for a typical data science project?

How has Deon helped you at Driven Data?

What are the customer facing impacts of embedding a discussion of ethics in the product development process?

Some of the items on the default checklist coincide with regulatory requirements. Are there any cases where regulation is in conflict with an ethical concern that you would like to see practiced?

What are your hopes for the future of the Deon project?

Keep In Touch
Emily
LinkedIn
ejm714 on GitHub

Peter
LinkedIn
@pjbull on Twitter
pjbull on GitHub

Driven Data
@drivendataorg on Twitter
drivendataorg on GitHub
Website

Picks
Tobias
Richard Bond Glass Art

Emily
Tandem Coffee in Portland, Maine

Peter
The Model Bakery in Saint Helena and Napa, California

Links
Deon
Driven Data
International Development
Brookings Institution
Stata
Econometrics
Metis Bootcamp
Pandas
Podcast Episode

C#

.NET

Podcast.__init__ Episode On Software Ethics

Jupyter Notebook
Podcast Episode

Word2Vec

cookiecutter data science

Logistic Regression

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
46 min
October 15, 2018 How Python Is Used To Build A Startup At Wanderu with Chris Kirkos and Matt Warren - Episode 183
The breadth of use cases that Python supports, coupled with the level of productivity that it provides through its ease of use have contributed to the incredible popularity of the language. To explore the ways that it can contribute to the success of a young and growing startup two of the lead engineers at Wanderu discuss their experiences in this episode. Matt Warren, the technical operations lead, explains the ways that he is using Python to build and scale the infrastructure that Wanderu relies on, as well as the ways that he deploys and runs the various Python applications that power the business. Chris Kirkos, the lead software architect, describes how the original Django application has grown into a suite of microservices, where they have opted to use a different language and why, and how Python is still being used for critical business needs. This is a great conversation for understanding the business impact of the Python language and ecosystem.
35 min
October 15, 2018How Python Is Used To Build A Startup At Wanderu with Chris Kirkos and Matt Warren
Summary
The breadth of use cases that Python supports, coupled with the level of productivity that it provides through its ease of use have contributed to the incredible popularity of the language. To explore the ways that it can contribute to the success of a young and growing startup two of the lead engineers at Wanderu discuss their experiences in this episode. Matt Warren, the technical operations lead, explains the ways that he is using Python to build and scale the infrastructure that Wanderu relies on, as well as the ways that he deploys and runs the various Python applications that power the business. Chris Kirkos, the lead software architect, describes how the original Django application has grown into a suite of microservices, where they have opted to use a different language and why, and how Python is still being used for critical business needs. This is a great conversation for understanding the business impact of the Python language and ecosystem.
Preface
Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
When you’re ready to launch your next app you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to scale up. Go to podcastinit.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute.
Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, and read the show notes. And if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions I would love to hear them. You can reach me on Twitter at @Podcast__init__ or email [email protected])
To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, tell your friends and co-workers, and share it on social media.
Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at podcastinit.com/chat
Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Matt Warren and Chris Kirkos and about the ways that they are using Python at Wanderu
Interview
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python?
Can you start by describing what Wanderu does?
How is the platform architected?

What are the broad categories of problems that you are addressing with Python?

What are the areas where you chose to use a different language or service?

What ratio of new projects and features are implemented using Python?
How much of that decision process is influenced by the fact that you already have so much pre-existing Python code?
For the projects where you don’t choose Python, what are the reasons for going elsewhere?

What are some of the limitations of Python that you have encountered while working at Wanderu?

What are some of the places that you were surprised to find Python in use at Wanderu?

What have you enjoyed most about working with Python?
What are some of the sharp edges that you would like to see smoothed over in future versions of the language?

What is the most challenging bug that you have dealt with at Wanderu that was attributable in some sense to the fact that the code was written in Python?

If you were to start over today on any of the pieces of the Wanderu platform, are there any that you would write in a different language?

Which libraries have been the most useful for your work at Wanderu?
Which ones have caused you the most pain?

Keep In Touch
Matt
@matthewwwarren on Twitter
LinkedIn

Chris
LinkedIn

Picks
Tobias
DataGrip

Matt
Chacarero

Chris
PDB
IPDB
PUDB
VSCode

Links
Wanderu
Northeastern University
C++
Perl
Microservices
PostgreSQL
Data Engineering Podcast Episode

MongoDB

Django

Node.js

Go-lang

AWS

ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load)

Data Warehouse

Graph Database

Twisted
Podcast Episode

Gevent

Scrapy

Virtualenv

Ruby

Rbenv

Boto3

PyMongo

Ansible

Pip

TLS

Cryptography
Podcast Episode

Setuptools

Openstack

Requests

PyCountry

SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)

XML

Jinja

OpenSSL

pytest

Bandit
Podcast Episode

Gang of Four

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
35 min
October 09, 2018 Building A Game In Python At PyWeek with Daniel Pope - Episode 182
Many people learn to program because of their interest in building their own video games. Once the necessary skills have been acquired, it is often the case that the original idea of creating a game is forgotten in favor of solving the problems we confront at work. Game jams are a great way to get inspired and motivated to finally write a game from scratch. This week Daniel Pope discusses the origin and format for PyWeek, his experience as a participant, and the landscape of options for building a game in Python. He also explains how you can register and compete in the next competition.
31 min
October 09, 2018Building A Game In Python At PyWeek with Daniel Pope
Summary
Many people learn to program because of their interest in building their own video games. Once the necessary skills have been acquired, it is often the case that the original idea of creating a game is forgotten in favor of solving the problems we confront at work. Game jams are a great way to get inspired and motivated to finally write a game from scratch. This week Daniel Pope discusses the origin and format for PyWeek, his experience as a participant, and the landscape of options for building a game in Python. He also explains how you can register and compete in the next competition.
Preface
Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
When you’re ready to launch your next app you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to scale up. Go to podcastinit.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute.
Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, and read the show notes. And if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions I would love to hear them. You can reach me on Twitter at @Podcast__init__ or email [email protected])
To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, tell your friends and co-workers, and share it on social media.
Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at podcastinit.com/chat
Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Daniel Pope about PyWeek, a one week challenge to build a game in Python
Interview
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python?
Can you start by describing what PyWeek is and how the competition got started?
What is your current role in relation to PyWeek and how did you get involved?

What are the strengths of the Python lanaguage and ecosystem for developing a game?

What are some of the common difficulties encountered by participants in the challenge?

What are some of the most commonly used libraries and tools for creating and packaging the games?

What are some shortcomings in the available tools or libraries for Python when it comes to game development?

What are some examples of libraries or tools that were created and released as a result of a team’s efforts during PyWeek?

How often do games that get started during PyWeek continue to be developed and improved?
Have there ever been games that went on to be commercially viable?

What are some of the most interesting or unusual games that you have seen submitted to PyWeek?

Can you describe your experience as a competitor in PyWeek?
How do you structure your time during the competition week to ensure that you can complete your game?

What are the benefits and difficulties of the one week constraint for development?

How has PyWeek changed over the years that you have been involved with it?

What are your hopes for the competition as it continues into the future?

Keep In Touch
@lordmauve on Twitter
Blog
lordmauve on GitHub
Picks
Tobias
The Architecht Show

Dan
Red Blob Games
Designing Virtual Worlds by Richard Bartle

Links
PyWeek
Two Sigma
Game Jam
Richard Jones
PyGame
Pyglet
SDL
PyGame Zero
Cocos 2D
Doctor Corovich’s Flying Atomic Squid
Mortimer The Lepidopterist
Ludum Dare
The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
31 min
October 02, 2018 Managing Application Secrets with Brian Kelly
Any application that communicates with other systems or services will at some point require a credential or sensitive piece of information to operate properly. The question then becomes how best to securely store, transmit, and use that information. The world of software secrets management is vast and complicated, so in this episode Brian Kelly, engineering manager at Conjur, aims to help you make sense of it. He explains the main factors for protecting sensitive information in your software development and deployment, ways that information might be leaked, and how to get the whole team on the same page.
40 min
October 02, 2018Managing Application Secrets with Brian Kelly
Summary
Any application that communicates with other systems or services will at some point require a credential or sensitive piece of information to operate properly. The question then becomes how best to securely store, transmit, and use that information. The world of software secrets management is vast and complicated, so in this episode Brian Kelly, engineering manager at Conjur, aims to help you make sense of it. He explains the main factors for protecting sensitive information in your software development and deployment, ways that information might be leaked, and how to get the whole team on the same page.
Preface
Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
When you’re ready to launch your next app you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to scale up. Go to podcastinit.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute.
Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, and read the show notes. And if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions I would love to hear them. You can reach me on Twitter at @Podcast__init__ or email [email protected])
To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, tell your friends and co-workers, and share it on social media.
Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at podcastinit.com/chat
Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Brian Kelly about how to store, deploy, and use sensitive information in your applications
Interview
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python?
To begin with, how do you define a secret in the context of an application?
What are the broad categories for solutions to secrets management?
What are the different aspects of secrets management in the lifecycle of developing, deploying, and maintaining an application?
How does the scale of a project or organization impact the strategies that are reasonable for secrets management?
What are some of the most challenging aspects of secrets management at the different stages of usage?
What are some of the common reasons that secrets management strategies fail?
What are some of the vulnerabilities or attack vectors that development teams should be thinking about when working with credentials?

What are your thoughts on versioning of secrets?

Beyond storing and deploying sensitive information, what are some of the secondary concerns around secrets management that development teams should be thinking about?

How does the use of multiple environments (e.g. dev, QA, production, etc.) affect the strategies used for secrets management?

What are some of the most useful resources that you have found for anyone looking to learn more about this subject?

Keep In Touch
@brikelly on Twitter
Blog
brikelly on GitHub
Picks
Tobias
The Inheritance Cycle

Brian
Donegal Ireland

Links
Conjur
CyberArk
Datawire
Transpiler
IDL
CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery)
Hashicorp Vault
Continuous Integration
Continuous Delivery
TLS (Transport Layer Security)
RBAC (Role Based Access Control)
Terraform
SQL Injection
Secretless
MFA
Duo Security
Kubernetes
Summon
OWASP Top 10
Configuration Management
Puppet
Chef
Ansible
SaltStack
Immutable Infrastructure
Conjur Blog
Krebs On Security
The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
40 min
September 24, 2018 Django, Channels, And The Asynchronous Web with Andrew Godwin
Once upon a time the web was a simple place with one main protocol and a predictable sequence of request/response interactions with backend applications. This is the era when Django began, but in the intervening years there has been an explosion of complexity with new asynchronous protocols and single page Javascript applications. To help bridge the gap and bring the most popular Python web framework into the modern age Andrew Godwin created Channels. In this episode he explains how the first version of the asynchronous layer for Django applications was created, how it has changed in the jump to version 2, and where it will go in the future. Along the way he also discusses the challenges of async development, his work on designing ASGI as the spiritual successor to WSGI, and how you can start using all of this in your own projects today.
42 min
September 24, 2018Django, Channels, And The Asynchronous Web with Andrew Godwin
Summary
Once upon a time the web was a simple place with one main protocol and a predictable sequence of request/response interactions with backend applications. This is the era when Django began, but in the intervening years there has been an explosion of complexity with new asynchronous protocols and single page Javascript applications. To help bridge the gap and bring the most popular Python web framework into the modern age Andrew Godwin created Channels. In this episode he explains how the first version of the asynchronous layer for Django applications was created, how it has changed in the jump to version 2, and where it will go in the future. Along the way he also discusses the challenges of async development, his work on designing ASGI as the spiritual successor to WSGI, and how you can start using all of this in your own projects today.
Preface
Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
When you’re ready to launch your next app you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to scale up. Go to podcastinit.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute.
Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, and read the show notes. And if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions I would love to hear them. You can reach me on Twitter at @Podcast__init__ or email [email protected])
To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, tell your friends and co-workers, and share it on social media.
Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at podcastinit.com/chat
Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Andrew Godwin about Django Channels 2.x and the ASGI specification for modern, asynchronous web protocols
Interview
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python?
Can you start with an overview of the problem that Channels is aiming to solve?
Asynchronous frameworks have existed in Python for a long time. What are the tradeoffs in those frameworks that would lead someone to prefer the combination of Django and Channels?
For someone who is familiar with traditional Django or working on an existing application, what are the steps involved in integrating Channels?
Channels is a project that you have been working on for a significant amount of time and which you recently re-architected. What were the shortcomings in the 1.x release that necessitated such a major rewrite?
How is the current system architected?

What have you found to be the most challenging or confusing aspects of managing asynchronous web protocols both as an author of Channels/ASGI and someone building on top of them?
While reading through the documentation there were mentions of the synchronous nature of the Django ORM. What are your thoughts on asynchronous database access and how important that is for future versions of Django and Channels?

As part of your implementation of Channels 2.x you introduced a new protocol for asynchronous web applications in Python in the form of ASGI. How does this differ from the WSGI standard and what was your process for developing this specification?
What are your hopes for what the Python community will do with ASGI?

What are your plans for the future of Channels?

What are some of the most interesting or unexpected uses of Channels and/or ASGI?

Keep In Touch
@andrewgodwin on Twitter
Website
andrewgodwin on GitHub
Picks
Tobias
Nobody Listens To Paula Poundstone

Andrew
Literary Appreciation Of The Olson Timezones Database

Links
Channels
ASGI
Django
South
Django Migrations
PHP
Turbogears
WSGI
Websockets
Eventlet
HTTP
WebRTC
IPFS
Twisted
Tornado
Podcast Episode

Daphne

Redis

Uvicorn

Heisenbugs

Deadlock

CherryPy

Flask

WSGI 2
Podcast Episode

Starlette

Django Rest Framework

Thom Christie

PEP Process Episode

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
42 min
September 17, 2018 The Business Of Technical Authoring With William Vincent
There are many aspects of learning how to program and at least as many ways to go about it. This is multiplicative with the different problem domains and subject areas where software development is applied. In this episode William Vincent discusses his experiences learning how web development mid-career and then writing a series of books to make the learning curve for Django newcomers shallower. This includes his thoughts on the business aspects of technical writing and teaching, the challenges of keeping content up to date with the current state of software, and the ever-present lack of sufficient information for new programmers.
50 min