The Python Podcast.init

By Tobias MaceyTechnology Education

The Python Podcast.init episodes

July 08, 2018Mike Driscoll And His Career In Python
Summary
Mike Driscoll has been writing blogs and books for the Python community for years, including his popular series on the Python Module Of The Week. In his daily work he uses Python to test graphical interfaces written in C++ and QT for embedded platforms. In this episode he explains his work, how he got involved in writing as a regular exercise, and an overview of his recent books.
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 200Gbit 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.
To get worry-free releases download GoCD, the open source continous delivery server built by Thoughworks. You can use their pipeline modeling and value stream map to build, control and monitor every step from commit to deployment in one place. And with their new Kubernetes integration it’s even easier to deploy and scale your build agents. Go to podcastinit.com/gocd to learn more about their professional support services and enterprise add-ons.
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.
Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Mike Driscoll about using Python to test QT UIs for embedded platforms, his experience running a popular Python blog, and being a self-published author
Technically, I am testing a C++ Qt app that is deployed to an embedded system
Interview
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python?
Can you start by describing the way in which you are using Python for your work?
What benefits does Python provide for writing and running tests for projects written in other languages?
What are the drawbacks or limitations?

What are some of the tools or techniques that you have found most useful for your work?
How much of that was hard-earned knowledge vs finding it in reference material or prior art?

What are some of the most interesting and/or difficult aspects of testing graphical interfaces?

What are some of the most surprising or unexpected aspects of the problem space that you have discovered through your work?

What are some of the other ways in which you have worked with the Python language and community?

What are you most interested in working toward in the future?

Keep In Touch
Blog
@driscollis on Twitter
driscollis on GitHub
Books
Picks
Tobias
Draw.io

Mike
Qt for Python
Jupyter Notebook

Links
Mouse vs. Python
C++
Qt
Ag Leader
Squish
CFFI
Ctypes
Tcl
Javascript
Ruby
Froglogic
Selenium
Pillow
OpenCV
WxPython
PSF
PyCon
Brett Cannon
Carol Willing
ReportLab
PDFRW
Brett Cannon PyCon 2018 Keynote
The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
24 min
July 02, 2018 The Pulp Artifact Repository with Bihan Zhang and Austin Macdonald
Hosting your own artifact repositories can have a huge impact on the reliability of your production systems. It reduces your reliance on the availability of external services during deployments and ensures that you have access to a consistent set of dependencies with known versions. Many repositories only support one type of package, thereby requiring multiple systems to be maintained, but Pulp is a platform that handles multiple content types and is easily extendable to manage everything you need for running your applications. In this episode maintainers Bihan Zhang and Austin Macdonald explain how the Pulp project works, the exciting new changes coming in version 3, and how you can get it set up to use for your deployments today.
31 min
July 02, 2018The Pulp Artifact Repository with Bihan Zhang and Austin Macdonald
Summary
Hosting your own artifact repositories can have a huge impact on the reliability of your production systems. It reduces your reliance on the availability of external services during deployments and ensures that you have access to a consistent set of dependencies with known versions. Many repositories only support one type of package, thereby requiring multiple systems to be maintained, but Pulp is a platform that handles multiple content types and is easily extendable to manage everything you need for running your applications. In this episode maintainers Bihan Zhang and Austin Macdonald explain how the Pulp project works, the exciting new changes coming in version 3, and how you can get it set up to use for your deployments 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 200Gbit 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.
To get worry-free releases download GoCD, the open source continous delivery server built by Thoughworks. You can use their pipeline modeling and value stream map to build, control and monitor every step from commit to deployment in one place. And with their new Kubernetes integration it’s even easier to deploy and scale your build agents. Go to podcastinit.com/gocd to learn more about their professional support services and enterprise add-ons.
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.
Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Austin Macdonald and Bihan Zhang about Pulp, a platform for hosting and managing software package repositories
Interview
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python?
What is Pulp and how did the project get started?
What are the use cases/benefits for hosting your own artifact repository?
What is the high level architecture of the platform?
Pulp 3 appears to be a fairly substantial change in architecture and design. What will be involved in migrating an existing installation to the new version when it is released?

What is involved in adding support for a new type of artifact/package?

How does Pulp compare to other artifact repositories?

What are the major pieces of work that are required before releasing Pulp 3?

What have been some of the most interesting/unexpected/challenging aspects of building and maintaining Pulp?

What are your plans for the future of Pulp?

Keep In Touch
Austin
asmacdo on GitHub
@asmacdo on Twitter

Bihan
LinkedIn

Pulp Project
Email
GitHub
Website
#pulp on freenode

Picks
Tobias
Soonish

Austin
Shostakovitch String Quartet #8

Bihan
AOPA: Air Safety Institute YouTube Channel

Links
Pulp
RedHat
French Horn
XKCD
RPM
Debian
PyPI
Center For Open Science
SciPy
Ansible
Django Project
Django Storages
Artifactory
Warehouse
OCI (Open Container Initiative)
Crane
Docker
Twinehttps://github.com/pypa/twine?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
Maven
Read-through Cache
The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
31 min
June 25, 2018 Bringing Africa Online At Ascoderu with Clemens Wolff
The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. One of the places where this is especially true is in sub-Saharan Africa which is a vast region with little to no reliable internet connectivity. To help communities in this region leapfrog infrastructure challenges and gain access to opportunities for education and market information the Ascoderu non-profit has built Lokole. In this episode one of the lead engineers on the project, Clemens Wolff, explains what it is, how it is built, and how the venerable e-mail protocols can continue to provide access cheaply and reliably.
43 min
June 25, 2018Bringing Africa Online At Ascoderu with Clemens Wolff
Summary
The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed. One of the places where this is especially true is in sub-Saharan Africa which is a vast region with little to no reliable internet connectivity. To help communities in this region leapfrog infrastructure challenges and gain access to opportunities for education and market information the Ascoderu non-profit has built Lokole. In this episode one of the lead engineers on the project, Clemens Wolff, explains what it is, how it is built, and how the venerable e-mail protocols can continue to provide access cheaply and reliably.
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 200Gbit 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.
To get worry-free releases download GoCD, the open source continous delivery server built by Thoughworks. You can use their pipeline modeling and value stream map to build, control and monitor every step from commit to deployment in one place. And with their new Kubernetes integration it’s even easier to deploy and scale your build agents. Go to podcastinit.com/gocd to learn more about their professional support services and enterprise add-ons.
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.
Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Clemens Wolff about how Ascoderu is using Python to help communities in sub-Saharan Africa gain access to the digital age
Interview
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python?
What is the mission of Ascoderu and how did the organization get started?
How did you get involved?

The primary project that you build and maintain is Lokole. What is it and how does it help you in achieving the goals of the organization?
What are the limitations of using e-mail as the only interface to the broader internet?
What are some of the most interesting or unexpected uses of email in isolation have you seen?

From the user perspective, can you describe the overall experience of interacting with Lokole?
What is happening in the background?
Did you consider using a binary message format such as Avro, protocol buffers, or msgpack in place of JSON?

What kind of fault tolerance techniques are built into the overall information flow?

What are the most challenging or unexpected aspects of building Lokole and interacting with the user communities?

What projects do you have planned for the future?

Keep In Touch
Email
GitHub
LinkedIn
Picks
Tobias
Hubspot CRM

Clemens
Ali Farka Toure

Links
Ascoderu
Lokole
NLTK
Haskell
DRC
Lokole client
Lokole server
Ali Express
Raspberry Pi
Orange Pi
Uganda
Tanzania
JSON
Avro
msgpack
gzip
Gmail
Lingala
wvdial
USB Modeswitch
Gnome SIM database
Benin
Agricultural Engineer
Outernet
Internet In A Box
mkvvconf
Azure for non-profits
Kubernetes
Connexion
Zalando
Open API
Sendgrid
Azure Service Bus
Ambassador Container
Pillow
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
43 min
June 17, 2018 Understanding Machine Learning Through Visualizations with Benjamin Bengfort and Rebecca Bilbro
Machine learning models are often inscrutable and it can be difficult to know whether you are making progress. To improve feedback and speed up iteration cycles Benjamin Bengfort and Rebecca Bilbro built Yellowbrick to easily generate visualizations of model performance. In this episode they explain how to use Yellowbrick in the process of building a machine learning project, how it aids in understanding how different parameters impact the outcome, and the improved understanding among teammates that it creates. They also explain how it integrates with the scikit-learn API, the difficulty of producing effective visualizations, and future plans for improvement and new features.
56 min
June 17, 2018Understanding Machine Learning Through Visualizations with Benjamin Bengfort and Rebecca Bilbro
Summary
Machine learning models are often inscrutable and it can be difficult to know whether you are making progress. To improve feedback and speed up iteration cycles Benjamin Bengfort and Rebecca Bilbro built Yellowbrick to easily generate visualizations of model performance. In this episode they explain how to use Yellowbrick in the process of building a machine learning project, how it aids in understanding how different parameters impact the outcome, and the improved understanding among teammates that it creates. They also explain how it integrates with the scikit-learn API, the difficulty of producing effective visualizations, and future plans for improvement and new features.
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.
To get worry-free releases download GoCD, the open source continous delivery server built by Thoughworks. You can use their pipeline modeling and value stream map to build, control and monitor every step from commit to deployment in one place. And with their new Kubernetes integration it’s even easier to deploy and scale your build agents. Go to podcastinit.com/gocd to learn more about their professional support services and enterprise add-ons.
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.
Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Rebecca Bilbro and Benjamin Bengfort about Yellowbrick, a scikit extension to use visualizations for assisting with model selection in your data science projects.
Interview
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python?
Can you describe the use case for Yellowbrick and how the project got started?
What is involved in visualizing scikit-learn models?
What kinds of information do the visualizations convey?
How do they aid in understanding what is happening in the models?

How much direction does yellowbrick provide in terms of knowing which visualizations will be helpful in various circumstances?

What does the workflow look like for someone using Yellowbrick while iterating on a data science project?

What are some of the common points of confusion that your students encounter when learning data science and how has yellowbrick assisted in achieving understanding?

How is Yellowbrick iplemented and how has the design changed over the lifetime of the project?

What would be required to integrate with other visualization libraries and what benefits (if any) might that provide?
What about other ML frameworks?

What are some of the most challenging or unexpected aspects of building and maintaining Yellowbrick?

What are the limitations or edge cases for yellowbrick?

What do you have planned for the future of yellowbrick?

Beyond visualization, what are some of the other areas that you would like to see innovation in how data science is taught and/or conducted to make it more accessible?

Keep In Touch
Rebecca Bilbro
Github
Twitter

Benjamin Bengfort
Github
Twitter

Picks
Tobias
Poutine

Rebecca
The color yellow

Benjamin
ALL CAPS

Links
Hadoop
Natural Language Processing
Machine Learning
scikit-learn
Model Selection Triple
the machine learning workflow
scikit-yb
Yellowbrick
Visualizer API
Visual Tests
Jupyter
Matplotlib
Tensorflow
Hyperparameter
Parallel Coordinates
Radviz
Rank2D
Prediction Error Plot
Residuals Plot
Validation Curves
Alpha Selection
Frequency Distribution Plot
Bayes Theorem
Seaborn
Stop Words
N-gram
Craig – Bias and Fairness of Algorithms
Shiny
Bokeh
Keras
StatsModels
Tensorboard
PyTorch
NumPy
Voxel
Wizard of Oz
The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
56 min
June 11, 2018 Modern Database Clients On The Command Line with Amjith Ramanujam
The command line is a powerful and resilient interface for getting work done, but the user experience is often lacking. This can be especially pronounced in database clients because of the amount of information being transferred and examined. To help improve the utility of these interfaces Amjith Ramanujam built PGCLI, quickly followed by MyCLI with the Prompt Toolkit library. In this episode he describes his motivation for building these projects, how their popularity led him to create even more clients, and how these tools can help you in your command line adventures.
31 min
June 11, 2018Modern Database Clients On The Command Line with Amjith Ramanujam
Summary
The command line is a powerful and resilient interface for getting work done, but the user experience is often lacking. This can be especially pronounced in database clients because of the amount of information being transferred and examined. To help improve the utility of these interfaces Amjith Ramanujam built PGCLI, quickly followed by MyCLI with the Prompt Toolkit library. In this episode he describes his motivation for building these projects, how their popularity led him to create even more clients, and how these tools can help you in your command line adventures.
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 200Gbit 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.
To get worry-free releases download GoCD, the open source continous delivery server built by Thoughworks. You can use their pipeline modeling and value stream map to build, control and monitor every step from commit to deployment in one place. And with their new Kubernetes integration it’s even easier to deploy and scale your build agents. Go to podcastinit.com/gocd to learn more about their professional support services and enterprise add-ons.
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.
Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Amjith Ramanujam about DBCLI, an umbrella project for command line database clients with autocompletion and syntax highlighting.
Interview
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python?
What is the DBCLI project?
Which of the clients was the first to be created and what was your motivation for starting it?

At what point did you decide to create the DBCLI umbrella for the different projects and what benefits does it provide?

How much functionality is shared between the different clients?

What additional functionality do the different clients provide over those that are distributed with their respective engines?

How do you optimize for cases where large volumes of data are returned from a query?

What are some of the most interesting or surprising things that you have learned about database engines in the process of building client interfaces for them?

What are the most challenging aspects of building the different database clients?

What are some unexpected hardships that you encountered through this open source project?

What are some unexpected pleasant surprises that you encountered through this project?

Why did you hand over the project leadership for pgcli and mycli to other devs? Was it a hard decision?

Why do you optimize on being nice over being right?

How did Microsoft get involved with dbcli? mssql-cli

What’s been the reception for the projects?

What are your plans for upcoming releases of the various clients?

Which database engines are you planning to target next?

Keep In Touch
amjith on GitHub
@amjithr on Twitter
Blog
Picks
Tobias
Downsizing

Amjith
Dosas
Sarasate

Links
DBCLI
Haskell
Learn you as haskell
List Comprehension
PGCLI
MyCLI
MSSQL-CLI
Prompt Toolkit
Podcast.__init__ Interview

BPython

DjangoCon EU

CLI Helpers

Python Generators

PGSpecial

Longboarding

Irina Truong

Thomas Roten(sp)

PostGreSQL

MySQL

Microsoft SQL Server

SQLite

Oracle DB

Cassandra DB

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
31 min
June 04, 2018 Pandas Extension Arrays with Tom Augspurger
Pandas is a swiss army knife for data processing in Python but it has long been difficult to customize. In the latest release there is now an extension interface for adding custom data types with namespaced APIs. This allows for building and combining domain specific use cases and alternative storage mechanisms. In this episode Tom Augspurger describes how the new ExtensionArray works, how it came to be, and how you can start building your own extensions today.
34 min