The Python Podcast.init

By Tobias MaceyTechnology Education

The Python Podcast.init episodes

December 10, 2017Kenneth Reitz
Summary
Kenneth Reitz has contributed many things to the Python community, including projects such as Requests, Pipenv, and Maya. He also started the community written Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python, and serves on the board of the Python Software Foundation. This week he talks about his career in the Python community and digs into some of his current work.
Preface
Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
I would like to thank everyone who supports us on Patreon. Your contributions help to make the show sustainable.
When you’re ready to launch your next project you’ll need somewhere to deploy it. Check out Linode at podastinit.com/linode and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for running your awesome app. And now you can deliver your work to your users even faster with the newly upgraded 200 GBit network in all of their datacenters.
If you’re tired of cobbling together your deployment pipeline then it’s time to try out GoCD, the open source continuous delivery platform built by the people at ThoughtWorks who wrote the book about it. With GoCD you get complete visibility into the life-cycle of your software from one location. To download it now go to podcatinit.com/gocd. Professional support and enterprise plugins are available for added piece of mind.
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 Kenneth Reitz about his career in Python
Interview
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python?
An overarching theme of your open source projects is the idea of making them “For Humans”. Can you elaborate on how that came to be a focus for you and how that informs the way that you design and write your code?
What are the projects that you are most proud of and which do you think have had the biggest impact on the Python community?
A: Requests, Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python, and Pipenv (yet to come to full fruition).
Which projects have you authored which are relatively unknown but you think people would benefit from using more often?
A: Maya: Datetime for Humans, and Records: SQL for Humans.
Outside of the code that you write, what are some of your personal missions for the software industry in general and the Python community in particular?
A: I consider myself a “spiritual alchemist”, which means “transformation of dark into light”. I seek to do “the great work”, in however in manifests, outside of the programming world, as well as within it.
What do you think is the biggest gap in the tool chest for Python developers?
A: I seek to fill all the voids that I see, and I’ve done my best to do that to the best of my ability. I think we have a lot of work to do in the area of single-file executable builds (a-la Go).
What are your ambitions for future projects?
A: At the moment, I have no current plans for future projects, but I’m sure something will come along at some point
If you weren’t working with Python what would you be doing instead?
A: I’d have a lot less money and I’d be a lot less fufilled.
Keep In Touch
Website
@kennethreitz on Twitter
kennethreitz on GitHub
Picks
Tobias
Algorithms to Live By

Kenneth
The Linux Programming Interface

Links
Heroku
Salesforce
PSF Board of Directors
Caldera Linux
C
Pascal
Basic
Groovy
Java
PHP
Ruby
The Design of Everyday Things
Requests
Hitchhiker’s Guide
Pipenv
Pipfile
The Update Framework
Falsehoods Programmer’s Believe About Time
PEP20
Py2EXE
Cxfreeze
Briefcase
The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
43 min
December 03, 2017 Asphalt: A Framework For Asynchronous Network Applications with Alex Grönholm
As we rely more on small, distributed processes for building our applications, being able to take advantage of asynchronous I/O is increasingly important for performance. This week Alex Grönholm explains how the Asphalt Framework was created to make it easier to build these network oriented software stacks and the technical challenges that he faced in the process.
35 min
December 03, 2017Asphalt: A Framework For Asynchronous Network Applications with Alex Grönholm
Summary
As we rely more on small, distributed processes for building our applications, being able to take advantage of asynchronous I/O is increasingly important for performance. This week Alex Grönholm explains how the Asphalt Framework was created to make it easier to build these network oriented software stacks and the technical challenges that he faced in the process.
Preface
Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
I would like to thank everyone who supports us on Patreon. Your contributions help to make the show sustainable.
When you’re ready to launch your next project you’ll need somewhere to deploy it. Check out Linode at podastinit.com/linode and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for running your awesome app. And now you can deliver your work to your users even faster with the newly upgraded 200 GBit network in all of their datacenters.
If you’re tired of cobbling together your deployment pipeline then it’s time to try out GoCD, the open source continuous delivery platform built by the people at ThoughtWorks who wrote the book about it. With GoCD you get complete visibility into the life-cycle of your software from one location. To download it now go to podcatinit.com/gocd. Professional support and enterprise plugins are available for added piece of mind.
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 Alex Grönholm about the Asphalt Framework, a Python microframework for network oriented applications
Interview
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python?
What is Asphalt and what was your reason for building it?
How does Asphalt compare to Twisted?
What are the most challenging parts of writing asynchronous and event-based applications and how does Asphalt help simplify that process?
When building an Asphalt application it can be easy to accidentally block an async loop by pulling in third party libraries that don’t support asynchronous execution. What are some of the techniques for identifying and resolving blocking portions of your application?
What does the internal architecture of Asphalt look like and how has that evolved from when you first started working on it?
What have been some of the most difficult aspects of building and evolving Asphalt?
What are some of the most interesting or unexpected uses of Asphalt that you have seen?
What are some of the new features or improvements that you have planned for the future of Asphalt?
Keep In Touch
Gitter
IRC
GitHub
agronholm on GitHub
@agronholm on Twitter
Picks
Tobias
Thor: Ragnarok

Alex
Two Steps From Hell

Links
Asphalt
ERP
Asyncio
Tornado
Twisted
SQLAlchemy
PEP 550
Sanic
WAMP
Podcast.init Interview About Crossbar
Tee
FlexGet
APScheduler
BitTorrent
uvloop
Tokio
The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
35 min
November 25, 2017 Golem: End-To-End Test Automation Framework with Luciano Renzi
The importance of testing your software is widely talked about and well understood. What is not as often discussed is the different types of testing, and how end-to-end tests can benefit your team to ensure proper functioning of your application when it gets released to production. This week Luciano Renzi shares the work that he has done on Golem, a framework for building and executing an automation suite to exercise the entire system from the perspective of the user. He discusses his reasons for creating the project, how he things about testing, and where he plans on taking Golem in the future. Give it a listen and then take it for a test drive.
55 min
November 25, 2017Golem: End-To-End Test Automation Framework with Luciano Renzi
Summary
The importance of testing your software is widely talked about and well understood. What is not as often discussed is the different types of testing, and how end-to-end tests can benefit your team to ensure proper functioning of your application when it gets released to production. This week Luciano Renzi shares the work that he has done on Golem, a framework for building and executing an automation suite to exercise the entire system from the perspective of the user. He discusses his reasons for creating the project, how he things about testing, and where he plans on taking Golem in the future. Give it a listen and then take it for a test drive.
Preface
Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
I would like to thank everyone who supports us on Patreon. Your contributions help to make the show sustainable.
When you’re ready to launch your next project you’ll need somewhere to deploy it. Check out Linode at podastinit.com/linode and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for running your awesome app. And now you can deliver your work to your users even faster with the newly upgraded 200 GBit network in all of their datacenters.
If you’re tired of cobbling together your deployment pipeline then it’s time to try out GoCD, the open source continuous delivery platform built by the people at ThoughtWorks who wrote the book about it. With GoCD you get complete visibility into the life-cycle of your software from one location. To download it now go to podcatinit.com/gocd. Professional support and enterprise plugins are available for added piece of mind.
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 Luciano Renzi about Golem, a framework and automation tool for end-to-end testing in Python
Interview
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python?
What is golem and what motivated you to create it?
What was your inspiration for the name?

Why did you choose to use Python for Golem and if you were to start over today would you make the same choice?

For someone who is unfamiliar with the concept, can you describe what end-to-end testing is and the reasons for making it part of their development process?

What is the main goal of Golem

What does the internal architecture and implementation of Golem look like and how has that evolved from when you first started the project?

How does Golem compare to other Python libraries for automated browser testing and what was lacking in the existing solutions when you created it?

What are the differences between golem and robot framework?

What about projects written in other languages such as protractor?

One of the intriguing features of Golem is the web interface for constructing tests. What are the benefits of codeless automation & record-playback functionality?

What are some of the most challenging aspects of building and maintaining Golem?

It seems that every browser automation library is ultimately a wrapper around Selenium. Why is a wrapper necessary and why haven’t any strong alternatives been created?

What are the advantages of making Golem a framework for test automation, rather than a library?

What are some of the most interesting or unexpected uses for Golem that you have seen?

What do you have planned for the future of Golem?

What is the current state of end to end automation and how do you see it evolving in the future?

How do you think machine learning and AI will be used in test automation?

Keep In Touch
luciano-renzi on GitHub
@lucianorenzi_ on Twitter
Picks
Tobias
Weapons of Math Destruction

Links
Golem
Elementum
Pascal
Watir
JUnit
Selenium
Page Object Pattern
Selenium Grid
Sauce Labs
py.test
Podcast.init Interview About Py.Test

Robot Framework

Mechanize

Acceptance Tests

Protractor

Webdriver.io

Appium

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
55 min
November 19, 2017 Graphite Metrics Stack with Jason Dixon and Dan Cech
Do you know what is happening in your production systems right now? If you have a comprehensive metrics platform then the answer is yes. If your answer is no, then this episode is for you. Jason Dixon and Dan Cech, core maintainers of the Graphite project, talk about how graphite is architected to capture your time series data and give you the ability to use it for answering questions. They cover the challenges that have been faced in evolving the project, the strengths that have let it stand the tests of time, and the features that will be coming in future releases.
1 hr 15 min
November 19, 2017Graphite Metrics Stack with Jason Dixon and Dan Cech
Summary
Do you know what is happening in your production systems right now? If you have a comprehensive metrics platform then the answer is yes. If your answer is no, then this episode is for you. Jason Dixon and Dan Cech, core maintainers of the Graphite project, talk about how graphite is architected to capture your time series data and give you the ability to use it for answering questions. They cover the challenges that have been faced in evolving the project, the strengths that have let it stand the tests of time, and the features that will be coming in future releases.
Preface
Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
I would like to thank everyone who supports us on Patreon. Your contributions help to make the show sustainable.
When you’re ready to launch your next project you’ll need somewhere to deploy it. Check out Linode at podastinit.com/linode and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for running your awesome app. And now you can deliver your work to your users even faster with the newly upgraded 200 GBit network in all of their datacenters.
If you’re tired of cobbling together your deployment pipeline then it’s time to try out GoCD, the open source continuous delivery platform built by the people at ThoughtWorks who wrote the book about it. With GoCD you get complete visibility into the life-cycle of your software from one location. To download it now go to podcatinit.com/gocd. Professional support and enterprise plugins are available for added piece of mind.
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.
Now is a good time to start planning your conference schedule for 2018. To help you out with that, guest Jason Dixon is offering a $100 discount for Monitorama in Portland, OR on June 4th – 6th and guest Dan Cech is offering a €50 discount to Grafanacon in Amsterdam, Netherlands March 1st and 2nd. There is also still time to get your tickets to PyCascades in Vancouver, BC Canada January 22nd and 23rd. All of the details are in the show notes
Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Jason Dixon and Dan Cech about Graphite
Interview
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python?
What is Graphite and how did you each get involved in the project?
Why should developers be thinking about collecting and reporting on metrics from their software and systems?
How do you think the Graphite project has contributed to or influenced the overall state of the art in systems monitoring?
There are a number of different projects that comprise a fully working Graphite deployment. Can you list each of them and describe how they fit together?
What are some of the early design choices that have proven to be problematic while trying to evolve the project?
What are some of the challenges that you have been faced with while maintaining and improving the various Graphite projects?
What will be involved in porting Graphite to run on Python 3?
If you were to start the project over would you still use Python?
What are the options for scaling Graphite and making it highly available?
Given the level of importance to a companies visibility into their systems, what development practices do you use to ensure that Graphite can operate reliably and fail gracefully?
What are some of the biggest competitors to Graphite?
When is Graphite not the right choice for tracking your system metrics?
What are some of the most interesting or unusual uses of Graphite that you are aware of?
What are some of the new features and enhancements that are planned for the future of Graphite?
Keep In Touch
Jason
@obfuscurity on Twitter
Website
obfuscurity on GitHub

Dan
@dancech on Twitter
Website
DanCech on GitHub

Picks
Tobias
Archery

Jason
Rocket League
Monitorama $100 Discount (Limited Quantity)

Dan
Home Assistant
Podcast.__init__ Interview

GrafanaCon €50 discount with PODCASTINIT2018

Links
Graphite
Sensu
Monitorama
RainTank
Grafana Labs
Librato
GitHub
Dyn
Telemetry
Perl
PHP
React
O’Reilly Graphite Book
Time Series
RRDTool
InfluxDB
Adrian Cockcroft
NVMe
Prometheus
CNCF
ASAP Smoothing
PyCascades
The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
1 hr 15 min
November 11, 2017 Surprise! Recommendation Algorithms with Nicolas Hug
A relevant and timely recommendation can be a pleasant surprise that will delight your users. Unfortunately it can be difficult to build a system that will produce useful suggestions, which is why this week's guest, Nicolas Hug, built a library to help with developing and testing collaborative recommendation algorithms. He explains how he took the code he wrote for his PhD thesis and cleaned it up to release as an open source library and his plans for future development on it.
31 min
November 11, 2017Surprise! Recommendation Algorithms with Nicolas Hug
Summary
A relevant and timely recommendation can be a pleasant surprise that will delight your users. Unfortunately it can be difficult to build a system that will produce useful suggestions, which is why this week’s guest, Nicolas Hug, built a library to help with developing and testing collaborative recommendation algorithms. He explains how he took the code he wrote for his PhD thesis and cleaned it up to release as an open source library and his plans for future development on it.
Preface
Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
I would like to thank everyone who supports us on Patreon. Your contributions help to make the show sustainable.
When you’re ready to launch your next project you’ll need somewhere to deploy it. Check out Linode at podastinit.com/linode and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for running your awesome app. And now you can deliver your work to your users even faster with the newly upgraded 200 GBit network in all of their datacenters.
If you’re tired of cobbling together your deployment pipeline then it’s time to try out GoCD, the open source continuous delivery platform built by the people at ThoughtWorks who wrote the book about it. With GoCD you get complete visibility into the life-cycle of your software from one location. To download it now go to podcatinit.com/gocd. Professional support and enterprise plugins are available for added piece of mind.
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 Nicolas Hug about Surprise, a scikit library for building recommender systems
Interview
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python?
What is Surprise and what was your motivation for creating it?
What are the most challenging aspects of building a recommender system and how does Surprise help simplify that process?
What are some of the ways that a user or company can bootstrap a recommender system while they accrue data to use a collaborative algorithm?
What are some of the ways that a recommender system can be used, outside of the typical ecommerce example?
Once an algorithm has been deployed how can a user test the accuracy of the suggestions?
How is Surprise implemented and how has it evolved since you first started working on it?
What have been the most difficult aspects of building and maintaining Surprise?
competitors?
What are the attributes of the system that can be modified to improve the relevance of the recommendations that are provided?
For someone who wants to use Surprise in their application, what are the steps involved?
What are some of the new features or improvements that you have planned for the future of Surprise?
Keep In Touch
Website
@hug_nicolas on Twitter
nicolashug on GitHub
Picks
Tobias
Silk profiler for Django

Links
Surprise
Gridsearch
Cold Start Problem
Content-Based Recommendation
Ensemble Learning
Spotlight
Lightfm
Pandas
The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
31 min
November 04, 2017 Rasa: Build Your Own AI Chatbot with Joey Faulkner
With the proliferation of messaging applications, there has been a growing demand for bots that can understand our wishes and perform our bidding. The rise of artificial intelligence has brought the capacity for understanding human language. Combining these two trends gives us chatbots that can be used as a new interface to the software and services that we depend on. This week Joey Faulkner shares his work with Rasa Technologies and their open sourced libraries for understanding natural language and how to conduct a conversation. We talked about how the Rasa Core and Rasa NLU libraries work and how you can use them to replace your dependence on API services and own your data.
49 min