The Python Podcast.init

By Tobias MaceyTechnology Education

The Python Podcast.init episodes

April 23, 2016Pip and the Python Package Authority with Donald Stufft
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Summary
As Python developers we have all used pip to install the different libraries and projects that we need for our work, but have you ever wondered about who works on pip and how the package archive we all know and love is maintained? In this episode we interviewed Donald Stufft who is the primary maintainer of pip and the Python Package Index about how he got involved with the projects, what kind of work is involved, and what is on the roadmap. Give it a listen and then give him a big thank you for all of his hard work!
Brief Introduction
Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS
Google Play Music just launched support for podcasts, so now you can check us out there and subscribe to the show.
Follow us on Twitter or Google+
Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+
Join our community! Visit discourse.pythonpodcast.com for your opportunity to find out about upcoming guests, suggest questions, and propose show ideas.
I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at pythonpodcast.com
Linode is sponsoring us this week. Check them out at linode.com/podcastinit and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for your next project
We also have a new sponsor this week. Rollbar is a service for tracking and aggregating your application errors so that you can fix the bugs in your application before your users notice they exist. Use the link rollbar.com/podcatinit to get 90 days and 300,000 errors for free on their bootstrap plan.
The Open Data Science Conference in Boston is happening on May 21st and 22nd. If you use the code EP during registration you will save 20% off of the ticket price. If you decide to attend then let us know, we’ll see you there!
Your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti
Today we are interviewing Donald Stufft about Pip and the Python Packaging Authority
Interview with Donald Stufft
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python? – Chris
How did you get involved with the Pip project? – Tobias
What is the Python Packaging Authority and what does it do? – Tobias
How is PyPi / the Python Packaging Authority funded? – Chris
What is your opinion on the current state of Python packaging? Are there lessons from other languages and package managers that you think should be adopted by Python? – Tobias
What was involved in getting pip into the standard Python distribution? Was there any controversy around this? – Chris
Can you describe some of the mechanics of Pip and how it differs from the other packaging systems that Python has used in the past? – Tobias
Does pip interact at all with virtualenv, pyenv and the like? – Chris
The newest package format for Python is the wheel system. Can you describe what that is and what its benefits are? – Tobias
What are the biggest challenges that you have encountered while working on Pip? – Tobias
What does the infrastructure for the Python Package Index look like? – Tobias
What have been some of the challenges around scaling Pypi’s infrastructure to meet demand? – Chris
You’re currently working on a replacement for the PyPI site with the Warehouse project. Can you explain your motivation for that and how it improves on the current system? – Tobias
Where do you see the future of dependency management in Python headed? – Chris
A few days ago there was a big story about how an NPM library was removed from the index, breaking a large number of dependent projects and applications. Do you think that anything like that could happen in the Python ecosystem? – Tobias
What’s on the roadmap for Pip? – Tobias
Keep In Touch
GitHub
DistUtils Special Interest Group
Email
@dstufft on Twitter
Picks
Tobias
Xiki

Chris
Agar.io
Culprate
TCP/IP Illustrated Volume I: The Protocols

Donald
Linux on Windows 10

Links
Bandersnatch
Wheel
Warehouse pypa/warehouse
PyPI Sponsors56
DevPI
The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
53 min
April 16, 2016 StackStorm with Tomaž Muraus and Patrick Hoolboom
If you are responsible for managing any amount of servers, then you know that automation is critical for maintaining your sanity. This week we spoke with Tomaž Muraus and Patrick Hoolboom about their work on StackStorm, which is a platform for tracking and reacting to events in your infrastructure. By allowing you to register actions with event triggers it frees you from having to worry about a whole class of concerns so that you can focus on building new capabilities rather than babysitting what you already have.
1 hr
April 16, 2016StackStorm with Tomaž Muraus and Patrick Hoolboom
Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community, and sign up for our mailing list.
Summary
If you are responsible for managing any amount of servers, then you know that automation is critical for maintaining your sanity. This week we spoke with Tomaž Muraus and Patrick Hoolboom about their work on StackStorm, which is a platform for tracking and reacting to events in your infrastructure. By allowing you to register actions with event triggers it frees you from having to worry about a whole class of concerns so that you can focus on building new capabilities rather than babysitting what you already have.
Brief Introduction
Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS
Follow us on Twitter or Google+
Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+
Join our community! Visit discourse.pythonpodcast.com for your opportunity to find out about upcoming guests, suggest questions, and propose show ideas.
I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at pythonpodcast.com
Linode is sponsoring us this week. Check them out at linode.com/podcastinit and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for your next project
I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers and designers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.__init__. Use the link hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus.
ODSC East in Boston is happening on May 21st – 22nd. Use the discount code EP for 20% off when you register
Your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti
Today we are interviewing Tomaž Muraus and Patrick Hoolboom about the StackStorm project, which is an event-driven system automation framework.
Interview
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python? – Chris
What is StackStorm and what problems does it solve? – Tobias
What was your inspiration for creating StackStorm and what were some of the biggest architectural and design challenges? – Tobias
What made you choose Python for StackStorm’s implementation rather than another language like Go? – Chris
Can you describe the architecture of StackStorm and what the setup looks like? – Tobias
Other than chat driven events, what types of event sources does StackStorm support, and what use cases do those alternate event streams enable? – Chris
The home page describes StackStorm as being an event-driven framework for automating the users infrastructure. What kinds of capabilities are made possible by this and do you think that it simplifies or complicates the work of operations engineers? – Tobias
Is there a minimum or maximum size of infrastructure for which it would make sense to use StackStorm? – Tobias
It looks like StackStorm is made up of a number of discrete components. What do the components use to communicate, and how did those choices influence the design of StackStorm’s overall architecture? – Chris
I use SaltStack in my work which is a tool that also focuses on event-driven architecture. Can you compare and contrast the capabilities and focus of StackStorm with the features of SaltStack? Would it make sense to use both frameworks in the same infrastructure? – Tobias
One of the advertised features of StackStorm is a strong focus on ChatOps. Can you explain that concept for people who might not be familiar with it and describe why it is such a useful paradigm? – Tobias
Extensibility is a critical capability for an operations platform due to the wide variety of environments that people are inclined to build. In StackStorm the unit of extensibility is a pack. Can you describe what a pack is and how you arrived at that abstraction? – Tobias
Have you encountered any situations in which the concept of a pack has been the wrong abstraction and made something more difficult than it may have been otherwise? – Tobias

In very large scale environments like Netflix, how would one build a StackStorm cluster to handle the immense load. More specifically, how does one determine what kinds of machine resources each component needs? – Chris

Management of credentials is always a difficult problem in operations. Does StackStorm attempt to tackle that issue or does it defer that responsibility to other systems, such as the user’s configuration management platform? – Tobias

Does StackStorm interface with Kibana, Splunk or other log / metric aggregation packages? – Chris

What are some of the most surprising uses that you have heard of from people using the platform? – Tobias

Keep In Touch
Tomaž
Twitter
website/blog

Patrick
Twitter

Picks
Tobias
SAWS
Bill Peet

Chris
Grimm Brewing Subliminal Message Sour Red Ale
Lobste.rs
Medium

Tomaž
Understanding Air France 447
Aviation Herald

Patrick
True Nutrition
JP Cycles

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
1 hr
April 09, 2016 Hypothesis with David MacIver
Writing tests is important for the stability of our projects and our confidence when making changes. One issue that we must all contend with when crafting these tests is whether or not we are properly exercising all of the edge cases. Property based testing is a method that attempts to find all of those edge cases by generating randomized inputs to your functions until a failing combination is found. This approach has been popularized by libraries such as Quickcheck in Haskell, but now Python has an offering in this space in the form of Hypothesis. This week, the creator and maintainer of Hypothesis, David MacIver, joins us to tell us about his work on it and how it works to improve our confidence in the stability of our code.
48 min
April 09, 2016Hypothesis with David MacIver
Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community, and sign up for our mailing list.
Summary
Writing tests is important for the stability of our projects and our confidence when making changes. One issue that we must all contend with when crafting these tests is whether or not we are properly exercising all of the edge cases. Property based testing is a method that attempts to find all of those edge cases by generating randomized inputs to your functions until a failing combination is found. This approach has been popularized by libraries such as Quickcheck in Haskell, but now Python has an offering in this space in the form of Hypothesis. This week, the creator and maintainer of Hypothesis, David MacIver, joins us to tell us about his work on it and how it works to improve our confidence in the stability of our code.
Brief Introduction
Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS
Follow us on Twitter or Google+
Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+
Join our community! Visit discourse.pythonpodcast.com for your opportunity to find out about upcoming guests, suggest questions, and propose show ideas.
I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at pythonpodcast.com
Linode is sponsoring us this week. Check them out at linode.com/podcastinit and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for your next project
Open Data Science Conference on May 21-22nd in Boston. 20%
Your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti
Today we are interviewing David MacIver about the Hypothesis project which is an advanced Quickcheck implementation for Python.
Interview with David MacIver
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python? – Chris
Can you provide some background on what Quickcheck is and what inspired you to write an implementation in Python? – Tobias
Are there any ways in which Hypothesis improves on the original design of Quickcheck? – Tobias
Can you walk us through the execution of a simple Hypothesis test to give our listeners a better sense for what Hypothesis does? – Chris
Have you had trouble getting people to use Hypothesis? How has adoption been? – David
What does this sort of testing get you that conventional testing doesn’t? – David
Why do you think this sort of testing hasn’t caught on in the Python world before? – David
Are there any facilities of the Python language that make your job easier? Are there aspects of the language that make this style of testing more difficult? – Tobias
What are some of the design challenges that you have been presented with while working on Hypothesis and how did you overcome them? – Tobias
Given that testing is an important part of the development process for ensuring the reliability and correctness of the system under test, how do you make sure that Hypothesis doesn’t introduce uncertainty into this step? – Tobias
Given the sophisticated nature of the internals of Hypothesis, do you find it difficult to attract contributors to the project? – Tobias
A few months ago you went through some public burnout with regards to open source and Hypothesis in particular, but circumstances have brought you back to it with a more focused plan for making it sustainable. Can you provide some background and detail about your experiences and reasoning? – Tobias
What’s next for Hypothesis? – Chris
Keep In Touch
Twitter
Blog
NewsLetter
Picks
Tobias
TypeForm
Listener Survey
CI Survey

Chris
Seashine
CheckIO
Mike Coutermarsh’s Jr. Developer series

David
Make It Stick by Peter Brown
Beeminder
Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
48 min
April 01, 2016 Pyjion with Dino Viehland and Brett Cannon
Episode 51 - Pyjion with Dino Viehland and Brett Cannon
0 min
April 01, 2016Pyjion with Dino Viehland and Brett Cannon
Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community, and sign up for our mailing list.
Summary
In an attempt to improve the performance characteristics of the CPython implementation, Dino Viehland began work on a patch to allow for a pluggable interface to a JIT (Just In Time) compiler. His employer, Microsoft, decided to sponsor his efforts and the result is the Pyjion project. In this episode we spoke with Dino Viehland and Brett Cannon about the goals of the project, the progress they have made so far, and the issues they have encountered along the way. We also made an interesting detour to discuss the general state of performance in the Python ecosystem and why the GIL isn’t the bogeyman it’s made out to be.
Brief Introduction
Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS
Follow us on Twitter or Google+
Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+
Join our community! Visit discourse.pythonpodcast.com for your opportunity to find out about upcoming guests, suggest questions, and propose show ideas.
I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at pythonpodcast.com
Linode is sponsoring us this week. Check them out at linode.com/podcastinit and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for your next project
I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers and designers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.__init__. Use the link hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus.
Your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti
Open Data Science Conference, Boston MA May 21st – 22nd, use the discount code EP at registration for 20% off
Today we are interviewing Brett Cannon and Dino Viehland about their work on Pyjion, a CPython extension that provides an API to allow for plugging a JIT compilation engine into the CPython runtime.
Interview with Brett Cannon and Dino Viehland
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python? – Chris
What was the inspiration for the Pyjion project and what are its goals? – Tobias
The FAQ mentions that Pyjion could easily be made cross platform, but this being a Microsoft project it was bootstrapped on Windows. Have any of the discrete tasks required to get Pyjion running under OSX or Linux been laid out even in outline form? – Chris
Given that this is a Microsoft backed project it makes sense that the first JIT engine to be implemented is for the CoreCLR. What would an alternative implementation provide and in what ways can a JIT framework be tuned for particular workloads? – Tobias
What kinds of use cases and problem domains that were previously impractical will be enabled by this? – Tobias
Does Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Xamarin and the Mono project change things for the Pyjion project at all? – Chris
What are the challenges associated with your work on Pyjion? Are there certain aspects of the Python language and the CPython implementation that make the work more difficult than it might be otherwise? – Tobias
When I think of Microsoft and programming languages I generally think of C++ and C#. Did your team have to go through an approval process in order to utilize Python, and further to open source your work on Pyjion? – Chris
How does Pyjion hook into the CPython runtime and what kinds of primitives does it expose to JIT engines for them to be able to work with? – Tobias
Would an entire project be run through the JIT engine during runtime or is it possible to target a subset of the code being executed? – Tobias
In what ways can a JIT compiler implementation be purpose-built for a given workload and how would someone go about creating one? – Tobias
Could a JIT plugin be designed with different trade-offs, like no C API compatibility, but that worked around the GIL to provide real concurrency in Python? – Chris
One of the most notable benefits of having a JIT implementation for the CPython runtime is the fact that modules with C extensions can be used, such as NumPy. Does that pose any difficulties in the compilation methods used for optimizing the Python portion of the code? – Tobias
What kinds of performance improvements have you seen in your experimentation? – Tobias
Which release of Python do you hope to have Pyjion incorporated into? – Tobias
Has any thought been given to making Python a first class citizen in Visual Studio Code? – Chris
What areas of the project could use some help from our listeners? – Chris
Keep In Touch
Dino
GitHub

Brett
Twitter
Blog
Python Engineering @ Microsoft Blog

Picks
Tobias
Logitech Wave MK550
SaltStack
TestInfra
SaltStack Formula Cookiecutter

Chris
Anchor – Public Radio for the People
The Magicians
Portal is a Feminist Masterpiece – PBS Gameshow

Brett
Breville Tea Maker
Bodom Mugs
Alto’s Adventure

Dino
Come Dine With Me

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
1 hr 11 min
March 26, 2016 Transcrypt with Jacques de Hooge
Episode 50 - Transcrypt with Jacques de Hooge
0 min
March 26, 2016Transcrypt with Jacques de Hooge
Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community, and sign up for our mailing list.
Summary
Any programmer who has dealt with a website for any length of time knows that writing JavaScript isn’t always the most enjoyable. Wouldn’t you rather write that code in Python and just have it work on your website? In this episode we learn about Transcrypt with its creator Jacques de Hooge. Transcrypt is a Python to JavaScript transpiler that embraces the JavaScript ecosystem while letting you use the familiar syntax of Python for writing your logic, rather than trying to shoehorn a Python runtime into your browser.
Brief Introduction
Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS
Follow us on Twitter or Google+
Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+
Join our community! Visit discourse.pythonpodcast.com for your opportunity to find out about upcoming guests, suggest questions, and propose show ideas.
I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at pythonpodcast.com
Linode is sponsoring us this week. Check them out at linode.com/podcastinit and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for your next project
I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers and designers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.__init__. Use the link hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus.
ODSC East in Boston is happening on May 21st – 22nd. Use the discount code EP for 20% off when you register
Your host today is Tobias Macey
Today I am interviewing Jacques de Hooge about his work on the Transcrypt Project
Interview with Jacques de Hooge
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python? – Tobias
What is Transcrypt and what inspired you to create it? – Tobias
As you mention in the documentation, there are a number of projects that attempt to shoehorn Python into the browser. What makes Transcrypt different? – Tobias
I like that you decided to embrace the web environment by calling into JavaScript libraries. What are some of the challenges that you encountered while creating that functionality? – Tobias
How is the transpilation performed and what are some of the methods that you used to get the build size as small as it is? – Tobias
Given the nature of JavaScripts prototypical inheritance and differences in class semantics, I imagine that adding support for multiple inheritance and reflecting the structure of Python classes must have been challenging. Can you describe that process and how you arrived at your current solution? – Tobias
Which aspects of the language were most difficult to translate to JavaScript? – Tobias
Is Transcrypt complete and stable enough to be used in production? – Tobias
Keep in Touch
Transcrypt.org
Forum
Email
Picks
Tobias
Cookiecutter

Jacques
Programming

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
43 min
March 18, 2016 VPython with Ruth Chabay and Bruce Sherwood
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to generate interactive 3D visualizations of physical systems in a declarative manner with Python? In this episode we spoke with Ruth Chabay and Bruce Sherwood about the VPython project which does just that. They tell us about how the use VPython in their classrooms, how the project got started, and the work they have done to bring it into the browser.
1 hr 4 min