The Python Podcast.init

By Tobias MaceyTechnology Education

The Python Podcast.init episodes

October 31, 2015Anthony Scopatz on Xonsh
Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list.
Summary
Anthony Scopatz is the creator of the Python shell Xonsh in addition to his work as a professor of nuclear physics. In this episode we talked to him about why he created Xonsh, how it works, and what his goals are for the project. It is definitely worth trying out Xonsh as it greatly simplifies the day-to-day use of your terminal environment by adding easily accessible python interoperability.
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+
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
I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.__init__. Use the link hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus.
Linode is also sponsoring us this week. Check them out at linode.com/podcastinit and get a $10 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for your next project
We are recording today on October 12th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti
Today we are interviewing Anthony Scopatz about Xonsh
On Hired software engineers & designers can get 5+ interview requests in a week and each offer has salary and equity upfront. With full time and contract opportunities available, users can view the offers and accept or reject them before talking to any company. Work with over 2,500 companies from startups to large public companies hailing from 12 major tech hubs in North America and Europe. Hired is totally free for users and If you get a job you’ll get a $2,000 “thank you” bonus. If you use our special link to signup, then that bonus will double to $4,000 when you accept a job. If you’re not looking for a job but know someone who is, you can refer them to Hired and get a $1,337 bonus when they accept a job.
Use the promo code podcastinit10 to get a $10 credit when you sign up!
Interview with Anthony Scopatz
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python?
Can you explain what Xonsh is and your motivation for creating it?
For people transitioning to Xonsh from a shell like Bash or Zsh, what are some of the biggest differences that they will see?
What are some really powerful one-liners that showcase Xonsh’s capabilities?
What is it about Python that lends itself to this kind of a project and what are your thoughts on building something like Xonsh in another language such as Ruby or Node.js?
If you had to single out one killer feature that Xonsh brings to the table, what would that be?
Is it possible to specify which shell, such as bash or zsh, gets used in subprocess mode?
I started using the Xonsh shell as my daily terminal recently and have been enjoying it so far. One of the things that I have been wondering is how to hook into the completion system to provide eldoc style completion from parsing the output of help flags. Do you have any advice on where to start? Perhaps using the docopt library to handle parsing of help output and generate completions from that?
What are your thoughts on adding a section to the project documentation for people to list various extension modules that people can take advantage of? Or perhaps creating something along the lines of Oh my Xonsh?
How do bash function definitions interoperate with the Xonsh environment and functions defined in Python?
It seems as though there could be some potential path or compatibility issues when moving between virtual environments and having access to extension modules loaded into Xonsh. Can you shed some light on that?
Do you have any suggestions for people who may not have the privileges to set their own login shell but who want to try Xonsh?
What are some of the most interesting uses of Xonsh that you have seen?
What does the future hold for the Xonsh project and how can our audience help?
Picks
Tobias
Mortdecai
Alembic
SQLAlchemy
population.io

Chris
Consider Phlebas
The Martian – Movie
Fantastic Planet

Anthony
The Worst Journey In The World

Keep In Touch
Mailing List
xonsh.org
#xonsh on OFTC
GitHub
Twitter: @scopatz
Links
Effective Computation in Physics
Python Prompt Toolkit
The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
58 min
October 24, 2015 Kay Hayen on Nuitka
Kay Hayen is a systems engineer from Germany who has dedicated his spare time to the creation of Nuitka, a library that will compile your Python project to C++. In this episode we talked to Kay about what inspired him to create the project, how it operates, and some of the challenges he has faced. It is a very interesting project and it has the potential to let you run your Python code in a whole new way!
1 hr 35 min
October 24, 2015Kay Hayen on Nuitka
Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list.
Summary
Kay Hayen is a systems engineer from Germany who has dedicated his spare time to the creation of Nuitka, a library that will compile your Python project to C++. In this episode we talked to Kay about what inspired him to create the project, how it operates, and some of the challenges he has faced. It is a very interesting project and it has the potential to let you run your Python code in a whole new way!
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, leave us a message on Google+, or leave a comment on our show notes
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
I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.__init__. Use the link hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus. Linode has also sponsored this episode and you can get a $10 credit using the link linode.com/podcastinit to try out their fast and reliable linux virtual servers.
We are recording today on October 6th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti
Today we are interviewing Kay Hayen about the Nuitka project
On Hired software engineers & designers can get 5+ interview requests in a week and each offer has salary and equity upfront. With full time and contract opportunities available, users can view the offers and accept or reject them before talking to any company. Work with over 2,500 companies from startups to large public companies hailing from 12 major tech hubs in North America and Europe. Hired is totally free for users and If you get a job you’ll get a $2,000 “thank you” bonus. If you use our special link to signup, then that bonus will double to $4,000 when you accept a job. If you’re not looking for a job but know someone who is, you can refer them to Hired and get a $1,337 bonus when they accept a job.
Use the promo code podcastinit10 to get a $10 credit when you sign up!
Interview with Kay Hayen
Introductions
German, family with 2 kids, one cat
Working in ATM (Air Traffic Management), tracker product
Systems Engineer
Nuitka as a hobbyist

How did you get introduced to Python?
Once was Perl “Guru”.
Python was getting a lot of positive press
Team decision to want to use readable stuff
CPAN was still more complete, but Python was making inroads

Can you describe how to pronounce the name of your project?
Wife Anna, Russian, Annuitka -> Nuitka

Can you briefly describe what Nuitka is and what your motivation was for creating it?
I was thinking a fully integrated and compatible compiler should be possible.
Why is nobody doing it?
I can do it.
I am doing it.
Take Python beyond current use cases.
Everbody currently using Python needs no compiler, or wouldn’t use it
Less need for time consuming C++/Python hybrid coding
Simple code should compile to fast code by default
Complex code should still work

On the project web site it says that Nuitka does a lot of clever things after being fed a Python project. Can you provide some details as to what some of that cleverness is?
Re-formulations of Python into simpler Python
No “class”
No “assert”
No complex assignments

SSA tracing
Attaching uses to assignments properly
Despite try/finally
Loops

Avoids checks for known defined/undefined values

Function inlining (coming)

Constant propagation

Closure variable removal

What is libpython and how is it used in both Nuitka and CPython?
Core of the Python interpreter
With Python VM and C interface
Nuitka can fall back to it
Avoiding it as often as we can, key to performance

Is there any way to provide hints to Nuitka to generate more optimized output?
Nuitka is yet to make a difference based on type information
Not yet there, but coming soonish. SSA was pre-requisite
PEP 484 will be unreliable type information, mostly useless
I want type hints that are checked at Python run time

What are some of the biggest challenges in generating statically compiled code from a language as dynamic as Python?
Python is compiled to .pyc files
Compatible Frame stack, cached
Exception handling of Python is terrible
CPython type system designed to be extensible
Extension types for functions, bound/unbound methods, generators, etc.

Many details to get right

Are there any particular Python constructs that Nuitka is unable to translate and as a corollary to that is the compilation step lossy at all or do you have some way of ensuring that the functionality of the program remains unaltered?
Big point, no price attached
Except for not having bytecode, there is nothing missing
No pdb support
Edit / run cycle is not accelerated
That said: PyQt (integrated), PySide (available, unmerged), wxPython (available, maybe merged) needed patches to take compiled function/method objects for function objects too

Are there any particular types of programs that benefit the most from Nuitka’s compilation?
Bindings with ctypes of cffi compile into zero overhead C calls (planned)
Scientific programs are the most obvious goal (float type inference)
CPU bound or low latency programs

Is it possible to feed an entire project with multiple modules into Nuitka all at once or is the standard use to perform compilation one source file or submodule at a time?
You give it the main program and it recurses imports according to “PYTHONPATH”
nuitka –recurse-all “/usr/bin/hg” supposed to work
Might have to give directories with program plug-ins

I’m curious about what led you to choose compilation to C++ for Nuitka rather than making Nuitka an LLVM back end like Numba?
When I started Nuitka, I was using C++0x and variadic templates
Wanted to make a proof of concept that compatibility and integration is feasible
From there, code generation got less high level to goto ridden C

How does Nuitka compare to projects like Numba or Cython?
Graceful degradation goal
Complete compatibility with Python whole stack

How does Nuitka compare to PyPy? – Kay
PyPy is the coolest project ever
Pure Python goals shared

How can users evaluate the performance of Nuitka – Kay
They currently cannot
Developing a tool to compare CPython and Nuitka runs
Based on vmprof from PyPy people
Identify parts of program where Nuitka is slower
Links to source code

To be done, help needed.

Nuitka is only starting to get to serious performance
Compatibility is such a high bar to take
C++ to C took a year (avoiding C++ exceptions)
SSA literally took forever

Picks
Tobias
Forbidden Island
Forbidden Desert
Otto Project

Chris
Grimm Super Symmetry
Are You Listening To?: Boston
Ripple

Kay
Learn being skeptic, Atheist Experience
MicroPython

Keep In Touch
Nuitka Homepage
Google+
Email
The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
1 hr 35 min
October 14, 2015 Trent Nelson on PyParallel
Trent Nelson is a software engineer working with Continuum Analytics and a core contributor to CPython. He started experimenting with a way to sidestep the restrictions of the Global Interpreter Lock without discarding its benefits and that has become the PyParallel project. We had the privilege of discussing the details around this innovative experiment with Trent and learning more about the challenges he has experienced, what motivated him to start the project, and what it can offer to the community.
1 hr 13 min
October 14, 2015Trent Nelson on PyParallel
Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list.
Summary
Trent Nelson is a software engineer working with Continuum Analytics and a core contributor to CPython. He started experimenting with a way to sidestep the restrictions of the Global Interpreter Lock without discarding its benefits and that has become the PyParallel project. We had the privilege of discussing the details around this innovative experiment with Trent and learning more about the challenges he has experienced, what motivated him to start the project, and what it can offer to the community.
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+
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
I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.__init__. Use the link hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus.
We are recording today on September 7th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti
Today we are interviewing Trent Nelson about PyParallel
On Hired software engineers & designers can get 5+ interview requests in a week and each offer has salary and equity upfront. With full time and contract opportunities available, users can view the offers and accept or reject them before talking to any company. Work with over 2,500 companies from startups to large public companies hailing from 12 major tech hubs in North America and Europe. Hired is totally free for users and If you get a job you’ll get a $2,000 “thank you” bonus. If you use our special link to signup, then that bonus will double to $4,000 when you accept a job. If you’re not looking for a job but know someone who is, you can refer them to Hired and get a $1,337 bonus when they accept a job.
Interview with Trent Nelson
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python?
For our listeners who may not be aware, can you give us an overview of what Pyparallel is and what makes it different from other Python implementations?
How did PyParallel come about?
What are some of the biggest technical hurdles that you have been faced with during your work on PyParallel?
I understand that PyParallel currently only works on Windows. What was the motivation for that and what would be required for enabling PyParallel to run on a Linux or BSD style operating system?
How does Pyparallel get around the limitations of the global interpreter lock without removing it?
Is there any special syntax required to take advantage of the parallelism offered by PyParallel? How does it interact with the threading module in the standard library?
In the abstract for the Pyparallel paper, you cite a simple rule – “Don’t persist parallel objects” – how easy is this to do with currently available concurrency paradigms and APIs, and would it make sense to add such support?
For instance, how would one be sure to follow this rule when using Twisted or asyncio?

Are there any operations that are not supported in parallel threads?

What drove the decision to fork Python 3.3 as opposed to the 2.X series?

In the documentation you mention that the long term goal for PyParallel is to merge it back into Python mainline, possibly within 5 years. Has anything changed with that goal or timeline? What milestones do you need to hit before that becomes a realistic possibility?

Can you compare PyParallel to PyPy-STM and Go with Goroutines in terms of performance and user implementation?

What are some particular problem areas that you are looking for help with?

Assuming that it does get merged in as Python 4, how do you think that would affect the features and experiments that went into Python 5?

To be continued…

Picks
Tobias
Testinfra
Software Engineering Daily

Chris
Hello Webapp – Intermediate Concepts
Grimm Rainbow Dome
PBS Idea Channel

Trent
Show Stopper by G. Pascal Zachary

Keep In Touch
GitHub
Twitter
@PyParallel
@TrentNelson
1 hr 13 min
October 09, 2015 Dag Brattli on RxPy
Dag Brattli is an engineer with Microsoft and in his spare time he created the ported the Reactive Xtensions framework to Python in the form of the RxPy library. In this episode we had the opportunity to speak with Dag and learn more about what ReactiveX is, why it is useful and how you can use it in your Python programs. It is definitely a very powerful programming patern when manipulating data streams which is becoming increasingly common in modern software architectures.
34 min
October 09, 2015Dag Brattli on RxPy
Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our newsletter!
Summary
Dag Brattli is an engineer with Microsoft and in his spare time he created the ported the Reactive Xtensions framework to Python in the form of the RxPy library. In this episode we had the opportunity to speak with Dag and learn more about what ReactiveX is, why it is useful and how you can use it in your Python programs. It is definitely a very powerful programming patern when manipulating data streams which is becoming increasingly common in modern software architectures.
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+
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
I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.__init__. Use the link hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus.
We are recording today on October 2nd, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti
Today we are interviewing Dag Brattli about the RxPy project
On Hired software engineers & designers can get 5+ interview requests in a week and each offer has salary and equity upfront. With full time and contract opportunities available, users can view the offers and accept or reject them before talking to any company. Work with over 2,500 companies from startups to large public companies hailing from 12 major tech hubs in North America and Europe. Hired is totally free for users and If you get a job you’ll get a $2,000 “thank you” bonus. If you use our special link to signup, then that bonus will double to $4,000 when you accept a job. If you’re not looking for a job but know someone who is, you can refer them to Hired and get a $1,337 bonus when they accept a job.
Interview with Dag Brattli
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python?
For our listeners who haven’t heard of it before, can you describe what RxPy is and why someone might want to use it?
What problem domains are best suited for using the Reactive X approach?
What is involved in integrating RxPy into an existing code base?
When should we use RxPy over asyncio or asynchronous workers like Celery?
What resources or tutorials do you recommend people use when trying to understand how and when to use the Reactive X tools?
What in particular about Python lends itself to the ReactiveX pattern, and what features of the language does RxPy leverage in particular in its implementation?
In what ways does the Python implementation of the Reactive X framework differ from those of other languages?
The project description references the use of LINQ for querying the various data streams that RxPy enables consumption of. I had always heard of LINQ in the context of traditional database queries. What makes LINQ a good choice for stream processing?
I mostly hear about ReactiveX in terms of UI design, but the project description seemed to indicate it was much more generally useful. What are some of the less common and more interesting problems that RxPy lends itself to solving?
Picks
Tobias
icdiff
Timeline card game
Griatch’s Digital Art
Chris
elpy
sshuttle
Chimay Grand Reserve
Dag
ASTor
How To Bake Pi – A book about the mathematics of mathematics
Keep In Touch
GitHub
Links
Main ReactiveX Site
rxjava site for documentation
rxmarbles
MSDN Channel 9
Function Overloading in Python 3
The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
34 min
October 03, 2015 uWSGI Core Developers
uWSGI is one of the most versatile application servers available. It was originally written for running Python applications and has since gained functionality to support Perl, Ruby, PHP, and more in addition to the incredible feature set. In this episode Tobias got to interview three of the core developers of this project and find out more about how the different pieces of it fit together and what its future holds.
35 min
October 03, 2015uWSGI Core Developers
Visit our site to listen to past episodes, join the mailing list and support the show.
Summary
uWSGI is one of the most versatile application servers available. It was originally written for running Python applications and has since gained functionality to support Perl, Ruby, PHP, and more in addition to the incredible feature set. In this episode Tobias got to interview three of the core developers of this project and find out more about how the different pieces of it fit together and what its future holds.
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+
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
I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.init. Sign up at hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus.
We are recording today on September 22nd, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti
Today we are interviewing the core developers of uWSGI (Adriano Di Luzio, Riccardo Magliocchetti, and Roberto De Ioris)
Interview with uWSGI core developers
Introductions
How did you get introduced to Python?
For anyone who hasn’t come across the project before, can you explain what uWSGI is and what makes it unique?
How did you architect uWSGI in order to allow for supporting so many different languages?
The feature set of uWSGI is truly incredible. Does this make the code complicated to understand and modify?
Can you describe some of your favorite features in uWSGI?
What have you found to be the most overlooked or underutilized features of uWSGI?
Can you briefly describe how Emperor mode works and how that can be used to handle routing between microservices?
Could you discuss some of the particular features UWSGI provides around load balancing?
Is connection draining supported?
Can nodes be dynamically added and removed from the pool or does the config need to be rewritten and UWSGI restarted?

The configuration syntax looks like it provides a very rich set of capabilities. Is it based on a general purpose programming language or is it a DSL?

What might be some common use cases for using UWSGI in tandem with another web server like NGINX?

I have read that WSGI does not get along with http/2. Are there any plans to look towards supporting that protocol in some way?

What new capabilities can we look forward to in the future of uWSGI?

Picks
Tobias
Manjaro Linux
Kontact
Blackhat

Riccardo
Building Microservices book
Django-Denis

Adriano
Paxos Algorithm

Roberto
The Brink

Keep In Touch
Mailing List
#uWSGI on IRC
GitHub
latest docs
Roberto
Twitter
GitHub

Adriano
GitHub
Twitter

Riccardo
GitHub
Twitter
35 min
September 29, 2015 Griatch on Evennia (Making MUDs with Python)
Griatch is an incredibly talented digital artist, professional astronomer and the maintainer of the Evennia project for creating MUDs in Python. We got the opportunity to speak with him about what MUDs are, why they’re interesting and how Evennia simplifies the process of creating and extending them. If you’re interested in building your own virtual worlds, this episode is a great place to start.
1 hr 15 min