Summary Learning to code is one of the most effective ways to be successful in the modern economy. To that end, Marlene Mhangami and Ronald Maravanyika created the ZimboPy organization to teach women and girls in Zimbabwe how to program in Python. In this episode they are joined by Mike Place to discuss how ZimboPy got started, the projects that their students have worked on, and how the community can get involved. Preface mu- Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast ab...
Feb 11, 2018•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Using a rendering library can be a difficult task due to dependency issues and complicated APIs. Rohit Pandey wrote PyRay to address these issues in a pure Python library. In this episode he explains how he uses it to gain a more thorough understanding of mathematical models, how it compares to other options, and how you can use it for creating your own videos and GIFs. Preface Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it grea...
Feb 05, 2018•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary One of the draws of Python is how dynamic and flexible the language can be. Sometimes, that flexibility can be problematic if the format of variables at various parts of your program is unclear or the descriptions are inaccurate. The growing middle ground is to use type annotations as a way of providing some verification of the format of data as it flows through your application and enforcing gradual typing. To make it simpler to get started with type hinting, Carl Meyer and Matt Page, a...
Jan 28, 2018•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Learning how to read is one of the most important steps in empowering someone to build a successful future. In developing nations, access to teachers and classrooms is not universally available so the Global Learning XPRIZE serves to incentivize the creation of technology that provides children with the tools necessary to teach themselves literacy. Kjell Wooding helped create Learn Leap Fly in order to participate in the competition and used Python and Kivy to build a platform for childr...
Jan 21, 2018•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Your backups are running every day, right? Are you sure? What about that daily report job? We all have scripts that need to be run on a periodic basis and it is easy to forget about them, assuming that they are working properly. Sometimes they fail and in order to know when that happens you need a tool that will let you know so that you can find and fix the problem. Pēteris Caune wrote Healthchecks to be that tool and made it available both as an open source project and a hosted version....
Jan 14, 2018•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary A majority of the work that we do as programmers involves data manipulation in some manner. This can range from large scale collection, aggregation, and statistical analysis across distrbuted systems, or it can be as simple as making a graph in a spreadsheet. In the middle of that range is the general task of ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) which has its own range of scale. In this episode Romain Dorgueil discusses his experiences building ETL systems and the problems that he routinel...
Jan 07, 2018•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Data mining and visualization are important skills to have in the modern era, regardless of your job responsibilities. In order to make it easier to learn and use these techniques and technologies Blaž Zupan and Janez Demšar, along with many others, have created Orange. In this episode they explain how they built a visual programming interface for creating data analysis and machine learning workflows to simplify the work of gaining insights from the myriad data sources that are available...
Dec 31, 2017•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary A majority of projects will eventually need some way of managing periodic or long-running tasks outside of the context of the main application. This is where a distributed task queue becomes useful. For many in the Python community the standard option is Celery, though there are other projects to choose from. This week Bogdan Popa explains why he was dissatisfied with the current landscape of task queues and the features that he decided to focus on while building Dramatiq, a new, opinion...
Dec 24, 2017•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Jake Vanderplas is an astronomer by training and a prolific contributor to the Python data science ecosystem. His current role is using Python to teach principles of data analysis and data visualization to students and researchers at the University of Washington. In this episode he discusses how he got started with Python, the challenges of teaching best practices for software engineering and reproducible analysis, and how easy to use tools for data visualization can help democratize acc...
Dec 17, 2017•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Dec 10, 2017•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 w...
Dec 03, 2017•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 re...
Nov 25, 2017•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Nov 19, 2017•1 hr 14 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. Pref...
Nov 11, 2017•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary 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...
Nov 04, 2017•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Understanding what is happening in a software system can be difficult, especially when you have inconsistent log messages. Itamar Turner-Trauring created Eliot to make it possible for your project to tell you a story about how transactions flow through your program. In this week’s episode we go deep on proper logging practices, anti patterns, and how to improve your ability to debug your software with log messages. Preface Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the ...
Oct 29, 2017•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Do you wish that you had a self-driving car of your own? With Donkey you can make that dream a reality. This week Will Roscoe shares the story of how he got involved in the arena of self-driving car hobbyists and ended up building a Python library to act as his pilot. We talked about the hardware involved, how he has evolved the code to meet unexpected challenges, and how he plans to improve it in the future. So go build your own self driving car and take it for a spin! Preface Hello and...
Oct 22, 2017•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The way that your application handles data and the way that it is represented in your database don’t always match, leading to a lot of brittle abstractions to reconcile the two. In order to reduce that friction, instead of overwriting the state of your application on every change you can log all of the events that take place and then render the current state from that sequence of events. John Bywater joins me this week to discuss his work on the Event Sourcing library, why you migh...
Oct 15, 2017•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Wouldn’t it be nice to have a personal assistant to answer your questions, help you remember important tasks, and control your environment? Meet Kalliope, a Python powered, modular, voice controlled automation platform. This week Nicolas Marcq and Thibaud Buffet explain how they started the project, what makes it stand out from other open source and commercial options, and how you can start using it today. Preface Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast a...
Oct 08, 2017•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Email has long been the most commonly used means of communication on the internet. This week Antoine Nguyen talks about his work on the Modoboa project to make hosting your own mail server easier to manage. He discusses how the project got started, the tools that it ties together, and how he used Django to build a webmail and admin interface to make it more approachable. Preface Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it gre...
Oct 01, 2017•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The future of computation and our understanding of the world around us is driven by the quantum world. This week Paul Nation explains how the Quantum Toolbox in Python (QuTiP) is being used in research projects that are expanding our knowledge of the physical universe. 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...
Sep 24, 2017•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Do you like Legos, robots, and Python? This week I am joined by David Lechner and Denis Demidov to talk about the ev3dev project and how you can program your Lego Mindstorms with Python! 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...
Sep 17, 2017•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Server administration is a complex endeavor, but there are some tools that can make life easier. If you are running your workload in a cloud environment then cloud-init is here to help. This week Scott Moser explains what cloud-init is, how it works, and how it became the de-facto tool for configuring your Linux servers at boot. 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 supp...
Sep 10, 2017•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Advances in the techniques used for genome sequencing are providing us with more information to unlock the secrets of biology. But how does that data get processed and analyzed? With Python of course! This week I am joined by some of the core maintainers of Biopython to discuss what bioinformatics is, how Python is used to help power the research in the field, and how Biopython helps to tie everything together. Preface Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast ab...
Sep 03, 2017•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Server administration is an activity that often happens in an isolated context in a terminal. ChatOps is a way of bringing that work into a shared environment and unlocking more collaboration. This week Jacob Tomlinson talks about the work he has done on opsdroid, a new bot framework targeted at tying together the various services and environments that modern production systems rely on. Preface Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people...
Aug 26, 2017•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary As developers we spend a lot of our work day in a terminal window, using shells that were designed 30 years ago. This week Liam Schumm joins me to explain why he decided to write a new, more ergonomic shell environment to simplify his workflow. 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...
Aug 20, 2017•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Analyzing and interpreting data is a large portion of the work involved in scientific research. Getting to that point can be a lot of work on its own because of all of the steps required to download, clean, and organize the data prior to analysis. This week Henry Senyondo talks about the work he is doing with Data Retriever to make data preparation as easy as retriever install . Preface Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who mak...
Aug 12, 2017•18 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary We write tests to make sure that our code is correct, but how do you make sure the tests are correct? This week Ned Batchelder explains how coverage.py fills that need, how he became the maintainer, and how it works under the hood. 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 ...
Aug 06, 2017•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary For any program that is used by more than one person you need a way to control identity and permissions. There are myriad solutions to that problem, but most of them are tied to a specific framework. Yosai is a flexible, general purpose framework for managing role-based access to your applications that has been decoupled from the underlying platform. This week the author of Yosai, Darin Gordon, joins us to talk about why he started it, his experience porting it from Java, and where he ho...
Jul 30, 2017•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary There are dozens of decisions that need to be made when building an application. Sometimes this can lead to analysis paralysis and prevent you from making progress, so don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. This week Michael Kennedy shares his experience with evolving his application architecture when his business needs outgrew his initial designs. Preface Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. I wo...
Jul 22, 2017•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
