Summary Managing an event is rife with inherent complexity that scales as you move from scheduling a meeting to organizing a conference. Indico is a platform built at CERN to handle their efforts to organize events such as the Computing in High Energy Physics (CHEP) conference, and now it has grown to manage booking of meeting rooms. In this episode Adrian Mönnich, core developer on the Indico project, explains how it is architected to facilitate this use case, how it has evolved since its first...
Apr 22, 2019•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The CPython interpreter has been the primary implementation of the Python runtime for over 20 years. In that time other options have been made available for different use cases. The most recent entry to that list is RustPython, written in the memory safe language Rust. One of the added benefits is the option to compile to WebAssembly, offering a browser-native Python runtime. In this episode core maintainers Windel Bouwman and Adam Kelly explain how the project got started, their experie...
Apr 15, 2019•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Version control has become table stakes for any software team, but for machine learning projects there has been no good answer for tracking all of the data that goes into building and training models, and the output of the models themselves. To address that need Dmitry Petrov built the Data Version Control project known as DVC. In this episode he explains how it simplifies communication between data scientists, reduces duplicated effort, and simplifies concerns around reproducing and reb...
Apr 08, 2019•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Ecommerce is an industry that has largely faded into the background due to its ubiquity in recent years. Despite that, there are new trends emerging and room for innovation, which is what the team at Mirumee focuses on. To support their efforts, they build and maintain the open source Saleor framework for Django as a way to make the core concerns of online sales easy and painless. In this episode Mirek Mencel and Patryk Zawadzki discuss the projects that they work on, the current state o...
Apr 01, 2019•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Naomi Ceder was fortunate enough to learn Python from Guido himself. Since then she has contributed books, code, and mentorship to the community. Currently she serves as the chair of the board to the Python Software Foundation, leads an engineering team, and has recently completed a new draft of the Quick Python Book. In this episode she shares her story, including a discussion of her experience as a technical author and a detailed account of the role that the PSF plays in supporting and...
Mar 25, 2019•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Python has become one of the dominant languages for data science and data analysis. Wes McKinney has been working for a decade to make tools that are easy and powerful, starting with the creation of Pandas, and eventually leading to his current work on Apache Arrow. In this episode he discusses his motivation for this work, what he sees as the current challenges to be overcome, and his hopes for the future of the industry. Announcements Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast ...
Mar 18, 2019•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The current buzz in data science and big data is around the promise of deep learning, especially when working with unstructured data. One of the most popular frameworks for building deep learning applications is PyTorch, in large part because of their focus on ease of use. In this episode Adam Paszke explains how he started the project, how it compares to other frameworks in the space such as Tensorflow and CNTK, and how it has evolved to support deploying models into production and on m...
Mar 10, 2019•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The Redis database recently celebrated its 10th birthday. In that time it has earned a well-earned reputation for speed, reliability, and ease of use. Python developers are fortunate to have a well-built client in the form of redis-py to leverage it in their projects. In this episode Andy McCurdy and Dr. Christoph Zimmerman explain the ways that Redis can be used in your application architecture, how the Python client is built and maintained, and how to use it in your projects. Announcem...
Mar 04, 2019•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Any time that your program needs to interact with other systems it will have to deal with serializing and deserializing data. To prevent duplicate code and provide validation of the data structures that your application is consuming Steven Loria created the Marshmallow library. In this episode he explains how it is built, how to use it for rendering data objects to various serialization formats, and some of the interesting and unique ways that it is incorporated into other projects. Anno...
Feb 25, 2019•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Chaos engineering is the practice of injecting failures into your production systems in a controlled manner to identify weaknesses in your applications. In order to build, run, and report on chaos experiments Sylvain Hellegouarch created the Chaos Toolkit. In this episode he explains his motivation for creating the toolkit, how to use it for improving the resiliency of your systems, and his plans for the future. He also discusses best practices for building, running, and learning from yo...
Feb 18, 2019•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Music is a part of every culture around the world and throughout history. Musicology is the study of that music from a structural and sociological perspective. Traditionally this research has been done in a manual and painstaking manner, but the advent of the computer age has enabled an increase of many orders of magnitude in the scope and scale of analysis that we can perform. The music21 project is a Python library for computer aided musicology that is written and used by MIT professor...
Feb 11, 2019•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Software development is a career that attracts people from all backgrounds, and Python in particular helps to make it an approachable occupation. Because of the variety of paths that can be taken it is becoming increasingly common for practitioners to bypass the traditional computer science education. In this episode David Kopec discusses some of the classic problems that he has found most useful to understand in his work as a professor and practitioner of software engineering. He shares...
Feb 04, 2019•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary As a developer and user of open source code, you interact with software and digital media every day. What is often overlooked are the rights and responsibilities conveyed by the intellectual property that is implicit in all creative works. Software licenses are a complicated legal domain in their own right, and they can often conflict with each other when you factor in the web of dependencies that your project relies on. In this episode Luis Villa, Co-Founder of Tidelift, explains the ca...
Jan 28, 2019•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary As we build software projects, complexity and technical debt are bound to creep into our code. To counteract these tendencies it is necessary to calculate and track metrics that highlight areas of improvement so that they can be acted on. To aid in identifying areas of your application that are breeding grounds for incidental complexity Anthony Shaw created Wily. In this episode he explains how Wily traverses the history of your repository and computes code complexity metrics over time a...
Jan 21, 2019•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Computers have found their way into virtually every area of human endeavor, and archaeology is no exception. To aid his students in their exploration of digital archaeology Shawn Graham helped to create an online, digital textbook with accompanying interactive notebooks. In this episode he explains how computational practices are being applied to archaeological research, how the Online Digital Archaeology Textbook was created, and how you can use it to get involved in this fascinating ar...
Jan 14, 2019•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Every day there are satellites collecting sensor readings and imagery of our Earth. To help make sense of that information, developers at the meteorological institutes of Sweden and Denmark worked together to build a collection of Python packages that simplify the work of downloading and processing satellite image data. In this episode one of the core developers of PyTroll explains how the project got started, how that data is being used by the scientific community, and how citizen scien...
Jan 07, 2019•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The web has spawned numerous methods for communicating between applications, including protocols such as SOAP, XML-RPC, and REST. One of the newest entrants is GraphQL which promises a simplified approach to client development and reduced network requests. To make implementing these APIs in Python easier, Syrus Akbary created the Graphene project. In this episode he explains the origin story of Graphene, how GraphQL compares to REST, how you can start using it in your applications, and h...
Dec 31, 2018•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Real-time communication over the internet is an amazing feat of modern engineering. The protocol that powers a majority of video calling platforms is WebRTC. In this episode Jeremy Lainé explains why he wrote a Python implementation of this protocol in the form of AIORTC. He also discusses how it works, how you can use it in your own projects, and what he has planned for the future. Preface Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who...
Dec 24, 2018•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Using computers to analyze text can produce useful and inspirational insights. However, when working with multiple languages the capabilities of existing models are severely limited. In order to help overcome this limitation Rami Al-Rfou built Polyglot. In this episode he explains his motivation for creating a natural language processing library with support for a vast array of languages, how it works, and how you can start using it for your own projects. He also discusses current resear...
Dec 17, 2018•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Do you know what your servers are doing? If you have a metrics system in place then the answer should be “yes”. One critical aspect of that platform is the timeseries database that allows you to store, aggregate, analyze, and query the various signals generated by your software and hardware. As the size and complexity of your systems scale, so does the volume of data that you need to manage which can put a strain on your metrics stack. Julien Danjou built Gnocchi during his t...
Dec 10, 2018•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Keeping up with the work being done in the Python community can be a full time job, which is why Dan Bader has made it his! In this episode he discusses how he went from working as a software engineer, to offering training, to now managing both the Real Python and PyCoders properties. He also explains his strategies for tracking and curating the content that he produces and discovers, how he thinks about building products, and what he has learned in the process of running his businesses....
Dec 03, 2018•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Digital books are convenient and useful ways to have easy access to large volumes of information. Unfortunately, keeping track of them all can be difficult as you gain more books from different sources. Keeping your reading device synchronized with the material that you want to read is also challenging. In this episode Kovid Goyal explains how he created the Calibre digital library manager to solve these problems for himself, how it grew to be the most popular application for organizing ...
Nov 26, 2018•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Investigative reporters have a challenging task of identifying complex networks of people, places, and events gleaned from a mixed collection of sources. Turning those various documents, electronic records, and research into a searchable and actionable collection of facts is an interesting and difficult technical challenge. Friedrich Lindenberg created the Aleph project to address this issue and in this episode he explains how it works, why he built it, and how it is being used. He also ...
Nov 19, 2018•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The Python Community is large and growing, however a majority of articles, books, and presentations are still in English. To increase the accessibility for Spanish language speakers, Maricela Sanchez helped to create the Charlas track at PyCon US, and is an organizer for Python Day Mexico. In this episode she shares her motivations for getting involved in community building, her experiences working on Python Day Mexico and PyCon Charlas, and the lessons that she has learned in the proces...
Oct 29, 2018•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary As data science becomes more widespread and has a bigger impact on the lives of people, it is important that those projects and products are built with a conscious consideration of ethics. Keeping ethical principles in mind throughout the lifecycle of a data project helps to reduce the overall effort of preventing negative outcomes from the use of the final product. Emily Miller and Peter Bull of Driven Data have created Deon to improve the communication and conversation around ethics am...
Oct 22, 2018•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The breadth of use cases that Python supports, coupled with the level of productivity that it provides through its ease of use have contributed to the incredible popularity of the language. To explore the ways that it can contribute to the success of a young and growing startup two of the lead engineers at Wanderu discuss their experiences in this episode. Matt Warren, the technical operations lead, explains the ways that he is using Python to build and scale the infrastructure that Wand...
Oct 15, 2018•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Many people learn to program because of their interest in building their own video games. Once the necessary skills have been acquired, it is often the case that the original idea of creating a game is forgotten in favor of solving the problems we confront at work. Game jams are a great way to get inspired and motivated to finally write a game from scratch. This week Daniel Pope discusses the origin and format for PyWeek, his experience as a participant, and the landscape of options for ...
Oct 09, 2018•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Any application that communicates with other systems or services will at some point require a credential or sensitive piece of information to operate properly. The question then becomes how best to securely store, transmit, and use that information. The world of software secrets management is vast and complicated, so in this episode Brian Kelly, engineering manager at Conjur, aims to help you make sense of it. He explains the main factors for protecting sensitive information in your soft...
Oct 02, 2018•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Once upon a time the web was a simple place with one main protocol and a predictable sequence of request/response interactions with backend applications. This is the era when Django began, but in the intervening years there has been an explosion of complexity with new asynchronous protocols and single page Javascript applications. To help bridge the gap and bring the most popular Python web framework into the modern age Andrew Godwin created Channels. In this episode he explains how the ...
Sep 24, 2018•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary There are many aspects of learning how to program and at least as many ways to go about it. This is multiplicative with the different problem domains and subject areas where software development is applied. In this episode William Vincent discusses his experiences learning how web development mid-career and then writing a series of books to make the learning curve for Django newcomers shallower. This includes his thoughts on the business aspects of technical writing and teaching, the cha...
Sep 17, 2018•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
