Summary One of the common complaints about Python is that it is slow. There are languages and runtimes that can execute code faster, but they are not as easy to be productive with, so many people are willing to make that tradeoff. There are some use cases, however, that truly need the benefit of faster execution. To address this problem Kevin Modzelewski helped to create the Pyston intepreter that is focused on speeding up unmodified Python code. In this episode he shares the history of the proj...
Jan 19, 2021•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Every software project has a certain amount of boilerplate to handle things like linting rules, test configuration, and packaging. Rather than recreate everything manually every time you start a new project you can use a utility to generate all of the necessary scaffolding from a template. This allows you to extract best practices and team standards into a reusable project that will save you time. The Copier project is one such utility that goes above and beyond the bare minimum by suppo...
Jan 12, 2021•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary On its surface Python is a simple language which is what has contributed to its rise in popularity. As you move to intermediate and advanced usage you will find a number of interesting and elegant design elements that will let you build scalable and maintainable systems and design friendly interfaces. Luciano Ramalho is best known as the author of Fluent Python which has quickly become a leading resource for Python developers to increase their facility with the language. In this episode ...
Jan 05, 2021•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Building a web application requires integrating a number of separate concerns into a single experience. One of the common requirements is a content management system to allow product owners and marketers to make the changes needed for them to do their jobs. Rather than spend the time and focus of your developers to build the end to end system a growing trend is to use a headless CMS. In this episode Jake Lumetta shares why he decided to spend his time and energy on building a headless CM...
Dec 28, 2020•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Notebooks have been a useful tool for analytics, exploratory programming, and shareable data science for years, and their popularity is continuing to grow. Despite their widespread use, there are still a number of challenges that inhibit collaboration and use by non-technical stakeholders. Barry McCardel and his team at Hex have built a platform to make collaboration on Jupyter notebooks a first class experience, as well as allowing notebooks to be parameterized and exposing the logic th...
Dec 21, 2020•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary When working with data it’s important to understand when it is correct. If there is a time dimension, then it can be difficult to know when variation is normal. Anomaly detection is a useful tool to address these challenges, but a difficult one to do well. In this episode Smit Shah and Sayan Chakraborty share the work they have done on Luminaire to make anomaly detection easier to work with. They explain the complexities inherent to working with time series data, the strategies tha...
Dec 15, 2020•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Technologies for building data pipelines have been around for decades, with many mature options for a variety of workloads. However, most of those tools are focused on processing of text based data, both structured and unstructured. For projects that need to manage large numbers of binary and audio files the list of options is much shorter. In this episode Lynn Root shares the work that she and her team at Spotify have done on the Klio project to make that list a bit longer. She discusse...
Dec 07, 2020•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Building a complete web application requires expertise in a wide range of disciplines. As a result it is often the work of a whole team of engineers to get a new project from idea to production. Meredydd Luff and his co-founder built the Anvil platform to make it possible to build full stack applications entirely in Python. In this episode he explains why they released the application server as open source, how you can use it to run your own projects for free, and why developer tooling i...
Dec 01, 2020•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary In a software project writing code is just one step of the overall lifecycle. There are many repetitive steps such as linting, running tests, and packaging that need to be run for each project that you maintain. In order to reduce the overhead of these repeat tasks, and to simplify the process of integrating code across multiple systems the use of monorepos has been growing in popularity. The Pants build tool is purpose built for addressing all of the drudgery and for working with monore...
Nov 23, 2020•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Building a machine learning model is a process that requires well curated and cleaned data and a lot of experimentation. Doing it repeatably and at scale with a team requires a way to share your discoveries with your teammates. This has led to a new set of operational ML platforms. In this episode Michael Del Balso shares the lessons that he learned from building the platform at Uber for putting machine learning into production. He also explains how the feature store is becoming the core...
Nov 17, 2020•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The CPython implementation has grown and evolved significantly over the past ~25 years. In that time there have been many other projects to create compatible runtimes for your Python code. One of the challenges for these other projects is the lack of a fully documented specification of how and why everything works the way that it does. In the most recent Python language summit Mark Shannon proposed implementing a formal specification for CPython, and in this episode he shares his reasoni...
Nov 10, 2020•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Artificial intelligence applications can provide dramatic benefits to a business, but only if you can bring them from idea to production. Henrik Landgren was behind the original efforts at Spotify to leverage data for new product features, and in his current role he works on an AI system to evaluate new businesses to invest in. In this episode he shares advice on how to identify opportunities for leveraging AI to improve your business, the capabilities necessary to enable aa successful p...
Nov 03, 2020•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Python and Java are two of the most popular programming languages in the world, and have both been around for over 20 years. In that time there have been numerous attempts to provide interoperability between them, with varying methods and levels of success. One such project is JPype, which allows you to use Java classes in your Python code. In this episode the current lead developer, Karl Nelson, explains why he chose it as his preferred tool for combining these ecosystems, how he and hi...
Oct 26, 2020•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The release of Python 3.9 introduced a new parser that paves the way for brand new features. Every programming language has its own specific syntax for representing the logic that you are trying to express. The way that the rules of the language are defined and validated is with a grammar definition, which in turn is processed by a parser. The parser that the Python language has relied on for the past 25 years has begun to show its age through mounting technical debt and a lack of flexib...
Oct 19, 2020•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The way that applications are being built and delivered has changed dramatically in recent years with the growing trend toward cloud native software. As part of this movement toward the infrastructure and orchestration that powers your project being defined in software, a new approach to operations is gaining prominence. Commonly called GitOps, the main principle is that all of your automation code lives in version control and is executed automatically as changes are merged. In this epis...
Oct 12, 2020•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Learning to code is a neverending journey, which is why it’s important to find a way to stay motivated. A common refrain is to just find a project that you’re interested in building and use that goal to keep you on track. The problem with that advice is that as a new programmer, you don’t have the knowledge required to know which projects are reasonable, which are difficult, and which are effectively impossible. Steven Lott has been sharing his programming expertise as ...
Oct 06, 2020•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Python is a powerful and expressive programming language with a vast ecosystem of incredible applications. Unfortunately, it has always been challenging to share those applications with non-technical end users. Gregory Szorc set out to solve the problem of how to put your code on someone else’s computer and have it run without having to rely on extra systems such as virtualenvs or Docker. In this episode he shares his work on PyOxidizer and how it allows you to build a self-contain...
Sep 29, 2020•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Servers and services that have any exposure to the public internet are under a constant barrage of attacks. Network security engineers are tasked with discovering and addressing any potential breaches to their systems, which is a never-ending task as attackers continually evolve their tactics. In order to gain better visibility into complex exploits Colin O’Brien built the Grapl platform, using graph database technology to more easily discover relationships between activities withi...
Sep 22, 2020•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary News media is an important source of information for understanding the context of the world. To make it easier to access and process the contents of news sites Lucas Ou-Yang built the Newspaper library that aids in automatic retrieval of articles and prepare it for analysis. In this episode he shares how the project got started, how it is implemented, and how you can get started with it today. He also discusses how recent improvements in the utility and ease of use of deep learning libra...
Sep 15, 2020•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Data applications are complex and continually evolving, often requiring collaboration across multiple teams. In order to keep everyone on the same page a high level abstraction is needed to facilitate a cross-cutting view of the data orchestration across integration, transformation, analytics, and machine learning. Dagster is an innovative new framework that leans on the power and flexibility of Python to provide an extensible interface to the complete lifecycle of data projects. In this...
Sep 07, 2020•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The internet is a rich source of information, but a majority of it isn’t accessible programmatically through APIs or databases. To address that shortcoming there are a variety of web scraping frameworks that aid in extracting structured data from web pages. In this episode Attila Tóth shares the challenges of web data extraction, the ways that you can use it, and how Scrapy and ScrapingHub can help you with your projects. Announcements Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the pod...
Sep 01, 2020•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary A large portion of the software industry has standardized on Git as the version control sytem of choice. But have you thought about all of the information that you are generating with your branches, commits, and code changes? Davide Spadini created the PyDriller framework to simplify the work of mining software repositories to perform research on the technical and social aspects of software engineering. In this episode he shares some of the insights that you can gain by exploring the his...
Aug 25, 2020•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary The Musicbrainz project was an early entry in the movement to build an open data ecosystem. In recent years, the Metabrainz Foundation has fostered a growing ecosystem of projects to support the contribution of, and access to, metadata, listening habits, and review of music. The majority of those projects are written in Python, and in this episode Param Singh explains how they are built, how they fit together, and how they support the goals of the Metabrains Foundation. This was an inter...
Aug 17, 2020•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Python is a leading choice for data science due to the immense number of libraries and frameworks readily available to support it, but it is still difficult to scale. Dask is a framework designed to transparently run your data analysis across multiple CPU cores and multiple servers. Using Dask lifts a limitation for scaling your analytical workloads, but brings with it the complexity of server administration, deployment, and security. In this episode Matthew Rocklin and Hugo Bowne-Anders...
Aug 10, 2020•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Netflix uses machine learning to power every aspect of their business. To do this effectively they have had to build extensive expertise and tooling to support their engineers. In this episode Savin Goyal discusses the work that he and his team are doing on the open source machine learning operations platform Metaflow. He shares the inspiration for building an opinionated framework for the full lifecycle of machine learning projects, how it is implemented, and how they have designed it t...
Aug 04, 2020•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary One of the best methods for learning programming is to just build a project and see how things work first-hand. With that in mind, Ken Youens-Clark wrote a whole book of Tiny Python Projects that you can use to get started on your journey. In this episode he shares his inspiration for the book, his thoughts on the benefits of teaching testing principles and the use of linting and formatting tools, as well as the benefits of trying variations on a working program to see how it behaves. Th...
Jul 28, 2020•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Python is an intuitive and flexible language, but that versatility can also lead to problematic designs if you’re not careful. Nikita Sobolev is the CTO of Wemake Services where he works on open source projects that encourage clean coding practices and maintainable architectures. In this episode he discusses his work on the DRY Python set of libraries and how they provide an accessible interface to functional programming patterns while maintaining an idiomatic Python interface. He ...
Jul 21, 2020•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Barry Warsaw has been a member of the Python community since the very beginning. His contributions to the growth of the language and its ecosystem are innumerable and diverse, earning him the title of Friendly Language Uncle For Life. In this episode he reminisces on his experiences as a core developer, a member of the Python Steering Committee, and his roles at Canonical and LinkedIn supporting the use of Python at those companies. In order to know where you are going it is always impor...
Jul 13, 2020•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Building and managing servers is a challenging task. Configuration management tools provide a framework for handling the various tasks involved, but many of them require learning a specific syntax and toolchain. PyInfra is a configuration management framework that embraces the familiarity of Pure Python, allowing you to build your own integrations easily and package it all up using the same tools that you rely on for your applications. In this episode Nick Barrett explains why he built i...
Jul 06, 2020•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Summary Programming languages are a powerful tool and can be used to create all manner of applications, however sometimes their syntax is more cumbersome than necessary. For some industries or subject areas there is already an agreed upon set of concepts that can be used to express your logic. For those cases you can create a Domain Specific Language, or DSL to make it easier to write programs that can express the necessary logic with a custom syntax. In this episode Igor Dejanović shares his wo...
Jun 30, 2020•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
