#247 Do you dare to press "."?
Watch the live stream: Watch on YouTube About the show Special guest: Dan Taylor Michael #1: Keep your computer awake during long processing For now, use Michael’s fork when on macOS. Until this PR is merged. Do you have work that will take a long time? Keeping your OS working away is just a context block from wakepy import keepawake with keepawake(keep_screen_awake=False): ... # do stuff that takes long time Brian #2: How to write a great Stack Overflow question via Kevin Markham The punchline (but it’s not enough) Write a brief introduction Provide a self-contained code example Detail the expected results and why I expect those results Add any important notes Link to any relevant questions Write a title that summarizes the question Kevin starts with a question about pandas dataframes and filling in missing values. The question is really application specific The rewrite of the question is awesome Simplifies the problem into a toy example, literally, and out of the domain specific context. Includes example code that can copied, pasted, and run that sets up the problem Uses short and simple variable names Talks about expected results. And why he expects those results. Includes a dataset in the sample code that covers cases the solution needs to provide Includes non-obvious requirements or non-requirements Links to related questions and why they don’t solve your problem. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this, but I think it’d be cool to add test code that will pass when the problem is solved. But that might make the question unnecessarily long. Dan #3: Github.dev - press ‘.’ to edit code in any GitHub repo Fun bonus feature released at the same time as GitHub Codespaces Runs VS Code entirely in your browser - supercharged “edit button” Nothing to install There’s no server to pay for, though functionality is limited The file system is your browser’s local storage and GitHub repo You can add files and commit changes directly to your repo You can install extensions that support running in “VS Code Web” Added basic web support to the Python Extension just yesterday Syntax checking, auto-complete, go-to-definition Uses type hints for packages (no python interpreter in the browser) You can also install vscode-pyiodide to run Python code using Jupyter+Pyiodide Overall means you can do more powerful code editing quickly in GitHub.com, I’m looking forward to seeing how this evolves Michael #4: Log analyzer (minus google analytics) GoAccess is an open source real-time web log analyzer and interactive viewer that runs in a terminal in *nix systems or through your browser. Features Fast, real-time, millisecond/second updates, written in C Only ncurses as a dependency Nearly all web log formats (Apache, Nginx, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFront, Caddy, etc) Simply set the log format and run it against your log Beautiful terminal and bootstrap dashboards (Tailor GoAccess to suit your own color taste/schemes) Brian #5: KMK: Clackety Keyboards Powered by Python recommended by Blaise “firmware for computer keyboards written and configured in CircuitPython.” Cool list of features Fully configured through a single, easy to understand Python file. Single-piece or two-piece split keyboards are supported Chainable keys such as KC.LWIN(KC.L) to lock the screen on a Windows PC Built-in unicode macros, including emojis RGB underglow and LED backlights One key can turn into many more based on how many times you tap it One writeup I found of someone using it for a 10-key KMK: run Python on your keyboard includes a video Seems like limited hardware so far, and although the coding might not be too difficult, you still gotta swap out of the circuitboard. I’m bringing this topic up because I’m hoping some keyboard kit people will put together something that just starts with the ability to run CircuitPython so I can just skip to the coding part. Dan #6: SQLModel - use the same models for SQL and FastAPI via Sebastián Ramírez (creator of SQLModel and FastAPI) Write a schema once and use everywhere, reduces a lot of repetitive code Traditionally have to manage several layers of code to pass your data from database queries, to the backend code, expose to your API and consume from the client Code-first ORMs (SQLAlchemy, Django ORM) make it easy to write code that generates SQL FastAPI makes it easy to expose objects to your API using Pydantic models Before you would need to create both models and convert from ORM to Pydantic using .from_orm SQLModel unifies those: a SQLModel is both a SQLAlchemy model and a Pydantic model You can use SQLModel to interact with the database (via wrapping SQLAlchemy) You can use that same model as a Pydantic model in FastAPI requests and responses FastAPI also uses the Pydantic models to generate an openapi.json, meaning you could generate a client library in any language using OpenAPI Generator Some other cool things: Designed using type annotations so that editors like VS Code, PyCharm give great auto-complete out of the box, uses the proposed dataclass_transforms spec for dynamic typing Supports async database sessions, alembic migrations because it’s based on SQLAlchemy (not yet documented) Should be possible to integrate with postgis, ts_vectors Extras Brian pip install ./local_directory is pretty interesting. Test & Code 163 The way pip installs from a local directory is about to change. Stéphane Bidoul joins the show to talk about it. Dan type4py - using ML to add type annotations to your codebase retrofitting codebases with types is a pain — static type checkers can only infer so much type4py research paper outlines a state of the art ML model for inferring types, adopting some techniques used in computer vision Open sourced training code, data set, VS Code extension, and inferencing server If you have a need to add type annotations to a large code base, worth giving this a try! WARNING the VS Code extension sends code tokens to their API on type4py.com (they do have a privacy policy) — if this is a concern be sure to host the inferencing server yourself! Joke: Continuous Deployment Also: “If a programmer gets an interview because of a recommendation from a friend, are they being passed by reference?” From @CarlaNotarobot, via @bluefiddleguy