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#108: Spilled data? Call the PyJanitor

Published Tue, Dec 11, 2018, recorded Mon, Dec 10, 2018

Sponsored by DigitalOcean: pythonbytes.fm/digitalocean

Brian #1: pyjanitor - for cleaning data

  • originally a port of an R package called janitor, now much more.
  • “pyjanitor’s etymology has a two-fold relationship to “cleanliness”. Firstly, it’s about extending Pandas with convenient data cleaning routines. Secondly, it’s about providing a cleaner, method-chaining, verb-based API for common pandas routines.”
  • functionality:
    • Cleaning columns name (multi-indexes are possible!)
    • Removing empty rows and columns
    • Identifying duplicate entries
    • Encoding columns as categorical
    • Splitting your data into features and targets (for machine learning)
    • Adding, removing, and renaming columns
    • Coalesce multiple columns into a single column
    • Convert excel date (serial format) into a Python datetime format
    • Expand a single column that has delimited, categorical values into dummy-encoded variables
  • This pandas code:
        df = pd.DataFrame(...)  # create a pandas DataFrame somehow.
        del df['column1']  # delete a column from the dataframe.
        df = df.dropna(subset=['column2', 'column3'])  # drop rows that have empty values in column 2 and 3.
        df = df.rename({'column2': 'unicorns', 'column3': 'dragons'})  # rename column2 and column3
        df['newcolumn'] = ['iterable', 'of', 'items']  # add a new column.
    - looks like this with pyjanitor:
        df = (
            pd.DataFrame(...)
            .remove_columns(['column1'])
            .dropna(subset=['column2', 'column3'])
            .rename_column('column2', 'unicorns')
            .rename_column('column3', 'dragons')
            .add_column('newcolumn', ['iterable', 'of', 'items'])
        )
    

Michael #2: What Does It Take To Be An Expert At Python?

  • Presentation at PyData 2017 by James Powell
  • Covers Python Data Model (dunder methods)
  • Covers uses of Metaclasses
  • All done very smoothly as a series of demos
  • Pretty long and in depth, 1.5+ hours

Brian #3: Awesome Python Applications

  • pypi is a great place to find great packages you can use as examples for the packages you write. Where do you go for application examples? Well, now you can go to Awesome Python Applications.
  • categories of applications included: internet, audio, video, graphics, games, productivity, organization, communication, education, science, CMS, ERP (enterprise resource planning), static site generators, and a whole slew of developer related applications.
  • Mahmoud is happy to have help filling this out, so if you know of a great open source application written in Python, go ahead and contribute to this, or open an issue on this project.

Michael #4: Django Core no more

  • Write up by James Bennett
  • If you’re not the sort of person who closely follows the internals of Django’s development, you might not know there’s a draft proposal to drastically change the project’s governance.
  • What’s up: Django the open-source project is OK right now, but difficulty in recruiting and retaining enough active contributors.
  • Some of the biggest open-source projects dodge this by having, effectively, corporate sponsorship of contributions.
  • Django has become sort of a victim of its own success: the types of easy bugfixes and small features that often are the path to growing new committers have mostly been done already in Django.
  • Not managed to bring in new committers at a sufficient rate to replace those who’ve become less active or even entirely inactive, and that’s not sustainable for much longer.
  • Under-attracting women contributors too
  • Governance: Some parallels to what the Python core devs are experiencing now. Project leads BDFLs stepped down.
  • The proposal: what I’ve proposed is the dissolution of “Django core”, and the revocation of almost all commit bits
    • Seems extreme but they were working much more as a team with PRs, etc anyway.
    • Breaks down the barrier to needing to be on the core team to suggest, change anything.
    • Two roles would be formalized — Mergers and Releasers — who would, respectively, merge pull requests into Django, and package/publish releases. But rather than being all-powerful decision-makers, these would be bureaucratic roles

Brian #5: wemake django template

  • a cookie-cutter template for serious django projects with lots of fun goodies
  • “This project is used to scaffold a django project structure. Just like django-admin.py startproject but better.”
  • features:
    • Always up-to-date with the help of [@dependabot](https://dependabot.com/)
    • poetry for managing dependencies
    • mypy for optional static typing
    • pytest for unit testing
    • flake8 and wemake-python-styleguide for linting
    • pre-commit hooks for consistent development
    • docker for development, testing, and production
    • sphinx for documentation
    • Gitlab CI with full build, test, and deploy pipeline configured by default
    • Caddy with https and http/2 turned on by default

Michael #6: Django Hunter

  • Tool designed to help identify incorrectly configured Django applications that are exposing sensitive information.
  • Why? March 2018: 28,165 thousand django servers are exposed on the internet, many are showing secret API keys, database passwords, amazon AWS keys.
  • Example: https://twitter.com/6IX7ine/status/978598496658960384
  • Some complained this inferred Django was insecure and said it wasn’t. Others thought “There is a reasonable argument to be made that DEBUG should default to False.”
  • One beginner, Peter, chimes in:
    • I probably have one of them, among my early projects that are on heroku and public GitHub repos.
    • I did accidentally expose my aws password this way and all hell broke loose.
    • The problem is that as a beginner, it wasn't obvious to me how to separate development and production settings and keep production stuff out of my public repository.

Extras:

Michael: Thanks for having me on your show Brian: https://blog.michaelckennedy.net/2018/12/08/being-a-great-podcast-guest/

Brian: open source extra: For Christmas, I want a dragon…

pic.twitter.com/RmFAEgqpSr — Changelog (@changelog)

Michael: Why did the multithreaded chicken cross the road?

  • road the side get to the other of to
  • to get the side to road the of other
  • the side of to the to road other get
  • to of the road to side other the get

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