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#122: Give Me Back My Monolith

Published Fri, Mar 22, 2019, recorded Wed, Mar 20, 2019

Sponsored by DigitalOcean: pythonbytes.fm/digitalocean

Brian #1: Combining and separating dictionaries

Michael #2: Why I Avoid Slack

  • by Matthew Rocklin
  • I avoid interacting on Slack, especially for technical conversations around open source software.
  • Instead, I encourage colleagues to have technical and design conversations on GitHub, or some other system that is public, permanent, searchable, and cross-referenceable.
  • Slack is fun but, internal real-time chat systems are, I think, bad for productivity generally, especially for public open source software maintenance.
  • Prefer GitHub because I want to
    • Engage collaborators that aren’t on our Slack
    • Record the conversation in case participants change in the future.
    • Serve the silent majority of users who search the web for answers to their questions or bugs.
    • Encourage thoughtful discourse. Because GitHub is a permanent record it forces people to think more before they write.
    • Cross reference issues. Slack is siloed. It doesn’t allow people to cross reference people or conversations across Slacks

Brian #3: Hunting for Memory Leaks in Python applications

  • Wai Chee Yau
  • Conquering memory leaks and spikes in Python ML products at Zendesk.
  • A quick tutorial of some useful memory tools
  • The memory_profiler package and matplotlib to visualize memory spikes.
  • Using muppy to heap dump at certain places in the code.
  • objgraph to help memory profiling with object lineage.
  • Some tips when memory leak/spike hunting:
    • strive for quick feedback
    • run memory intensive tasks in separate processes
    • debugger can add references to objects
    • watch out for packages that can be leaky
      • pandas? really?

Michael #4: Give Me Back My Monolith

  • by Craig Kerstiens
  • Feels like we’re starting to pass the peak of the hype cycle of microservices
  • We’ve actually seen some migrations from micro-services back to a monolith.
  • Here is a rundown of all the things that were simple that you now get to re-visit
  • Setup went from intro chem to quantum mechanics
    • Onboarding a new engineering, at least for an initial environment would be done in the first day. As we ventured into micro-services onboarding time skyrocketed
  • So long for understanding our systems
    • Back when we had monolithic apps if you had an error you had a clear stacktrace to see where it originated from and could jump right in and debug. Now we have a service that talks to another service, that queues something on a message bus, that another service processes, and then we have an error.
  • If we can’t debug them, maybe we can test them
  • All the trade-offs are for a good reason. Right?

Brian #5: Famous Laws Of Software Development

  • Tim Sommer
  • 13 “laws” of software development, including
    • Hofstadter’s Law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.”
    • Conway’s Law: “Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.”
    • The Peter Principle: “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
    • Ninety-ninety rule: “The first 90% of the code takes 10% of the time. The remaining 10% takes the other 90% of the time”

Michael #6: Beer Garden Plugins

  • A powerful plugin framework for converting your functions into composable, discoverable, production-ready services with minimal overhead.
  • Beer Garden makes it easy to turn your functions into REST interfaces that are ready for production use, in a way that’s accessible to anyone that can write a function.
  • Based on MongoDB, Rabbit MQ, & modern Python
  • Nice docker-compose option too

Extras

Michael:

  • Firefox Send
  • Ethical ads on Python Bytes (and Talk Python)

Brian:

Jokes

  • From Derrick Chambers

    “What do you call it when a python programmer refuses to implement custom objects? self deprivation! Sorry, that joke was really classless.”

  • via pyjokes: I had a problem so I thought I'd use Java. Now I have a ProblemFactory.


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