#222: Autocomplete with type annotations for AWS and boto3

Sponsored by Linode! pythonbytes.fm/linode

Special guest: Greg Herrera

YouTube live stream for viewers:

Play on YouTube

Watch the live stream replay

Michael #1: boto type annotations

• via Michael Lerner
• boto3's services are created at runtime
• IDEs aren't able to index its code in order to provide code completion or infer the type of these services or of the objects created by them.
• Type systems cannot verify them
• Even if it was able to do so, clients and service resources are created using a service agnostic factory method and are only identified by a string argument of that method.
• boto3_type_annotations defines stand in classes for the clients, service resources, paginators, and waiters provided by boto3's services.

Example with “bare” boto3:

Example with annotated boto3:

Brian #2: How to have your code reviewer appreciate you

• By Michael Lynch
• Suggested by Miłosz Bednarzak
• Actual title “How to Make Your Code Reviewer Fall in Love with You”
  • but 🤮
  • even has the words “your reviewer will literally fall in love with you.”
  • literally → figuratively, please
• Topic is important though, here are some good tips:
  • Review your own code first
    • “Don’t just check for mistakes — imagine reading the code for the first time. What might confuse you?”
  • Write a clear change list description
  • “A good change list description explains what the change achieves, at a high level, and why you’re making this change.”
  • Narrowly scope changes
  • Separate functional and non-functional changes
  • This is tough, even for me, but important.
  • Need to fix something, and the formatting is a nightmare and you feel you must blacken it. Do those things in two separate merge requests.
  • Break up large change lists
  • A ton to write about. Maybe it deserves 2-3 merges instead of 1.
  • Respond graciously to critiques
  • It can feel like a personal attack, but hopefully it’s not.
  • Responding defensively will only make things works.

Greg #3: REPODASH - Quality Metrics for Github repositories

• by Laurence Molloy
• Do you maintain a project codebase on Github?
• Would you like to be able to show the maturity of your project at a glance?
• Walk through the metrics available
• Use-case

Michael #4: Extra, extra, extra, extra, hear all about it

• Python 3 Float Security Bug
• Building Python 3 from source now :-/ It’s still Python 3.8.5 on Ubuntu with the kernel patch just today! (Linux 5.4.0-66 / Ubuntu 20.04.2)
• Finally, I’m Dockering on my M1 mac via:

1. docker context create remotedocker --docker "host=ssh://user@server"
2. docker context use remotedocker
3. docker run -it ubuntu:latest bash now works as usual but remotely!

• Why I keep complaining about merge thing on dependabot. Why!?! ;)

• Anthony Shaw wrote a bot to help alleviate this a bit. More on that later.

Brian #5: testcontainers-python

• Suggested by Josh Peak
• Why mock a database? Spin up a live one in a docker container.

• “Python port for testcontainers-java that allows using docker containers for functional and integration testing. Testcontainers-python provides capabilities to spin up docker containers (such as a database, Selenium web browser, or any other container) for testing.”

  import sqlalchemy
  from testcontainers.mysql import MySqlContainer
  
  with MySqlContainer('mysql:5.7.32') as mysql:
          engine = sqlalchemy.create_engine(mysql.get_connection_url())
          version, = engine.execute("select version()").fetchone()
          print(version)  # 5.7.32
  

• The snippet above will spin up a MySql database in a container. The get_connection_url() convenience method returns a sqlalchemy compatible url we use to connect to the database and retrieve the database version.

Greg #6: The Python Ecosystem is relentlessly improving price-performance every day

• Python is reaching top-of-mind for more and more business decision-makers because their technology teams are delivering solutions to the business with unprecedented price-performance.
• The business impact keeps getting better and better.
• What seems like heavy adoption throughout the economy is still a relatively small-inroad compared to what we’ll see in the future. It’s like water rapidly collecting behind a weak dam.
• It’s an exciting time to be in the Python world!

Extras:

Brian:

• Firefox 86 enhances cookie protection
  • sites can save cookies. but can’t share between sites.
  • Firefox maintains separate cookie storage for each site.
  • Momentary exceptions allowed for some non-tracking cross-site cookie uses, such as popular third party login providers.

Joke:

56 Funny Code Comments That People Actually Wrote: These are actually in a code base somewhere (a sampling):

    /*
     * Dear Maintainer
     *
     * Once you are done trying to ‘optimize’ this routine,
     * and you have realized what a terrible mistake that was,
     * please increment the following counter as a warning
     * to the next guy.
     *
     * total_hours_wasted_here = 73
     */

    // sometimes I believe compiler ignores all my comments

    // drunk, fix later

    // Magic. Do not touch.

    /*** Always returns true ***/
    public boolean isAvailable() {
        return false;
    }