WEBVTT 00:00:00.001 --> 00:00:04.520 Hello and welcome to Python Bytes, where we deliver Python news and headlines directly to 00:00:04.520 --> 00:00:13.220 your earbuds. This is episode 192, recorded July 22nd, 2020. Had to look that one up. 00:00:13.220 --> 00:00:15.460 I am Brian Okken. And I'm Michael Kennedy. 00:00:15.460 --> 00:00:18.720 And I can't believe we're heading close to 200. This is crazy. 00:00:18.720 --> 00:00:21.880 Oh yeah. Been at this for a while. That's going to be like four years almost. 00:00:21.880 --> 00:00:26.420 Yeah. Again, this episode is sponsored by us and we'll tell you a little bit more about 00:00:26.420 --> 00:00:32.160 other things that we're doing a little later in the show. But first, some of the ways that people 00:00:32.160 --> 00:00:38.400 tell each other what they're up to is their personal GitHub readme on their GitHub profile, 00:00:38.400 --> 00:00:39.240 right? Yeah, that's right. 00:00:39.240 --> 00:00:45.740 So I was impressed by something that I saw recently. Simon Willison, he's the co-creator of Django. 00:00:45.740 --> 00:00:53.400 He posted something called a blog post saying how to do a building a self-updating profile readme 00:00:53.400 --> 00:00:57.380 for GitHub. So at the top of it, I'm going to quote this. It says, 00:00:57.380 --> 00:01:01.420 GitHub quietly released a new feature at some point in the past few days. 00:01:01.420 --> 00:01:03.880 Profile readmes. This is news to me. 00:01:03.880 --> 00:01:07.800 Yeah. So if you create a repository with the same name as your GitHub account. 00:01:07.800 --> 00:01:14.880 So in Simon's case, it was Simon W. So github.com/Simon W slash Simon W. 00:01:15.360 --> 00:01:22.740 So two, you go too deep and then add a readme.md or readme markdown file to it. GitHub will render 00:01:22.740 --> 00:01:29.340 the contents at the top of your personal profile page. So that's neat. In that case, it's just one 00:01:29.340 --> 00:01:34.720 up. So if you go to github.com/Simon W, you see his, but his looks really awesome. It's got a whole 00:01:34.720 --> 00:01:40.480 bunch of cool stuff in it because he took it one step further. It's not a static markdown file. 00:01:41.020 --> 00:01:46.240 He's got another article that talks about it, but this article here walks through exactly what he 00:01:46.240 --> 00:01:53.240 does. And also it's all open source. So you can see his code. He uses a GitHub actions. There's 00:01:53.240 --> 00:02:00.800 both a button that he can push to make it happen, but there's also any post to his own Simon W repo 00:02:00.800 --> 00:02:06.020 will cause this to happen. But the GitHub actions run, he contributes to a lot of open source 00:02:06.020 --> 00:02:13.100 projects. So he takes a certain set of repos that he has and pulls the latest releases and have like 00:02:13.100 --> 00:02:20.240 latest release notes using the GitHub GraphQL API. So there's an example of that. There's an example 00:02:20.240 --> 00:02:27.000 of using feed parser to pull blog entries off of his blog and an example of using a SQL query to grab, 00:02:27.480 --> 00:02:33.540 guess he's got a site called TAIL for today. I learned grabs a few links off of that. So he's 00:02:33.540 --> 00:02:39.980 got a three column setup for a read me that is kept up to date using GitHub actions. How cool is that? 00:02:39.980 --> 00:02:44.620 That is awesome. Yeah. So normally you go to your GitHub repo and you have your picture 00:02:44.620 --> 00:02:49.080 on how many followers you have and whatnot. Some other cool stuff we'll talk about later, 00:02:49.080 --> 00:02:56.080 but then has your pinned repositories and that green ish heat map of how frequently you contribute to 00:02:56.080 --> 00:03:02.140 various projects or just to get up in general. But now you can have right at the top, you know, 00:03:02.140 --> 00:03:05.960 whatever you want to write, which that's pretty awesome. I think I might have to do this. 00:03:05.960 --> 00:03:10.020 Yeah. I mean, you still get all that other stuff, but it's just that other stuff is below 00:03:10.020 --> 00:03:13.060 this read me info. That's pretty neat. 00:03:13.140 --> 00:03:17.660 Yeah. Very cool. And it's super simple, right? Anyone can write a readme.md file. 00:03:17.660 --> 00:03:21.520 Yeah. And one of the reasons why I brought this up is I think there's a lot of people trying to 00:03:21.520 --> 00:03:27.660 utilize, I mean, this day of COVID and quarantine and stuff, I'm glad I'm not looking for a job. 00:03:27.660 --> 00:03:33.280 And I think that if you are looking for a job, making your GitHub profile look professional 00:03:33.280 --> 00:03:39.180 and show the content that you want to show off and having things like, you know, blog posts on 00:03:39.180 --> 00:03:43.160 your GitHub profile, that's pretty cool. It is really cool. And just, you know, you know that people, 00:03:43.160 --> 00:03:49.400 employers say they check people's GitHub profile accounts, right? So how many people have, are going 00:03:49.400 --> 00:03:52.680 to have these unique special ones that show they care, right? Not too many. 00:03:52.680 --> 00:03:54.460 Well, the people that listen to our podcast. 00:03:54.460 --> 00:03:55.880 Exactly. Yeah. 00:03:55.880 --> 00:04:00.780 All the awesome people. Okay. So that's really cool. I definitely didn't know about that. Thanks for 00:04:00.780 --> 00:04:07.200 sharing that. It looks neat. So we got this next one from Connor Furster and he works in engineering, 00:04:07.200 --> 00:04:14.560 but also does data science-y things. And he sent over this project that he works on that is incredibly 00:04:14.560 --> 00:04:21.040 cool. So a lot of times what people want to do is they want to take symbolic math or math that you 00:04:21.040 --> 00:04:26.980 might write out by hand, turn it into Python code through pandas and numpy and whatnot, scikit learn 00:04:26.980 --> 00:04:33.440 or scikit in general, and then run it through Jupyter and get an answer. But he says he works in design 00:04:33.440 --> 00:04:39.980 engineering and you have to do a lot of calculations and those have to be kept as part of legal records 00:04:39.980 --> 00:04:47.160 to show the project design history. And one, yeah, one thing you do is do them by hand. That's kind of 00:04:47.160 --> 00:04:53.800 crazy. A lot of people use Excel. That's a nightmare. Like Excel is like unbounded go-to's you can't see, 00:04:53.900 --> 00:04:58.360 which is always tricky. So you could do it with Jupyter, but then you just got this pile of code 00:04:58.360 --> 00:05:04.740 and here's the answer and so on. Right. So you want to like the theoretical view to verify the formula 00:05:04.740 --> 00:05:12.320 you're using. Right. So he created this thing called hand calcs and C-A-L-C-S like calculus or 00:05:12.320 --> 00:05:18.680 calculations. Anyway, hand calcs. And the idea is you type in Python code into a Jupyter cell, 00:05:18.900 --> 00:05:25.440 and then you can do a percent percent render from the hand calcs project and it will turn it into 00:05:25.440 --> 00:05:30.640 symbolic math. This is beautiful. Yeah. As if you had written it out by hand. Yeah. With like, 00:05:30.640 --> 00:05:36.320 as an example in the little video demo, we've said before we like those and everybody does, 00:05:36.320 --> 00:05:41.480 but it has, has like square root symbols with a bunch of symbols underneath it and 00:05:41.480 --> 00:05:46.560 all sorts of symbols that, yeah. Yeah. Looks like, like what you would have had to show if you were 00:05:46.560 --> 00:05:51.840 in math class, right? Yep. Exactly. And it will show steps like symbolic steps from step A, step B, 00:05:51.840 --> 00:05:56.900 step C. And you can say, show it shorthand or expand it out longhand and show me all the steps you 00:05:56.900 --> 00:06:01.760 use to like solve these problems and all kinds of cool stuff. Wow. Yeah. The reason it looks so good 00:06:01.760 --> 00:06:11.240 is it basically converts symbolic Python math over to latex and latex is like the de facto math 00:06:11.240 --> 00:06:16.140 representation language for academic papers. So, you know, you want to have like integral signs, 00:06:16.140 --> 00:06:20.080 you want to have infinite summations, all that kind of stuff. No problem. Oh, this is really cool. 00:06:20.080 --> 00:06:26.340 Isn't it cool? And then you can also use the symbolic tag to get it to do other, like show more 00:06:26.340 --> 00:06:31.340 symbolic stuff. You can do longhand, shorthand, you can have it do units. They'll put units like 00:06:31.340 --> 00:06:36.560 millimeters cubed or whatever, and it'll carry the units through the calculation in symbolically. 00:06:36.560 --> 00:06:41.840 Yeah. But looking at all these formulas, it's giving me nightmares. Don't look anymore. Okay. 00:06:41.840 --> 00:06:47.620 Well, I guess the thing you would, you would want to think about the trade-off is would you rather 00:06:47.620 --> 00:06:54.400 look at them in their proper mathematical form or in like programming meaning, not, you know, 00:06:54.400 --> 00:07:01.120 where you turn it into like star star pow instead of, you know, proper exponents and stuff. 00:07:01.120 --> 00:07:05.620 No, no, I was just kidding. This is beautiful stuff. But when we got into integrals, that's 00:07:05.620 --> 00:07:10.440 where basically that's where my brain left and I never really caught integrals that way. 00:07:10.440 --> 00:07:17.380 Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. So if people have to take programming math, but they want to represent 00:07:17.380 --> 00:07:20.100 it more nicely, check out handcaps. Looks awesome. 00:07:20.100 --> 00:07:22.580 Yeah. Nice. Oh, I'm next. 00:07:23.400 --> 00:07:30.280 Actually, I'm not. I'd like to talk to all of us about our sponsor and our sponsor is a 00:07:30.280 --> 00:07:34.240 Talk Python Training and a testing code today. 00:07:34.240 --> 00:07:36.580 Tell me about Talk Python Training. 00:07:36.580 --> 00:07:39.380 I'll tell you about what I'm working on this week. I started writing a new course. 00:07:39.380 --> 00:07:43.280 We have a couple of new courses that are fun that are coming. And the one that I started working on 00:07:43.280 --> 00:07:46.880 is called Python memory management and tips. 00:07:46.880 --> 00:07:47.480 Tell me more. 00:07:47.620 --> 00:07:50.840 Yeah. So if you ever wondered, like, what happens, like, how does it free up memory? 00:07:50.840 --> 00:07:55.820 What algorithms make, like, work better with Python memory and what algorithms can make it 00:07:55.820 --> 00:08:00.760 more expensive or slow? What are some of the tips and tricks you can do to, like, dramatically 00:08:00.760 --> 00:08:06.280 decrease the memory consumption, like, two or three times with almost exactly the same code 00:08:06.280 --> 00:08:09.060 type of thing? Well, I'm writing a course on that. 00:08:09.140 --> 00:08:09.780 Oh, that's neat. 00:08:09.780 --> 00:08:10.640 Yeah. Thanks. 00:08:10.640 --> 00:08:15.800 Especially for people, like, talking about doing some more, we can get Python on smaller 00:08:15.800 --> 00:08:17.060 operating system. 00:08:17.060 --> 00:08:17.260 Yeah. 00:08:17.260 --> 00:08:20.240 Architectures like CircuitPython and stuff. That's important. 00:08:20.240 --> 00:08:25.060 Yeah. That's a really good point that on the small memory constraint pieces, you might care a lot 00:08:25.060 --> 00:08:25.500 for sure. 00:08:25.500 --> 00:08:25.880 Yeah. 00:08:25.960 --> 00:08:26.700 How about testing code? 00:08:26.700 --> 00:08:33.140 Well, I was interviewing somebody recently, David Lord. His actual interview will come out sometime 00:08:33.140 --> 00:08:39.640 in August. But he said, I was looking at testing code and a lot of the recent episodes really haven't 00:08:39.640 --> 00:08:45.720 been about testing. What's up with that? And I said, yeah, it's and code, test and code. But yeah, 00:08:45.720 --> 00:08:52.960 so there is a lot of testing focus because primarily because I think that software engineering doesn't 00:08:52.960 --> 00:08:58.240 talk about testing enough. But I do cover a lot of stuff. I'm going to highlight a few of the last 00:08:58.240 --> 00:09:06.240 episodes. I talked to Sebastian Ramirez on episode 120 about Fest API and Typer. Talked with Brett Cannon 00:09:06.240 --> 00:09:14.040 on episode 119 about packaging and pyproject.toml and what's going on there. 121 is a diversion. It's a 00:09:14.040 --> 00:09:20.320 completely different sort of talk. I talked to somebody about 3D printing and finite state machines 00:09:20.320 --> 00:09:25.200 and stuff. And it's just sort of a fun people doing Python and cool things. 00:09:25.200 --> 00:09:25.720 Very cool. 00:09:25.720 --> 00:09:32.540 And then again, talking, thinking about people possibly looking for jobs in episode 122, we talk about 00:09:32.540 --> 00:09:37.680 better resumes for software engineers. So there's, yeah, there is a lot of stuff for everybody. Even 00:09:37.680 --> 00:09:43.260 if you cringe when you think about testing, please check out testing code. We are still putting out 00:09:43.260 --> 00:09:46.460 episodes. If you want to hear more, I'd love to hear what people want to hear about. 00:09:46.600 --> 00:09:49.240 Yeah. It makes our job so much easier when we get suggestions. 00:09:49.240 --> 00:09:52.640 Yeah. Suggestions and questions and things that can flow into things. 00:09:52.640 --> 00:09:57.380 Yeah. Like a suggestion to return the print statement so you don't have to put the parentheses. 00:09:57.380 --> 00:10:03.620 Yeah. So this is crazy and I don't really have much of a comment here, but I saw the thing by Guido 00:10:03.620 --> 00:10:11.740 and then I saw this article by Jake Edge on LWN.net. I don't know what LWN stands for, but it doesn't matter. 00:10:11.740 --> 00:10:19.500 Anyway, the non-return of the Python print statement. So this is odd, I thought. We have talked about the new 00:10:19.500 --> 00:10:26.900 peg parser in Python that's going on. But one of the things that happened with that is, I guess, one of the reasons 00:10:26.900 --> 00:10:33.240 why Python 2 to 3, they went from a print statement to a print function was it made the parsing easier. 00:10:33.240 --> 00:10:41.560 But with the peg parser, you can do all sorts of crazy things and you can have functions that syntactically look like statements 00:10:41.560 --> 00:10:51.840 and have it work just work, sort of. So as an example, we could use a print statement instead, instead of having to be, put the 00:10:51.840 --> 00:11:02.100 parentheses in, you could avoid the parentheses. Anyway, he just put it out there as an idea and essentially people said, no, yuck. What do you think about this? 00:11:02.100 --> 00:11:09.240 It's interesting. It would be one fewer things that has to happen to move to the next stage from a 2 to 3 conversion. 00:11:09.240 --> 00:11:18.060 On the other hand, this looks like one of the easiest conversions for that step. To me, I'm not a fan of having statements and functions in the language 00:11:18.060 --> 00:11:22.720 because it looks to me like functions basically solve the same problem with a little more 00:11:22.720 --> 00:11:24.040 clarity. 00:11:24.040 --> 00:11:28.420 They're a little more functional. You can span the multi-line if the arguments are super long 00:11:28.420 --> 00:11:29.620 that you need to. 00:11:29.620 --> 00:11:34.980 Like with the print statement, you'd have to use a continuation backslash and other weirdness like that. 00:11:34.980 --> 00:11:38.460 So, you know, just because you can doesn't mean you should. 00:11:38.460 --> 00:11:40.400 I guess that's probably how I feel about it, but 00:11:40.400 --> 00:11:43.640 I wouldn't use it if it were in the language. Let me put it that way. 00:11:43.640 --> 00:11:50.200 Yeah, I'm for the no yuck camp. I think that print statement shouldn't have been a statement in the 00:11:50.200 --> 00:11:54.720 first place. And then I think Python 3 fixed it. Having it be a function is the right thing to do. 00:11:54.720 --> 00:12:01.380 I wish there were more statements that were functions instead. Also, I think I wish assert was a function 00:12:01.380 --> 00:12:06.440 instead of a statement. Because people doing, thinking that it's a function and putting a parentheses 00:12:06.440 --> 00:12:12.340 around assert causes problems. But that's not what this is about. It's interesting. I brought it up 00:12:12.340 --> 00:12:16.240 because people should know about this weird, wacky discussion. 00:12:16.240 --> 00:12:17.140 Yeah, that's funny. 00:12:17.140 --> 00:12:20.480 I'm glad that it got thumbed down. And I don't think it's going to happen. 00:12:20.480 --> 00:12:21.960 You're willing to make a statement about it? 00:12:21.960 --> 00:12:22.760 Yes. 00:12:22.760 --> 00:12:29.020 All right. Well, I'm going to make a statement about Flask. I think Flask, you just had David 00:12:29.020 --> 00:12:34.020 Lord on the show, right? That's not out yet, but pretty cool. Yeah. And he's lead maintainer of 00:12:34.020 --> 00:12:41.180 Flask these days. So Flask is, at least at the API level, got to be the most popular web framework 00:12:41.180 --> 00:12:46.840 there is. Because it's slightly more popular than Django if you look at some of the recent surveys. 00:12:46.840 --> 00:12:52.760 But if you look at the other frameworks, many of them are Flask-esque, if you will, right? 00:12:52.760 --> 00:12:52.940 Yeah. 00:12:52.940 --> 00:12:59.300 Things that are like Responder or Cynic or whatever. They have this idea of like sort of the same style, 00:12:59.300 --> 00:13:05.520 right? So there's an article called FastAPI for Flask users. And I'm actually a big fan of 00:13:05.520 --> 00:13:12.340 FastAPI. I'm hoping to have some opportunity to use it soon. Like the APIs that I've worked on, 00:13:12.340 --> 00:13:16.140 they've been around for a while, they predate FastAPI. And I don't really want to go create a whole 00:13:16.140 --> 00:13:21.760 new site just so I could use a different framework. That sounds like maintenance to me. So I haven't 00:13:21.760 --> 00:13:28.180 got a chance to use it in production yet, but FastAPI looks awesome. So there's an article called Fast 00:13:28.180 --> 00:13:33.780 FastAPI for Flask users. And it says, look, you probably know the Flask API. Here is the equivalent 00:13:33.780 --> 00:13:35.660 for FastAPI. 00:13:35.660 --> 00:13:36.220 Okay. 00:13:36.220 --> 00:13:42.880 Yeah. And so there's talk about some of the advantages and they're pretty awesome. So automatic data 00:13:42.880 --> 00:13:49.780 validation in FastAPI doesn't exist in Flask, generally speaking. Automatic documentation generation, 00:13:50.160 --> 00:13:57.200 built in best practices like type annotations and Pydantic scheme schemas and whatnot. 00:13:57.200 --> 00:14:05.780 It comes ships or recommend, I guess, as terms of like a requirement, you have to have a ASGI server. 00:14:05.780 --> 00:14:11.800 So it comes with uvicorn, which is one of the, it's like Gicorn plus uvloop for async stuff. 00:14:11.800 --> 00:14:16.500 And in a lot of ways, it's super similar. So if you want to create a view method instead of 00:14:16.500 --> 00:14:23.160 app.route, you would say app.get. And so FastAPI, would you imagine the name indicates it's 00:14:23.160 --> 00:14:24.180 mostly for building APIs? 00:14:24.180 --> 00:14:25.460 Yes. 00:14:25.460 --> 00:14:30.900 All right. So when you talk about functions and what they're going to do, you say not just 00:14:30.900 --> 00:14:39.800 here's a URL, but here's a URL and an HTTP verb. So app.get forward slash or app.put slash account 00:14:39.800 --> 00:14:44.760 or something like that, which is pretty cool. In the route, you can specify variables. So in Flask, 00:14:44.760 --> 00:14:51.000 you would, you could have a user ID and in the string route, you would say int colon user ID. If 00:14:51.000 --> 00:14:56.820 you want Flask to convert that to an integer, right? It's fine. It works. Okay. But that the rest of the 00:14:56.820 --> 00:15:01.540 tooling doesn't help you know it's an integer just because Flask knows it's going to be an integer, 00:15:01.540 --> 00:15:06.940 right? So in FastAPI, you put the variable up there as well. But then in the function, 00:15:07.420 --> 00:15:13.240 you put the variable name as a type, and then it will actually convert that to an integer using the 00:15:13.240 --> 00:15:22.060 Python language tools or specification rather than the string API thing. So that's handy. If you want a 00:15:22.060 --> 00:15:27.240 query string in Flask, you just have a URL, you can go to request.args, and you can get the value out of the 00:15:27.240 --> 00:15:34.640 query string. In FastAPI, you just put the query string values, or sorry, the keys as arguments, and they just get 00:15:34.640 --> 00:15:41.300 passed in. That's pretty cool. Yeah. If you have a API that takes a JSON post, like, you know, it's 00:15:41.300 --> 00:15:46.720 accepting a JSON document, you can just say it takes a dictionary, and that gets posted in. But you can go 00:15:46.720 --> 00:15:52.860 way, way further, which is awesome. You can define a Pydantic model, which is a class that has types 00:15:52.860 --> 00:15:58.840 and validation on the class, right? Yeah. And then you can say my view method or my API method takes, 00:15:58.840 --> 00:16:03.660 like in the example they have is a sentence that has got like various components, nouns, verbs, and 00:16:03.660 --> 00:16:09.480 whatever. You can say, here's a function, and it has an argument called sentence, and it'll take that JSON 00:16:09.480 --> 00:16:14.860 document, parse it into the Pydantic model, and pass it to you pre-validated. 00:16:14.860 --> 00:16:19.360 That's definitely one of the benefits of FastAPI is this data validation. 00:16:19.360 --> 00:16:24.080 Yeah, this data, this is like built-in data validation, because how much, how many times 00:16:24.080 --> 00:16:29.040 do you spend like effort, oh, I got a string, but I got to convert it to an integer. I got to make 00:16:29.040 --> 00:16:33.740 sure that this value is here. I got to make sure that this one is, you know, like, whatever, like it 00:16:33.740 --> 00:16:39.260 matches some, some set of sub strings or whatever. Just let, let the framework handle it. It also has 00:16:39.260 --> 00:16:43.980 the equivalent of blueprints, which it calls routers, and this automatic validation I talked about. So 00:16:43.980 --> 00:16:51.700 anyway, there's a nice article that says, you know Flask, let's teach you FastAPIs real quick by just doing a 00:16:51.700 --> 00:16:52.920 this equals that. 00:16:52.920 --> 00:17:00.240 Yeah, I love this, because there's a lot of people that have been writing APIs in Flask for a long time. And so it's 00:17:00.240 --> 00:17:06.760 just second nature to them. And having something to say, hey, I want to try FastAPI, but is the learning curves going to be 00:17:06.760 --> 00:17:12.160 a problem? Well, with something like this is decoder ring. And it is set up for, you can just sort of skim 00:17:12.160 --> 00:17:18.280 through and go, well, how do I do URLs? Oh, this is, this is how you do it. And URL variables and 00:17:18.280 --> 00:17:20.520 different things. It's set up really nice. 00:17:20.520 --> 00:17:23.040 Yeah. Yep. Definitely fun. Definitely useful. 00:17:23.040 --> 00:17:24.280 So do you use Twitter? 00:17:24.280 --> 00:17:31.680 I do use Twitter. Sometimes happily. Sometimes I get dragged into stuff. Sometimes I use it in write only 00:17:31.680 --> 00:17:35.560 mode where I want to make a statement, but I don't really want to go read it. But yeah, definitely. 00:17:35.560 --> 00:17:42.140 Yeah, well, I have a, this is probably common, sort of a love-hate relationship with Twitter. I use it a lot 00:17:42.140 --> 00:17:49.260 and like keeping track of other people. But sometimes I don't really like that it's a pain to delete old 00:17:49.260 --> 00:17:55.700 stuff. Because I think of it as a current conversation. I don't really look at what somebody wrote a year 00:17:55.700 --> 00:18:03.380 ago. And I don't really care what I wrote a year ago. So I have used Twitter deletion tools before. 00:18:03.740 --> 00:18:09.400 They seem kind of weird that I have to go out and give my credentials to some other website or 00:18:09.400 --> 00:18:10.740 something though. So, but I know. 00:18:10.740 --> 00:18:13.060 I'm sure that'll be fine. It'll be fine. Don't worry about it. 00:18:13.060 --> 00:18:20.380 Yeah. Anyway, but there's APIs. So you could use the Twitter API, but how? And so I thought it was 00:18:20.380 --> 00:18:27.680 really cool that Chris Albon is somebody that tweets about data science a lot. And he posted a little 00:18:27.680 --> 00:18:35.660 snippet that he said he uses. At least he did it first at one point. But it's a cool little example 00:18:35.660 --> 00:18:44.140 of using a library called Tweepy to interact with Twitter and to delete old tweets for your account. 00:18:44.680 --> 00:18:50.800 So it's just this really short little Python script. But it deletes tweets. There has defaults, but you 00:18:50.800 --> 00:18:55.020 can change those. Obviously, it's just a Python script. So you can change whatever you want. 00:18:55.020 --> 00:19:02.680 But it's set up to delete tweets that are older than 62 days and that have likes less than 100 people 00:19:02.680 --> 00:19:10.100 and that you haven't liked yourself. So the idea being, if you go through some of your old tweets 00:19:10.100 --> 00:19:14.460 and the ones that you're like, oh yeah, that was cool. I want to keep that around. Just like it, 00:19:14.460 --> 00:19:20.280 like your own tweets and then run this script and it'll delete some old stuff. I would definitely 00:19:20.280 --> 00:19:25.140 have to change that 100 count to something else because I don't think I've ever had a tweet liked 00:19:25.140 --> 00:19:25.940 by 100 people. 00:19:25.940 --> 00:19:30.860 That's a big number. You know, Twitter used to show how many tweets you actually had. 00:19:31.220 --> 00:19:35.220 And I don't think it shows it anymore on my profile. At least I don't see it immediately. 00:19:35.220 --> 00:19:43.320 How many tweets I had just followers and following and likes and stuff like that. But yeah, pretty cool. 00:19:43.320 --> 00:19:49.320 It's like keep the highlights, right? Just keep my highlights. I don't need every random thing of, 00:19:49.320 --> 00:19:54.600 oh, I went on, had a hamburger today. People don't need that as a piece of history. 00:19:54.600 --> 00:19:58.460 Yeah. So when, and you don't know what's going to stick and what's going to not. And I was actually 00:19:58.460 --> 00:20:04.800 reading an article recently about, about Twitter, about how that, what that says to you. If somebody 00:20:04.800 --> 00:20:09.800 like, for instance, you're trying to get a job and somebody looks at your Twitter account, having the 00:20:09.800 --> 00:20:17.000 junk in there that like nobody really related to having that automatically called out and just having 00:20:17.000 --> 00:20:20.820 the highlight reel, that's not a bad idea for some of the old stuff. 00:20:20.820 --> 00:20:25.580 Yeah. And you could turn it way down. You could say, look, if there's no likes or no retweets, 00:20:25.580 --> 00:20:30.880 just drop it. Yeah. Yeah. It might even be good for me to like, just to go back a couple of days, 00:20:30.880 --> 00:20:34.440 but if nobody's liked it in a couple of days, maybe just take it away. 00:20:34.440 --> 00:20:35.620 That didn't happen. 00:20:35.620 --> 00:20:37.220 Yeah. That didn't happen. 00:20:37.220 --> 00:20:42.620 So people could end up clinging to their old tweets, but they probably shouldn't. 00:20:42.620 --> 00:20:42.960 Right. 00:20:42.960 --> 00:20:49.980 Yeah. So I want to talk about an article by Itamar Turner-Trowing. Now we spoke about him, 00:20:50.580 --> 00:20:55.580 sort of, not by name, I don't think, but we talked about Phil, the data science memory 00:20:55.580 --> 00:20:56.980 profiler a little while ago. 00:20:56.980 --> 00:20:57.680 Okay. Yeah. Right. 00:20:57.680 --> 00:21:03.080 So he's the guy who wrote that. I actually had him on Talk Python on episode 274 as well, 00:21:03.080 --> 00:21:07.220 talking about that. So that was pretty cool. But he, independent of that, he wrote this article 00:21:07.220 --> 00:21:13.300 that I came across that I liked called Clinging to Memory, How Python Function Calls Can Increase 00:21:13.300 --> 00:21:18.440 Your Memory Usage. And this is part of my research for working on that course that I was talking about, 00:21:18.440 --> 00:21:21.080 that memory, Python memory management stuff. 00:21:21.080 --> 00:21:21.360 Okay. 00:21:21.360 --> 00:21:26.900 So he talks about like, hey, we're going to have this thing. It's going to load up some NumPy data 00:21:26.900 --> 00:21:31.060 and then it's going to pass it to a function. The function is going to make some changes, 00:21:31.060 --> 00:21:35.440 take the return value of that, pass it to another function. It's going to make some more changes. 00:21:35.440 --> 00:21:40.760 So basically three steps and said, look, we'd expect that we've loaded two gigs of memory. 00:21:40.760 --> 00:21:45.860 And yet when you run Phil against it, you end up with three gigs of maximum memory usage, 00:21:45.860 --> 00:21:51.420 which is a little bit weird. And the reason is those initial like intermediate values that you're 00:21:51.420 --> 00:21:57.500 working with on step one and step two, the way Python decides a variable goes out of scope 00:21:57.500 --> 00:22:04.560 is in this case, the function returns, not like it's never used again, but it's just the function 00:22:04.560 --> 00:22:10.020 returns. In which case it's going to hang on to all the intermediate copies all the way to the end. 00:22:10.020 --> 00:22:10.540 Interesting. 00:22:10.540 --> 00:22:16.320 Right? Like some languages, they determine that and they get rid of it. Like in C#, 00:22:16.320 --> 00:22:22.320 the JIT compiler will notice like, okay, a variable is not used after half the way. So we're going to 00:22:22.320 --> 00:22:27.300 make it eligible for GC basically, unless it's in debug mode, then keep it around in case somebody 00:22:27.300 --> 00:22:30.480 sets a break point. They want to see it. So there's a lot, a lot of the tricks that things can do. 00:22:30.480 --> 00:22:34.260 Python doesn't do them. So it's going to stick around for this 00:22:34.260 --> 00:22:39.740 length of the function. So what can you do to make it not stick around as long? Because maybe 00:22:39.740 --> 00:22:43.660 you only have two gigs and you don't want to use three gigs or whatever. Right? So he talks about 00:22:43.660 --> 00:22:48.940 three different solutions. One is to don't hold onto the intermediate variables and just chain into 00:22:48.940 --> 00:22:54.380 one massive function call, like pass the results of one to two to step two, pass the results of step 00:22:54.380 --> 00:22:59.540 two to three. And there's no variables holding on. So it'll be gone. Right? That's an option. 00:22:59.840 --> 00:23:06.560 Another one is to iteratively change the variable, say like data equals load data from first step. 00:23:06.560 --> 00:23:13.340 Data equals step two of processing of data. Data equals step three of processing of data. And that 00:23:13.340 --> 00:23:19.560 way you're dropping the reference count to the first, to the intermediate steps along the way. 00:23:20.320 --> 00:23:24.000 Right? So that's an option. And then there's a third one that's more complicated about creating 00:23:24.000 --> 00:23:29.340 like a sort of a ownership management type of thing that people can check out as well. But I just thought 00:23:29.340 --> 00:23:33.880 it was interesting to think about, you know, when, how long do these things stick around and what 00:23:33.880 --> 00:23:39.580 techniques might you use that are incredibly simple? Like just reuse the variable name, problem solved 00:23:39.580 --> 00:23:41.880 in terms of having too much memory usage. 00:23:42.040 --> 00:23:46.060 Interesting. Yeah. When I look at these, they all look kind of like the same, but having, 00:23:46.060 --> 00:23:50.800 having the answer be that they, they use different amounts of memory is not obvious. 00:23:50.800 --> 00:23:55.600 Right. It's not obvious at all, but it's, you could easily look at this one where you're iteratively 00:23:55.600 --> 00:23:59.180 changing the variable and say, Oh, you shouldn't do that. You should name it more clearly. Cause 00:23:59.180 --> 00:24:04.220 maybe the type is changing along the way and it would be weird, but you could say, yeah, but 00:24:04.220 --> 00:24:10.280 this one works cause it will fit into Ram and the other one won't. So we're willing to accept this 00:24:10.280 --> 00:24:17.160 like slightly imperfect code because it works better. Anyway, there's a lot of interesting trade-offs you 00:24:17.160 --> 00:24:21.480 can make here, but I just, it's, it's only the tip of the iceberg for things like this you could do, 00:24:21.480 --> 00:24:24.740 I think, but it's interesting to just put it on your radar. 00:24:24.740 --> 00:24:30.680 Yeah. Yeah, it is interesting. Yeah. And actually, and like we said, I think that more and more as we 00:24:30.680 --> 00:24:36.920 start using Python for other applications or non desktop kind of things, like when we're 00:24:36.920 --> 00:24:41.500 a non-server things, if we're using it for, there's a couple ends of it. If you're using 00:24:41.500 --> 00:24:47.820 small devices, like in circuit Python or something, you're going to care about this stuff. But also if 00:24:47.820 --> 00:24:53.740 you're using very large data sets, then we care about it again. And, it doesn't matter how much 00:24:53.740 --> 00:24:59.340 memory your computer has having multiple copies of gigabytes of data when you don't have to, 00:24:59.340 --> 00:25:04.960 will slow things down. Yeah, for sure. Or even if it's like an API and you just happen to be doing, 00:25:04.960 --> 00:25:09.940 it's not that extreme, but you happen to be doing a thousand of them at a time. Same story. 00:25:09.940 --> 00:25:15.460 Yeah, exactly. And as we use Python more and more and more applications, we're going to start caring 00:25:15.460 --> 00:25:21.640 about that again. Yeah, absolutely. That's the end of our six. I actually have been just so swamped 00:25:21.640 --> 00:25:25.800 with stuff. I don't have anything extra to talk about. Do you have any extra items? 00:25:25.800 --> 00:25:31.020 I do. And this is just a follow-up email we got from a listener named Adam. Thank you, Adam. 00:25:31.020 --> 00:25:36.800 And you had talked about pickling things. Apparently you're a fan of dill pickles and 00:25:36.800 --> 00:25:42.940 no wait, pickled strings, pickled lists, pickled dictionaries. No, we were talking about a pickling 00:25:42.940 --> 00:25:46.900 and how it didn't make sense most of the time, but there might be some use cases and you're like, 00:25:46.900 --> 00:25:49.500 what might be a use case that we really need? Right? 00:25:49.620 --> 00:25:55.400 So Adam said, Hey, I got a use case that worked for us. I worked on an API that spoke to a third 00:25:55.400 --> 00:26:02.740 party service that was wonky and it was over raw sockets. So you'd have to create these byte arrays 00:26:02.740 --> 00:26:09.120 and send them along. And the thing was also not available 24 seven. It would sometimes crash, 00:26:09.120 --> 00:26:13.140 things like that. So what they would do is they could set a flag in their app and it would pickle 00:26:13.140 --> 00:26:20.260 all the messages that it would, would have sent. And if the site comes back, it can like rehydrate 00:26:20.260 --> 00:26:24.680 those things and then ship them along, or you could pull them up for debugging and look at their 00:26:24.680 --> 00:26:30.140 details and whatnot. So it was like, Oh, we got to save this exactly as we would have sent it. 00:26:30.140 --> 00:26:31.020 Let's just pickle it. 00:26:31.020 --> 00:26:31.600 That's pretty cool. 00:26:31.600 --> 00:26:33.040 Yeah. That seems like a pretty good one. 00:26:33.040 --> 00:26:33.280 Yeah. 00:26:33.280 --> 00:26:36.600 And there was a feature flag they could turn on and off, which was kind of cool. Yeah. 00:26:36.600 --> 00:26:39.440 They could also do that for the messages they got from the service. Pretty cool. 00:26:39.920 --> 00:26:45.080 real quick. Python three, eight, four is out. I've already brew upgraded mine. So that's all good. 00:26:45.080 --> 00:26:49.000 And big news, big news. I can't believe it. I've been selected. 00:26:49.000 --> 00:26:49.480 For what? 00:26:49.480 --> 00:26:54.480 I, if I go to my GitHub repo, I don't have the cool read me thing that you're talking about, 00:26:54.480 --> 00:26:59.060 but under my picture, it says I have a pro account because I had to pay for some stuff, 00:26:59.060 --> 00:27:03.180 but I noticed that I'm an Arctic code vault contributor. 00:27:03.180 --> 00:27:03.740 Wow. 00:27:03.740 --> 00:27:08.720 So remember we spoke about the Arctic code vault where GitHub is taking a bunch of the popular projects 00:27:08.720 --> 00:27:16.520 and then like sticking them over in some vault in Norway or somewhere like that, Greenland, 00:27:16.520 --> 00:27:23.060 to preserve it. And if the code that you've contributed to GitHub was selected, then now 00:27:23.060 --> 00:27:27.080 you get this cool little highlight that's like a snowflake that says Arctic code vault contributor. 00:27:27.080 --> 00:27:32.060 And you can hover over it and it'll say why. So yeah, I've contributed apparently to a couple 00:27:32.060 --> 00:27:33.620 of things and you might be as well. 00:27:33.840 --> 00:27:38.160 Well, yeah, you, the listener might, but I just checked mine and I am too. So that's neat. 00:27:38.160 --> 00:27:38.880 Yeah. Awesome. 00:27:38.880 --> 00:27:39.620 Neato. 00:27:39.620 --> 00:27:40.940 Yeah. So. 00:27:41.540 --> 00:27:42.920 I think we covered that once. 00:27:42.920 --> 00:27:44.160 Yeah. 00:27:44.160 --> 00:27:48.180 Yeah. We definitely covered the code vault, but yeah, I think this, you are a contributor 00:27:48.180 --> 00:27:51.960 thing. The little badge is new and I don't know. It makes me happier than it probably should. 00:27:51.960 --> 00:27:55.880 Yes. It's so cool. 00:27:55.880 --> 00:27:59.080 It's cool. 00:27:59.080 --> 00:27:59.940 Yeah. 00:27:59.940 --> 00:28:01.300 Yeah. It's super neat. 00:28:01.300 --> 00:28:02.720 Testing is cool. 00:28:02.840 --> 00:28:05.360 I love testing and having good code coverage is cool. 00:28:05.360 --> 00:28:05.700 Yeah. 00:28:05.700 --> 00:28:08.920 So I've got a joke for you, a cartoon, if you will. 00:28:08.920 --> 00:28:09.220 Okay. 00:28:09.220 --> 00:28:11.260 From this place called geek and poke. 00:28:11.260 --> 00:28:12.800 They have all sorts of good stuff there. 00:28:12.800 --> 00:28:17.440 And, you can click on the picture and it'll take you to the actual comic. 00:28:17.440 --> 00:28:23.100 So there's a two people, a woman developer and a man developer staring at each other. 00:28:23.100 --> 00:28:25.780 And the woman is the more senior one. 00:28:25.780 --> 00:28:28.260 They're looking at each other and it says QA best practices. 00:28:29.100 --> 00:28:33.600 She's looking, looking at the guy and says, never just remove a failing test. 00:28:33.600 --> 00:28:35.980 The guy stares back blankly for a second. 00:28:35.980 --> 00:28:38.500 Says, only remove the assert statements. 00:28:38.500 --> 00:28:39.360 Yup. 00:28:39.360 --> 00:28:43.780 So how to sustain a decent code coverage. 00:28:43.780 --> 00:28:46.680 yeah, you can fix a test. 00:28:46.680 --> 00:28:49.480 You can make a test, not fail, remove the assert statements. 00:28:49.480 --> 00:28:50.000 It's good. 00:28:50.000 --> 00:28:50.360 Yeah. 00:28:50.360 --> 00:28:50.860 That's funny. 00:28:50.860 --> 00:28:54.880 You said you actually like test for failure though on yours that they potentially could 00:28:54.880 --> 00:28:55.180 fail. 00:28:55.180 --> 00:28:55.500 Yeah. 00:28:55.600 --> 00:29:00.080 Well, I think that's one of the reasons why we do code coverage on all or not code 00:29:00.080 --> 00:29:00.280 coverage. 00:29:00.280 --> 00:29:02.580 We do code coverage, but we also do a review. 00:29:02.580 --> 00:29:03.320 What's the word again? 00:29:03.320 --> 00:29:03.700 Review. 00:29:03.700 --> 00:29:04.300 Yes. 00:29:04.300 --> 00:29:04.920 Code reviews. 00:29:04.920 --> 00:29:05.560 Yes. 00:29:05.560 --> 00:29:11.540 We do code reviews on tests because we have had a test show up before that exercise. 00:29:11.540 --> 00:29:15.380 we, you know, with a test equipment, we do a lot of complicated things. 00:29:15.380 --> 00:29:21.300 You set up everything, run some stuff, and then we've often have people forget to check 00:29:21.300 --> 00:29:22.200 anything at the end. 00:29:22.200 --> 00:29:28.300 And, and the, so it is important to look at the end to see, is there any way this can 00:29:28.300 --> 00:29:29.180 actually fail? 00:29:29.180 --> 00:29:31.640 Is it, or is it just exercising things? 00:29:31.640 --> 00:29:36.760 I mean, actually exercising things isn't a bad thing because you can get a search in 00:29:36.760 --> 00:29:39.380 your code or, except, or an exception. 00:29:39.380 --> 00:29:39.980 Yeah. 00:29:39.980 --> 00:29:43.040 You still test something, but you're not testing very much. 00:29:43.040 --> 00:29:43.520 Yeah. 00:29:43.520 --> 00:29:47.760 You're testing it runs basically. 00:29:47.760 --> 00:29:48.460 Yeah. 00:29:48.460 --> 00:29:49.500 So awesome. 00:29:49.620 --> 00:29:52.160 Well, yeah, just never remove and fill in a test. 00:29:52.160 --> 00:29:53.200 Only the search statements. 00:29:53.200 --> 00:29:54.840 It's terrible. 00:29:54.840 --> 00:29:56.880 We should not give that idea to people. 00:29:56.880 --> 00:29:58.760 No, we should totally delete this joke. 00:29:58.760 --> 00:29:59.360 It didn't happen. 00:29:59.360 --> 00:29:59.980 It wasn't funny. 00:29:59.980 --> 00:30:00.840 Yeah, it wasn't funny. 00:30:00.840 --> 00:30:02.560 Thanks a lot, Michael. 00:30:02.560 --> 00:30:03.600 Yeah, you bet. 00:30:03.600 --> 00:30:04.440 Great to see you as always. 00:30:04.440 --> 00:30:06.400 Thank you for listening to Python Bytes. 00:30:06.400 --> 00:30:08.860 Follow the show on Twitter at Python Bytes. 00:30:08.860 --> 00:30:11.900 That's Python Bytes as in B-Y-T-E-S. 00:30:11.900 --> 00:30:14.780 And get the full show notes at Pythonbytes.fm. 00:30:15.020 --> 00:30:19.860 If you have a news item you want featured, just visit Pythonbytes.fm and send it our way, 00:30:19.860 --> 00:30:21.900 where I was on the lookout for sharing something cool. 00:30:21.900 --> 00:30:26.100 This is Brian Okken, and on behalf of myself and Michael Kennedy, thank you for listening 00:30:26.100 --> 00:30:28.320 and sharing this podcast with your friends and colleagues.