#247: Do you dare to press "."?

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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