#282: Don't Embarrass Me in Front of The Wizards

Published Tue, May 3, 2022, recorded Tue, May 3, 2022

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Brian #1: pyscript

Python in the browser, from Anaconda. repo here
Announced at PyConUS
“During a keynote speech at PyCon US 2022, Anaconda’s CEO Peter Wang unveiled quite a surprising project — PyScript. It is a JavaScript framework that allows users to create Python applications in the browser using a mix of Python and standard HTML. The project’s ultimate goal is to allow a much wider audience (for example, front-end developers) to benefit from the power of Python and its various libraries (statistical, ML/DL, etc.).” from a nice article on it, PyScript — unleash the power of Python in your browser
PyScript is built on Pyodide, which is a port of CPython based on WebAssembly.
Demos are cool.
Note included in README: “This is an extremely experimental project, so expect things to break!”

Michael #2: Memray from Bloomberg

Memray is a memory profiler for Python.
It can track memory allocations in
- Python code
- native extension modules
- the Python interpreter itself
Works both via CLI and focused app calls
Memray can help with the following problems:
- Analyze allocations in applications to help discover the cause of high memory usage.
- Find memory leaks.
- Find hotspots in code which cause a lot of allocations.
Notable features:
- 🕵️‍♀️ Traces every function call so it can accurately represent the call stack, unlike sampling profilers.
- ℭ Also handles native calls in C/C++ libraries so the entire call stack is present in the results.
- 🏎 Blazing fast! Profiling causes minimal slowdown in the application. Tracking native code is somewhat slower, but this can be enabled or disabled on demand.
- 📈 It can generate various reports about the collected memory usage data, like flame graphs.
- 🧵 Works with Python threads.
- 👽🧵 Works with native-threads (e.g. C++ threads in native extensions)
Has a live view in the terminal.
Linux only

Brian #3: pytest-parallel

I’ve often sped up tests that can be run in parallel by using -n from pytest-xdist.
I was recommending this to someone on Twitter, and Bruno Oliviera suggested a couple of alternatives. One was pytest-parallel, so I gave it a try.
pytest-xdist runs using multiprocessing
pytest-parallel uses both multiprocessing and multithreading.
This is especially useful for test suites containing threadsafe tests. That is, mostly, pure software tests.
Lots of unit tests are like this. System tests are often not.
Use --workers flag for multiple processors, --workers auto works great.
Use --tests-per-worker for multi-threading. --tesst-per-worker auto let’s it pick.
Very cool alternative to xdist.

Michael #4: Pooch: A friend for data files

via via Matthew Fieckert
Just want to download a file without messing with requests and urllib?
Who is it for? Scientists/researchers/developers looking to simply download a file.
Pooch makes it easy to download a file (one function call). On top of that, it also comes with some bonus features:
- Download and cache your data files locally (so it’s only downloaded once).
- Make sure everyone running the code has the same version of the data files by verifying cryptographic hashes.
- Multiple download protocols HTTP/FTP/SFTP and basic authentication.
- Download from Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) issued by repositories like figshare and Zenodo.
- Built-in utilities to unzip/decompress files upon download
file_path = pooch.retrieve(url)

Extras

Michael:

Joke:

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