#284: Spicy git for Engineers

Published Wed, May 18, 2022, recorded Mon, May 16, 2022

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Brian #1:distinctipy

“distinctipy is a lightweight python package providing functions to generate colours that are visually distinct from one another.”
Small, focused tool, but really cool.
Say you need to plot a dynamic number of lines.
Why not let distinctipy pick colors for you that will be distinct?
Also can display the color swatches.

Some example palettes here: https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/distinctipy/tree/main/examples

from distinctipy import distinctipy

# number of colours to generate
N = 36

# generate N visually distinct colours
colors = distinctipy.get_colors(N)

# display the colours
distinctipy.color_swatch(colors)

Michael #2: Soda SQL

Soda SQL is a free, open-source command-line tool.
It utilizes user-defined input to prepare SQL queries that run tests on dataset in a data source to find invalid, missing, or unexpected data.
Looks good for data pipelines and other CI/CD work!

Daniel #3: Python in Nature

There’s a review article from Sept 2020 on array programming with NumPy in the research journal Nature.
For reference, in grad school we had a fancy paper on quantum entanglement that got rejected from Nature Communications, a sub-journal to Nature. Nature is hard to get into.
List of authors includes Travis Oliphant who started NumPy. Covers NumPy as the foundation, building up to specialized libraries like QuTiP for quantum computing.
If you search “Python” on their site, many papers come up. Interesting to see their take on publishing software work.

Brian #4: Supercharging GitHub Actions with Job Summaries

From a tweet by Simon Willison
- and an article: GH Actions job summaries
Also, Ned Batchelder is using it for Coverage reports
“You can now output and group custom Markdown content on the Actions run summary page.”
“Custom Markdown content can be used for a variety of creative purposes, such as:
- Aggregating and displaying test results
- Generating reports
- Custom output independent of logs”

Coverage.py example:

- name: "Create summary"
run: |
echo '### Total coverage: ${{ env.total }}%' >> $GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY
echo '[${{ env.url }}](${{ env.url }})' >> $GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY

Michael #5:Language Summit is write up out

via Itamar, by Alex Waygood
- Python without the GIL: A talk by Sam Gross
- Reaching a per-interpreter GIL: A talk by Eric Snow
- The "Faster CPython" project: 3.12 and beyond: A talk by Mark Shannon
- WebAssembly: Python in the browser and beyond: A talk by Christian Heimes
- F-strings in the grammar: A talk by Pablo Galindo Salgado
- Cinder Async Optimisations: A talk by Itamar Ostricher
- The issue and PR backlog: A talk by Irit Katriel
- The path forward for immortal objects: A talk by Eddie Elizondo and Eric Snow
- Lightning talks, featuring short presentations by Carl Meyer, Thomas Wouters, Kevin Modzelewski, Samuel Colvin and Larry Hastings

Daniel #6:AllSpice is Git for EEs

Software engineers have Git/SVN/Mercurial/etc
None of the other engineering disciplines (mechanical, electrical, optical, etc), have it nearly as good. Altium has their Vault and “365,” but there’s nothing with a Git-like UX.
Supports version history, diffs, all the things you expect. Even self-hosting and a Gov Cloud version.
“Bring your workflow to the 21st century, finally.”

Extras

Brian: