#338: Scripting iOS with Python

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• Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org
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Brian #1: The Basics of Python Packaging in Early 2023

• Jay Qi
• Good description of a minimal-ish pyproject.toml file, which includes a build backend and project metadata.
• That’s all you need for a Python-only project.
• Discussion of how to choose a build backend. Mostly it’s baed on extra features you might want, like hatchling’s include/exclude features for source distributions.
• Some discussion of frontend choices.
• Nice discussion of non-Python-only builds. Specifically, if you need to compile C or C++ extensions, you can use scikit-build-core, or meson-python, or setuptools.
• Related: "Sharing is Caring - Sharing pytest Fixtures" by Brian Okken (PyCascades 2023)
  • My PyCascades 2023 on packaging pytest plugins is up on YouTube

Michael #2: vecs

• via Oli
• Python collection-like interface to storing and searching vectors in postgres.
• Vector search is a key component in building AI chatbots, and semantic document search.
• If you're familiar with the space, it's effectively Pinecone built on free OSS
• It's under the Supabase github org but it's fully open source, and compatible with any pgvector vendor, e.g. RDS, or locally in docker
• If you’re on macOS and need Postgres, Postgres App is a good option.

Brian #3: Introducing Grasshopper - An Open Source Python Library for Load Testing

• Jacob Fiola
• “Grasshopper is a library for automated load testing, written in Python.”
• Open source project from Alteryx,
• On GitHub and PyPI under the name locust-grasshopper
• Built on Locust.
• Adds
  • Tag-based suites for trend analysis and evaluating changes.
  • Custom trends. Useful for actions that span multiple http calls, and you want to see timing trends for the whole action.
  • Checks. Checks validate boolean conditions in the test.
  • Custom tagging for all metrics
  • Send data to time series db & dashboards.
  • Thresholds.
  • Reporting results to other locations.
  • Some reusable base classes that take care of the majority of the boilerplate that tests often contain
• Readme has a very thorough introduction including configuration and samples.

Michael #4: memocast

• by Daniel Engvall
• A small iOS app for e.g. iPhone that allow you to add links heard in podcasts into reminders.
• Good example of how to use Pythonista to build python scripts for iOS
• Pythonista just made an update (2 weeks ago) so that'd use Python 3.10 on the iOS which makes it even more interesting.

Extras

Brian:

• Help test Python 3.12 beta!
• Python Language Summit write-ups available

• PyPI was subpoenaed Michael:

• You Can Ignore This Post

Joke: Careful or you might end up summoning a demon.