#46: Spicy lecture notes and unicorn console spinners

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Brian #1: Scipy lecture notes

• “One document to learn numerics, science, and data with Python”
• Topics
  • Python language tutorial
  • NumPy, Matplotlib, scipy
  • Debugging, optimizing, image manipulation
  • Statistics, scikit-image, scikit learn
  • 3D plotting
• Nice table of contents layout that makes it easy to jump right to whatever you need to learn.
• Just in time learning for scientific Python.

Michael #2: Building a desktop notification tool for Linux using python

• The term desktop notifications refer to a graphical control element that communicates certain events to the user without forcing them to react to this notification immediately.
• Example: we are going to build a notification tool which displays the current rate of bitcoins in INR.
• Based on notify2 package

Brian #3:** pytest-benchmark

• Easily wrap some time constraints around some code to make sure certain parts of your system don’t slow down.
• Good table or graph based preliminary times with statistics
• Can generate golden sets of numbers, then compare against those and fail based on changes in particular stats like min, mean, etc.
• Can have max and min times for benchmarks even without previous training.
• Lots of fun flags and utilities.
• good integration with pytest

Michael #4: Alice in Python projectland

• via Vicki Boykis
• Python project structure and packaging standardization is still not a solved problem
• In the JVM, as long as you have your path structured correctly, build tools will understand it and create a package for you into an executable JAR.
• But, when I started looking for the same standardization in Python, it wasn’t as straightforward. Some questions I had as I worked:
  • Should I be using virtualenvs?
  • Pipenvs?
  • Setuptools?
  • Should I have a setup.cfg?
  • What are wheels, or eggs, for that matter?
  • Does each folder need an __init__.py?
  • What does that file even do?
  • How do I reference modules along the same PYTHONPATH?
• Hat tip to pipreqs
• Conclusion: Python project structure and packaging can be intimidating, but, if you take it step by step, it doesn’t have to be.

Brian #5: How to teach technical concepts with cartoons

• Just draw more pictures.
• You don’t have to be a good artist for drawings to help with retention when you are trying to teach technical concepts.

Michael #6: Halo: Beautiful terminal spinners in Python

• We’ve talk about progressbars: tqdm: https://github.com/tqdm/tqdm
• doesn’t have to be.
• Cool methods like
• spinner.start([text])
• spinner.succeed([text])
• spinner.fail([text])
• Windows File Progress Dialog Author: https://xkcd.com/612/

Extras

• releases: stay current. go upgrade
  • Python 3.6.3 released
  • pytest 3.2.3 released
• New Test & Code episodes
  • 31: I'm so sick of the testing pyramid
  • 32: David Hussman - Agile vs Agility, Dude's Law, and more