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#46: Spicy lecture notes and unicorn console spinners

Published Thu, Oct 5, 2017, recorded Wed, Oct 4, 2017

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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


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