Transcript #298: "Unstoppable" Python

00:00 Hello and welcome to Python Bytes, where we deliver Python news and headlines directly to

00:04 your earbuds. This is episode 298, just too short of 300 coming in fast, recorded August 23rd,

00:12 2022. I'm Michael Kennedy. And I'm Brian Okken. Wow, close to 300. That's amazing.

00:17 Yeah. Yeah. That's, what is that, coming up on six years here pretty soon? That's insane.

00:23 That's amazing. Well, 52 times. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. So pretty awesome.

00:29 And got some fun folks we see in the audience who are out here frequently. Will McGugan is here.

00:35 Will is going to be a guest on the next episode. So if you want to hear from Will, be sure to

00:39 at least listen to the next episode if you don't come to the live one.

00:42 Yeah. Also, before we, yeah, it'd be fantastic. Also, before we get going on the topics,

00:47 I just want to say thank you to Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub for sponsoring this and so

00:52 many of the episodes this year. Super great to have their support. Very cool. It's uncommon, Brian, to

00:58 have such great supporters, wouldn't you say? It is uncommon. Nice segue. I like it. So I'd like to

01:06 talk about uncommon uses of Python in commonly used libraries. Actually, this is just a pretty cool

01:12 article. It's by Eugene Yan. And he goes through a handful of things. I'm just going to pull out one,

01:18 but it goes through using super classes and a whole bunch of things. The idea was to learn how to build

01:24 more maintainable and usable Python libraries. He's been reading some of the most widely used Python packages

01:29 and learning some things along the way, which is an awesome way to learn is to read other code.

01:35 I agree. I think it's fantastic.

01:37 Yeah. So he's good. He goes through super and a handful of other things. When do you use a mix in?

01:43 I don't know if I'd use that. Anyway, the thing I want to pull out is using relative imports all the

01:50 time. And this is something I picked up not too long ago, but it really isn't talked about much.

01:56 So the idea is that if you do an import, like import something or from some library import,

02:05 if you don't, if you put a dot in front of at the beginning is the first dot, then it looks in your,

02:11 in your path, your current search, the directory of the, the, the file that it's in. So in the example,

02:18 he has a base by a base dot pie from scikit learn and it, it uses, it says from dot utils dot validation

02:28 import something. And, and these are, because it says dot utils, it'll look for utils in the

02:35 current directory and not somewhere else because there's probably a utils like somewhere else also,

02:40 looking for the search path. so this is neat. You can do multiple, you can move, do multiple

02:45 dots also. I don't ever, I don't think I ever do that. I do the current directory and down

02:50 or the current project and down. So, this is, we'll get you up, up one and then down a different

02:56 path or something like that, right? It will. So if you do dot dot something and you don't do slashes,

03:00 you don't, it's not a direct, a pat, it's kind of like a path, but it's not, like dot is the

03:06 current directory. Dot dot is like one up and you can do three, but wow. I think there's something

03:12 wrong with your project if you're doing that. but, maybe not, maybe not. There's,

03:17 a couple of links in there for further reading. There's a Guido's decision on relative imports,

03:22 which is part of the, part of the, the PEP 328 writeup. And actually the, this PEP 328 writeup

03:29 is this little bit about Guido's decision where he's talked about the leading dot or leading two dots.

03:36 there's a really good, easy way to get a handle on how to use this. And, I, I use this a lot

03:42 now and try to put it in, projects, you know, projects at work and project personal projects

03:47 as well. So, the dot thing is cool and yeah, it doesn't talk about much. So I like it.

03:51 Yeah. It's fantastic. It only works in packages and not just a pile of module files, right?

03:58 Oh yeah. Yeah. So you have to have Dunder and net files within the directory. And that's,

04:03 I guess one of the things that I wish we had another name for, because in Python,

04:07 we talk about a package or a sub package. These are, this could be just a directory with Python

04:14 files in it that has Dunder in it and the, and that, that makes it a package in Python,

04:20 but we also definitely, yeah. Yeah. We also talk about the package repository and PyPI. It's the Python

04:26 package index. Those are not just directories with Dunder and nets. They're packaged up with a whole

04:32 bunch of other meditated and stuff like that. So there's two things that we call packages, but

04:36 yeah, they have to have Dunder and nets in them for this to work. So anyway.

04:40 Yeah. Brent, Brandon on the audience asked, so are we arguing for relative imports?

04:44 I, for the current, for the current directory, I am, I think that, within a project, if you're,

04:51 like internal stuff, you're not, I mean, if it's a, if it's part of the external API of the project,

04:57 I, I will always go through the external API to get at something, but there's a whole,

05:02 there's a lot of times where you're just developing a bunch of Python modules together. and they're

05:09 internally, they're going to talk to other sub components and that isn't necessarily part of

05:14 the external API. And this is the best way to get at it. So yeah. Yeah. All right. Sounds good.

05:19 Next up, let's go to the sky plane. So this one comes to us, from, let me make sure I give the

05:27 proper credit. This one comes to us from RMRF, the Sudur. Thank you for sending this in. Really

05:34 appreciate it. The project is called sky plane, 114 times faster cloud transfers. At first I was like,

05:41 what does that mean exactly? Like what's the baseline for this? I'll say. So, probably what

05:47 they're basing that on in a minute. This is interesting for two reasons. It's interesting

05:52 because it's a tool that I think many Python developers would find useful, especially those

05:59 folks doing a lot of work in the cloud. It is also useful or interesting because it is itself a Python

06:05 project. Okay. So if you want to contribute to it or understand it or extend it or work it and do other

06:12 things, that's totally possible. It's worked on by a pretty big group of folks. The idea is

06:17 it gives you blazing fast bulk transfers, file transfers between any cloud, any, it needs a

06:24 little like star or an asterisk by it that says any means any of the big three cloud providers. Okay.

06:31 Whereas, you know, this is like AWS, it's Azure and it's Google, GCP. Okay. So those three,

06:40 however, what I'm not clear on is whether you can point it at the S3 compatible places like

06:47 Linode and digital ocean also have cloud storage that are S3 like, but I'm pretty sure it won't work

06:55 based on the way I'm about to tell you what's going to happen next. Okay. Okay. So if you go over,

06:59 there's an architecture section. And if you look in there, they've got this sky retreat 2022,

07:04 where Paris Jane introduces sky plane. And to the folks, there's about a 15 minute video,

07:10 but you really got to watch just two minutes of it to get the Zen. So they laid on a scenario. This is,

07:16 I believe in their world, they're doing data science. And so what they need is they need the

07:21 data very near to them. And there's a woman in the middle East, using some AWS, S3 and point

07:28 there. And she has 30, 80 gigs of data. And Paris is on the East coast of the U S and wants closer

07:36 access to that data for their other work that they're doing. So there's a way with the AWS CLI

07:42 to just copy from Bahrain or wherever it is over to Virginia. And they run that. And it says the,

07:48 after running for a while, it says estimated time to completion one hour, right? I don't know. Is that

07:53 good or bad? Like it's, it's a lot of data, right? 80 gigs halfway around the world. It's miraculous that

07:59 this is possible, but is that good or not? So then they say, well, let's try it with sky plane.

08:03 They were getting like 20 megabit. I think they run it with sky plane. They're getting

08:07 30 gigabit transfers from the middle East. And it took 30 seconds instead of an hour.

08:13 That's quite a bit faster.

08:14 That is pretty awesome.

08:16 Yeah, exactly. And so instead of going across the open internet, it's, it was transferring basically

08:23 over like dedicated fiber for just AWS data center connects or something like that. Right. But what

08:28 it does is it will spin up a virtual machine or many virtual machines in the different data centers.

08:35 So I think what happens here, not a hundred percent sure, but I think it fired up some VMs in

08:41 Virginia, copied it from S3 in Bahrain directly through the internal data system data center transfer,

08:50 and then pushed it into like nearly local S3 storage. And you can do the same thing from like AWS

08:56 East coast to Azure West coast, right? You would fire up a VM. I think in that scenario,

09:02 in both of the data centers and those VMs would talk directly over the high speed data center

09:06 network instead of like the S3 one, we'll copy it down to your machine and then you push it back

09:10 out of your machine to the new destination. Yeah.

09:13 So it basically manages data center to data center traffic.

09:16 That's pretty cool. Makes sense.

09:18 It's pretty cool. It has, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like all the CLI, it's like one CLI command

09:23 and that's creating the various virtual machines, provisioning them, setting up the encryption,

09:28 doing all the stuff, and then it shuts back down.

09:31 So, and as far as security goes, what you do is you basically install the AWS CLI or the,

09:37 the Azure CLI, and you just log into those local CIs and CLIs, and it uses those behind the scenes

09:44 to do the setup of like create the VM and then SSH over to it, do the work or something like that.

09:49 So it has a lot of integrity checking. So it does like checksums and verifies the files are there.

09:56 The file sizes are the same and all that kind of stuff. It does end-to-end encryption sort of.

10:02 So the VM, as it gets it out of cloud storage, encrypts it and then sends it over to the network.

10:07 And then when it has to decrypt it to drop it back into the other place, but it also on top of that goes over TLS.

10:13 However, some people might be storing encrypted data in the cloud because they don't trust that it couldn't,

10:19 you know, it's not going to get looked at.

10:20 So even the stuff in S3 or wherever Azure Blob Storage could be encrypted, in which case you can turn all this off

10:27 and it'll go a lot faster because it's already encrypted end-to-end.

10:30 It'll set up like virtual private networks with, if it's within a data center.

10:34 And there's a bunch of cool things that are kind of nice that you don't have to worry about.

10:38 Anyway, this is the sky plane.

10:40 So if you're transferring data between different clouds or even different data centers within a single cloud,

10:46 it looks like it'll do a lot of nice work for you.

10:47 Now, it's believable that it's faster.

10:50 I'm curious if it's cheaper also.

10:53 Any comment?

10:54 Oh, that's a really good point, actually.

10:56 If you go and say AWS to Azure or vice versa, I think it's the same price.

11:01 But if you're going Azure to Azure, it probably is cheaper because I don't know what they really charge you for the S3 CLI

11:08 if you say do a transfer.

11:10 You're still like flowing through.

11:11 But, you know, the within data center transfer is cheaper than outside.

11:15 Taking it out.

11:16 Out of the, yeah, exactly.

11:17 Oh, cool.

11:18 So maybe, I don't know.

11:20 They didn't talk about it, but possibly.

11:22 Yeah.

11:22 Wow, that's awesome.

11:23 Anyway, that's what I got for you.

11:24 Yeah, sky plane.

11:25 Nice.

11:25 You know what else is awesome?

11:27 Speaking of Azure.

11:28 Microsoft for startups, yeah.

11:30 Yeah, absolutely.

11:31 They are, like I said, big supporters of the show, big fans of the show.

11:35 And this episode, like many of them, is brought to you by Microsoft for startups,

11:39 Founders Hub.

11:40 If you have a startup and you intend to have some kind of cloud computing resources,

11:46 or you've dreamed of going to something like a Y Combinator type of accelerator,

11:51 this is a really great way to get some of the benefits of that.

11:55 So with Microsoft for startup, Founders Hub, they give you a bunch of resources for running

12:02 your startup in the cloud in Azure, but also many other cloud resources, like a bunch of

12:08 GitHub credits for automation and actions, as well as access to places like OpenAI.

12:14 But another thing I think is really important is having access to mentors and people who have

12:19 been there and have the right connections.

12:22 Right?

12:22 Like, I think honestly, that might be the hardest thing about doing a startup because as developers,

12:27 we can build it.

12:28 Often we can build it.

12:29 But then it's, well, how do you build the right thing?

12:32 How do you, you know, in terms of customer fit, how do you get access to the right networks?

12:37 So you can find people for investing or get better, maybe coaching for like sales and marketing.

12:45 All those things are incredibly hard, especially if your, your expertise is in software.

12:49 So through Microsoft for startup, Founders Hub, you get access to their entire mentorship network,

12:54 access a pool of hundreds of mentors across a bunch of disciplines like idea validation,

12:58 fundraising, management, coaching, sales and marketing, and a bunch of technical areas as well.

13:04 So you'll be able to book a one-on-one meetings with these mentors, many of whom are founders

13:09 themselves.

13:09 You'll make your idea a reality today with the critical support you'll get from Microsoft for

13:14 startups, Founders Hub.

13:14 To join the program, there are very few restrictions.

13:17 You don't have to be third-party validated.

13:20 You don't have to necessarily have funding.

13:22 You just visit pythonbytes.fm/foundershub 2022.

13:25 Link in your show notes.

13:27 You apply for free.

13:28 You get accepted.

13:28 You get all these benefits.

13:30 And it seems like a great program.

13:32 Yeah.

13:32 I'm excited to see what comes out of this.

13:34 Yeah, absolutely.

13:35 All right.

13:36 What's, what do you got for us here, Brian?

13:38 Well, it wouldn't be complete if we didn't talk about Will McGoogan a little bit.

13:47 Absolutely.

13:49 Hey, Will.

13:50 So there's an article that is from the textualize.io blog.

13:56 And it's seven things I've learned about building a modern TUI framework.

14:01 And this is pretty interesting because I think that, I mean, Will, more than anybody else has

14:06 went, has really thought about like, okay, I want to, I want to have something be really

14:11 responsive and really good to work with on the command line, which is, it's been there for

14:15 a long time.

14:16 We just haven't developed it much.

14:17 So there's a whole bunch of cool learnings that he talks about.

14:21 Like terminals are fast and, and they're faster than we realize, but there's a whole bunch of

14:26 like things that you can, that are different about terminals and other places like flicker

14:31 and tearing and stuff and how to deal with that.

14:34 There's a whole bunch of learnings in here.

14:35 The thing that like popped out as something that everybody can use that I wanted to talk

14:41 about was a little blip that he talked about that is dicta views are amazing.

14:46 So the, the, the thing he talks about here is that so maybe, I don't know if everybody knows

14:53 the term dicta views or views into a dictionary, but things like if you ask for, if you have a

14:59 dictionary and you ask for the keys or you ask for items, that is a view.

15:03 It's called a view into, into a dictionary and they are super fast.

15:07 And one of the things he points out is that they act like they act like sets also.

15:14 And you can use the, you can use set operators.

15:17 Like here's the little carrot symbol and was, I can't remember.

15:20 I'll have to look it up.

15:21 The carrot symbol is a symmetric difference.

15:24 Basically what's, what's just give me a set of the stuff that's different about the two

15:28 different sets or two dictionaries.

15:30 And the, you can do this in code, but he's doing it using, using views because those,

15:37 those operators are happening with, with C code.

15:41 Python has optimized those.

15:43 So they, they work super fast and they're way faster than anything you could write in

15:48 Python.

15:49 So this just taking the items of two dictionaries and using a set operations on them.

15:55 And then you can go back to dictionaries if you want, you don't have to use that, but

15:59 super cool.

16:00 I, I hadn't had, I didn't know that about dictionaries and views.

16:04 So yeah, nice.

16:05 Obviously use dot items and dot keys all the time.

16:09 Didn't know they had this name and I didn't know you could do set operations on them.

16:14 Quite cool.

16:14 Right.

16:15 Yeah.

16:15 Super neat.

16:17 Then he, he, he goes, covers a whole bunch of other stuff like LRU caching and the, how

16:22 fast that is.

16:23 One of the things that I thought was great where he talks about Unicode in art, Unicode art in

16:30 doc strings of just like a picture says, says, you know, a picture gives you a thousand words

16:35 or whatever.

16:36 But, he, he, he gives an example here for talking about splitting, the screen

16:42 into sub regions.

16:43 And yeah, there's no way to, I mean, describing it in text is good, but this little picture

16:49 goes, you can just mentally go, Oh yeah, I get it.

16:51 If you give it a cut X and a cut Y, you end up with four regions, obviously, but it isn't

16:56 obvious just looking at the API.

16:58 but with, with a little picture, you're like, Oh yeah, that's cool.

17:02 So he's got a little, for people listening, he's got a picture showing, just a spatially

17:07 what, what it would look like using ASCII characters.

17:10 So neat.

17:11 Yeah.

17:11 I love it.

17:12 I love when people put art like that in there.

17:15 I'm looking for where it is.

17:17 I'd have to, I guess I'm going to have to look this up, but in CPython, there's actually

17:22 this huge diagram in the malloc in the, the minute of the memory management section.

17:28 that shows you it's like this, it shows you all the different, data structures

17:33 and concepts that are used to manage memory, like the, the pools, the blocks and the arenas

17:39 and all that stuff in like a huge diagram in code comments.

17:43 It's perfect.

17:43 Nice.

17:44 And he gives a, shout out to just one, tool that's around.

17:48 He must use it called Monodraw.

17:50 It's a Mac tool, but so there are drawing tools that you can use to generate, ASCII

17:55 art.

17:55 So, or our Unicode art, as it were.

17:58 Yeah.

17:58 Yeah.

17:59 Yeah.

17:59 Nice.

18:00 Oh, maybe, maybe I'll, I'll be able to find it here.

18:02 Let's see.

18:03 I'd love to share it with everyone if I can find it.

18:06 Oh yes.

18:06 Here we go.

18:07 I'll put the link in here.

18:09 You ready for this, Brian?

18:09 Yeah.

18:10 You can show it.

18:11 Yeah.

18:11 Yeah.

18:11 I just got to, I had to find it.

18:13 Hold on.

18:13 There we go.

18:13 Look at this.

18:14 Oh yeah.

18:15 Here's the, here's the object allocator in Python.

18:18 And it shows here's the object specific ones, the ant dick.

18:21 And then there's like object specific.

18:23 And then you can see these tiers.

18:24 Then there's the object, the Python object allocator, the raw memory.

18:26 And it even goes down to like, here's the OS and the physical memory.

18:30 And then, I think maybe further down, we might be able to find like some of the stuff

18:34 about arenas or whatever, but isn't that nuts?

18:35 Yeah.

18:36 But also it's awesome because you, I mean, you can visually, now you can read the text

18:40 and it makes more sense instead of just having.

18:42 It has a short description and then a proper picture of here's what's happening.

18:47 Yeah.

18:47 Yeah.

18:47 Absolutely.

18:48 Very good.

18:49 Cool.

18:49 So yeah, yeah.

18:50 That's a great, great example and great recommendation.

18:52 Sometimes a little bit of ASCII art like this, it really does help.

18:57 It goes a long ways.

18:58 Yeah.

18:58 Yeah.

18:58 It sure does.

18:59 A whole bunch of other great tips in Will's article.

19:02 So, encourage people to check it out.

19:04 Right on.

19:05 Another thing that goes a long way is Python.

19:07 There's an InfoWorld article that refers to Python as unstoppable.

19:12 The title is Python popularity is still soaring, but the subtitle is unstoppable Python.

19:18 Once again, ranked number one in the August updates for both the TOB and PYPL indexes.

19:24 I don't know if that's PYPL or I don't know how to say this, but, another secondary programming

19:30 language index.

19:31 And, yeah.

19:32 How cool is that?

19:33 Very cool.

19:33 Also a really nice rocket image.

19:35 I was going to say, this is, it, it, it characterizes the other programming languages,

19:40 hot air pollutants in Python as a rocket.

19:42 Yeah.

19:43 So, yeah.

19:44 some interesting things to take away from here.

19:47 Let's see that, Python first took the top spot just, last October.

19:54 So that was actually big news, right?

19:55 Yeah.

19:56 Now it, that makes it the only language besides C and Java to ever hold the number one position

20:02 from the TOB index.

20:03 And not only is it still number one, but it's actually gained a couple of percentage points

20:07 on the current rankings, year over year.

20:10 So, for example, come down here, you can see it's actually up, you know, 3.56%.

20:16 I think that's year over.

20:17 Yeah.

20:18 That's year over year.

20:18 Nice.

20:19 which, which is pretty awesome.

20:21 also, but C and Java have gained also.

20:24 So other, I guess we're whittling down, taking away from.

20:28 I think it's taking from the lower languages down here, right?

20:31 Like objective C or here we go.

20:33 What a surprise you that Pearl and, Fortran have lost.

20:36 by the way, also the, it has the ratings.

20:40 I don't know if that's quite what you would consider market share, but Python is at 15%, you

20:44 know, C is at 14%.

20:46 things that, sometimes get compared like R is less than 1%.

20:50 Ruby is less than 1%.

20:52 Those are, pretty interesting, comparisons.

20:55 Yeah.

20:55 They're also not really general purpose languages.

20:58 I mean, R isn't at least.

21:00 So yeah, yeah, yeah, that's for sure.

21:02 Let's see.

21:02 Yeah.

21:03 The, the TOB commentary accompanying the index was Python seems to be unstoppable.

21:07 It's hard to find a field of programming in which Python is not used extensively, extensively

21:12 nowadays, except for safety critical embedded systems.

21:15 So that's, that's pretty cool.

21:17 let's see.

21:18 Rust is now number 22, closing in on the top 20 and carbon.

21:22 Have you been tracking carbon?

21:23 No.

21:24 This is, I believe it's Google who is behind carbon.

21:27 yeah.

21:28 It's a language that's intended to be, to supplant C++, but be very C++ like.

21:34 An experimental successor to C++ strives for the C++ performance and compatibility while

21:39 avoiding its technical debt and extreme difficulty to improve.

21:43 Ouch.

21:47 Uh.

21:48 Yeah.

21:48 Yeah.

21:49 Not saying extreme difficulty to use, but like, it's just, it's where it is.

21:53 You know what I mean?

21:53 Yeah.

21:54 Yeah.

21:54 It's like a language on top of a language on top of 50 years.

21:59 Anyway.

21:59 but so carbon has entered the index at a number, a position 192.

22:06 They've got some work to do.

22:07 Yeah.

22:07 But it's still interesting.

22:08 Something to watch.

22:09 Yeah.

22:09 And you look at the other programming index.

22:12 Again, no idea how to say it.

22:14 P Y P L the popularity of programming language is what the acronym stands for.

22:19 It's an index creating, it's created by analyzing how often tutorials are, language

22:25 tutorials are searched on Google.

22:26 So that's one metric.

22:28 Python is like massively ahead of second place, Java, third place JavaScript.

22:33 And then it drops quick, quick, quick down from there.

22:36 Like for example, Ruby, 1% people are interested in tutorials, how to do it versus almost 30% for

22:42 Python.

22:42 Hmm.

22:43 Yeah.

22:43 Anyway, that's just another, another, factor that was part of this info world

22:48 article.

22:49 So, you know, I, on one of the live streams, not too long ago, somebody said, Oh, I heard

22:53 that there's not a whole lot of jobs or interest in Python.

22:56 Maybe what else should I learn?

22:57 But you know what?

22:57 I'm not so sure you're getting great advice if, if that's, where, what you're thinking.

23:03 Okay.

23:03 I mean, popular is popular is not everything, but it's an important part of like, can I have

23:08 a job?

23:08 Can I find developers doing this?

23:09 Will there be a library for my thing X?

23:11 I want to talk to you with it.

23:12 And so on.

23:13 I, I love Python obviously.

23:15 but I, it's hard to answer those like for a job, which languages should I, whether languages

23:22 should I learn?

23:23 I, I don't want to answer that.

23:25 depends on what you're trying to get into.

23:27 but, just as a roundabout developer, I think it is important to learn more than one

23:33 language.

23:33 I, I don't think that it would, I wouldn't want somebody to just stop with Python and say,

23:37 Oh, I'm good.

23:37 No, no, no.

23:38 Yeah.

23:38 Yeah.

23:39 Well, and you also, if you want to build mobile apps, you might want to look elsewhere.

23:42 I will.

23:43 Except I might have a, I might have something in an extra section for you on that.

23:47 Okay.

23:47 Cool.

23:48 But did I, did I switch the order?

23:49 Did I jump in front of you?

23:51 I think I may have.

23:52 I don't think so.

23:52 You've got one more thing to go.

23:53 No.

23:54 Tell us about some magic.

23:55 Oh, no, this is part of one of my extras.

23:57 So.

23:58 Oh, this is when you're extras.

23:59 Okay.

23:59 Well, let's, that's it then.

24:00 Yeah.

24:01 Okay.

24:01 Jump into your extras.

24:01 Then let's jump into your extras.

24:02 All right.

24:02 Oh.

24:03 I didn't want to cover this.

24:04 Really quick, really quick comment just from, I think this is kind of amusing from SE Steve

24:08 in the audience.

24:08 Extreme difficulty to use is just a side benefit of C++.

24:12 Yeah.

24:13 I mean, yeah.

24:14 Yeah.

24:15 Think about all the jobs people get to keep without much effort over time.

24:19 Like.

24:20 Exactly.

24:20 I mean, if there was a lot of competition for C++ developers, I don't know what I would

24:28 I would do.

24:28 I'm, I'm enjoying the competition.

24:30 Yeah.

24:31 so.

24:32 Exactly.

24:33 I just ran across this, the magic of my matplotlib style sheets, article, and

24:38 I just wanted to bring it up for people that might, might want to, to try it out.

24:42 So I've, I've used matplotlib, matplotlib style sheets before, and they're just

24:48 great.

24:49 So you could just say like, so let's say you've got a, a current plot and by default,

24:54 it's just, it's not bad.

24:55 It just, it, it is what it is.

24:57 and then if you just drop in one line of code, use styles plot style use, and then

25:04 you drop a style sheet name, there's a whole bunch of built-in ones you can use.

25:07 It just looks nicer.

25:08 It's got like, I love it.

25:10 It's so unsettled, but it looks so much better.

25:12 Yeah.

25:12 but I didn't know that it's pretty easy to write your own.

25:16 I didn't, I mean, I figured maybe style sheets were complicated.

25:19 So the rest of this article just talks about, really how to, how to write your own

25:25 style sheet.

25:25 So, if anybody's interested in, in customizing the style sheet for their, for their group

25:31 or something, might be a good thing to just have, you know, be able to roll your own

25:36 style sheet.

25:36 So here you go.

25:37 Yeah.

25:37 Fantastic.

25:38 one of the things, that the 10 year old in me enjoyed that, the, if you want the lines to end in a square instead of a rounded line, you give it a solid cap style

25:50 of, but, it makes it chop off the end.

25:55 So that's funny.

25:56 That is funny.

25:58 all right.

26:00 Yeah.

26:01 This is not, this is not one of my extras, but I might as well add it as a follow on here

26:05 is, XKCD plots have landed.

26:08 Yeah.

26:09 And Matt plot live, right?

26:10 Like this, I'm sure this is probably accomplished the same way, but look at that.

26:15 Isn't this, aren't these fantastic?

26:16 I use these at work because they're just, it, especially, I, I especially like it.

26:22 If, if I've just made up, like made up the data or my sample size is small, I don't want

26:28 anybody to take it as like a research project.

26:31 It's a, it's just, I'm, I'm showing something in informally.

26:35 So.

26:35 Right.

26:36 Right.

26:36 sometimes there's a whole ton of value to present it.

26:40 Not quite polished.

26:41 Yeah.

26:41 There's an app I use called, let's see, what does it not want to make a new vault

26:46 comic?

26:46 Oh, it doesn't let me type in.

26:48 Oh, well, it's called balsamic and it, it will generate wireframes of like web browsers

26:54 and buttons or to do mobile apps or whatever.

26:57 And it intentionally has this shape.

26:59 Like it looks very XKCD like, like, okay, don't, this is not the answer.

27:03 This is not the final thing.

27:04 It's just to give you an idea of like, here's the layout and so on.

27:07 Yeah.

27:07 And it's, I think it's balsamic with a Q, if people are looking for it.

27:11 Yes.

27:11 It's, it's funky, small, it's spelled funky.

27:13 Yeah.

27:13 I think what happened is the, the, my keyboard's battery died.

27:16 So anyway, that's why I can't type anymore.

27:18 I'm not on a laptop.

27:19 So when the battery dies, that's it, but that's fine.

27:22 Cause I already got all the stuff I want to talk about.

27:23 Anyway.

27:24 we talked about, I wouldn't try to learn Python to write mobile apps and I still stand

27:29 by that.

27:29 But we discussed way back on episode, which one was it on 295 a couple of weeks ago, we

27:36 talked about flit and flit lets you write flutter apps in Python.

27:40 It is super neat.

27:42 Yeah.

27:43 Where, just look at an example or whatever, pull up the tutorial, but like the code that

27:48 you write.

27:49 I mean, if you ever done flutter, it feels very much like that.

27:53 But what you write is Python and it's glorious.

27:56 Anyway, the, the extra that I want to talk about is I had, theodore Fitzner, who is

28:02 the creator of flit on talk Python last week.

28:05 And if people want to hear what he had to say about it in our conversation, they should check

28:09 that out.

28:10 Nice.

28:10 Yeah.

28:11 All right.

28:11 That's it for my extras.

28:12 I believe it's you, you ready for a joke?

28:15 I am.

28:16 But I just, I want to like pause and just say, well, I think that's one of the cool things

28:20 about how we've done, Python bytes and talk Python and testing code of, if

28:27 we do these small segments within Python bytes, but if we can, if we want to just also do like

28:33 a deep dive, we've got the other podcasts to do a deep dive into something.

28:36 It's good.

28:37 So absolutely.

28:38 It's super nice and kind of on purpose, right?

28:40 We kind of designed this one so we could just quick talk about to fun stuff.

28:44 And then the other one, if you really want to spend an hour on something like that's what

28:47 it's for.

28:47 Yeah.

28:47 So hopefully people listen to both or all three, I rather three.

28:51 Yeah, exactly.

28:52 Yeah.

28:53 Yeah.

28:53 Yeah.

28:53 Yeah.

28:53 All right.

28:54 Now something funny.

28:55 Now, you know, we talked about the cloud stuff and you, you specifically ask about price.

29:00 So here's the joke.

29:01 This one has two pictures.

29:03 One, somebody who is new to AWS and somebody who has experienced at AWS.

29:09 The new person, it shows this like cartoon character walking one step steps on a rake.

29:15 The rake wax up and smashes them in the faces.

29:17 New to AWS.

29:18 Accidental $50,252 monthly bill.

29:22 The experienced one with the rake is like, you know, sometimes skateboarders will jump up

29:26 and they'll like grind down like a stair railing.

29:29 It'll do something amazing.

29:31 Well, it's a kickflip they're showing.

29:32 Yeah.

29:33 Yeah.

29:33 That's right.

29:33 Off the stairs.

29:34 The kickflip off the stairs.

29:35 And like that often goes good, but not always.

29:37 So here they're doing like an amazing kickflip with the rake.

29:40 Off the rake.

29:41 And then they land at the bottom, smacks them in the faces.

29:45 Accidental $50,252 bill.

29:49 Yeah.

29:50 Yeah.

29:51 And then down here, there's a funny comment from somebody who, how they forgot to turn

29:56 off something.

29:57 So they just, but luckily their card expired.

29:59 So they just let their EC2 account expire.

30:02 And, you know, Amazon was talking about doing like healthcare stuff and whatnot.

30:05 So this, this person here, Jess, Jess, the unstill says, just wait soon enough.

30:11 If you don't pay your EC2 AWS bill, they won't even let you visit your doctor.

30:15 Sometimes things are funny.

30:19 Interesting idea though, to, to attach your AWS account to a credit card with a low balance.

30:25 So that's, that's one of the interesting.

30:28 Yes, exactly.

30:29 It might be a benefit.

30:30 Yeah.

30:30 It just might be a benefit actually.

30:33 Yeah.

30:34 Quite cool.

30:34 Anyway, I, I thought this was kind of funny, but you also have heard of real stories of

30:39 startups shutting down because they accidentally did get like a $60,000 bill and they're like,

30:44 we can't pay this.

30:44 Well, also just, yeah.

30:46 Or, or somebody just misconfigured it and suddenly they're, they're making like the transfers are

30:52 like, you know, three times larger than they're supposed to be or something like that.

30:56 Yeah, absolutely.

30:57 So every time I run this command, it spins up a cool VM to do the test in the cloud.

31:02 I forgot to shut it down.

31:04 Now I have a hundred VMs running.

31:05 Yeah.

31:07 Yeah.

31:08 So concrete advice, you can set up billing alerts at different tiers.

31:13 Like once it crosses a hundred dollars, send me a message.

31:15 Once it crosses $200, send me a message.

31:18 Those numbers will differ for people, but I would strongly recommend that you set that up at your

31:22 cloud provider.

31:23 Like if it goes beyond a reasonable amount of what I normally would like to pay or expect

31:28 to pay.

31:28 Yeah.

31:29 Let me know soon.

31:30 Yeah.

31:31 Not like tomorrow.

31:32 Let me know right away.

31:34 Exactly.

31:35 In fact, can you make my smoke alarm go off?

31:38 Because I really need to get up and get going.

31:40 Yeah.

31:43 So anyway.

31:44 All right.

31:44 Well, fantastic to be here with you, Brian.

31:46 Good to be with you too.

31:47 Talk to you next week.

31:48 Yep.

31:48 Yep.

31:49 See you later.

31:49 Thanks everyone for listening.

31:50 Oh, really quick.

31:51 One piece of follow up out here from Kim and the audience.

31:54 If a huge AWS bill accidentally happens, I'd rather I can speak to the AWS directly before

32:00 giving in in despair.

32:01 Yeah.

32:02 Indeed.

32:02 Yeah.

32:02 I've heard of success stories where people just talk and they work with them.

32:07 On the other top.

32:09 It's worth a try.

32:09 On the drawing topic, Will recommends that, where'd it go?

32:14 AccelerDraw has a similar look.

32:17 So I'll have to check that out too.

32:18 Yeah.

32:18 I haven't heard of that one.

32:19 That's cool.

32:19 All right.

32:20 All right.

32:20 Talk to you later.

32:21 See you all later.