Transcript #377: A Dramatic Episode

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

00:04 earbuds. This is episode 377, recorded April 2nd, 2024, so it's not an April Fool's joke.

00:12 And I am Brian Okken.

00:13 I am Michael Kennedy.

00:14 This episode is sponsored by Scout APM. Please listen to their segment later in the show.

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01:03 Yeah, that's a cool thing we just started doing.

01:05 So if you want to just, you don't have time to listen or you forget to show up for an episode,

01:10 it'll just show up.

01:11 I love the artisanal part, Brian. Well done on that.

01:13 It's very craftsman-like.

01:16 Yeah, anyway.

01:18 I just want to talk about Paths today. Can we just talk about Paths?

01:21 Yeah, just Paths. Nothing else.

01:23 Nothing, just Paths.

01:25 Actually, that's what it's called, just Paths.

01:27 Okay, so here's a tool that is built in Python and just, it's just a language.

01:33 It's 1.2% just.

01:35 I don't know, this is too meta.

01:37 Anyway, it's a quick CLI tool built with Python.

01:41 And when you hear that, the first thing you should think is, "PipX, install the thing,"

01:46 because that's how you install CLI tools for Python, right?

01:50 It gets managed on its own.

01:51 It gets, it's upgradable through PipX and all the things.

01:54 They made a little mistake here.

01:55 Like I should do a PR and put an X on the PipX install, just Path.

01:59 Okay.

01:59 So what is this thing?

02:00 What it does is it, it's for Windows and macOS, I believe is what it's for.

02:06 No, Windows Linux and macOS as well, because it basically pretends macOS is Linux.

02:12 And what it does is it will look at your path variable and see, help you determine if it's good.

02:19 So if you want to answer questions like, "When I type Python, I always get Python 2.

02:23 Why is that?

02:24 When I type Python, I get Python 3.10, but I have 3.12 installed.

02:28 Why is that?

02:28 When I pip install or PipX install a thing, it claims that stuff that gets installed by it

02:34 won't be in the path.

02:35 Wait, I thought it was.

02:36 Oh, no, wait, that was 3.11, not the 3.12 version of that." All these complicated little weird things that you run into all the time.

02:41 This is just a CLI tool that you just say, "Tell me how, how am I doing?

02:45 What is my path?

02:47 What stuff, like, do it, do I have something in my path that links to a directory,

02:52 but the directory is no longer there?" So for example, if I have Python 3.10 in my path, but I've uninstalled Python 3.10,

02:58 but it's still in my .cshrc or .bashrc file or Windows path environment variables,

03:05 whatever, right?

03:06 That kind of stuff.

03:06 Cool, huh?

03:07 Yeah, actually very cool.

03:09 Yeah, so it does a bunch of different things.

03:11 It can do just --raw to show you what it is.

03:14 You can just run it by itself and it gives you this colored output of each element in your path.

03:20 So it parses the path and then it goes line by line and tells you, "Green, this exists.

03:25 Yellow, it's a duplicate of something that was there before." So if you have something in your path multiple times,

03:31 maybe it's earlier and later and you thought it should be later.

03:33 So that's also a weird thing going on.

03:36 Or it'll turn it red if there are some that don't exist.

03:39 Yeah, so that's pretty cool.

03:41 You can ask for just the invalids, just for the duplicates.

03:44 You can ask it to follow symlinks and then resolve whether those are duplicates or not.

03:48 And then you can say, "Give me a corrected version as a string," or not as a string, as a list.

03:53 And then that will let you basically remove the duplicates, remove the missings, and go from there.

03:58 There's a little video here that's --is it a GIF here or something?

04:02 I don't know.

04:02 But if you want to watch the video, you can pull it up and you'll see what it looks like

04:07 when it runs and all the colors and stuff.

04:09 But it's super easy to try out.

04:11 So I recommend people check out JustPath.

04:14 I think it's handy.

04:15 I --my score is not that amazing.

04:17 I just ran it, Brian, 42 directories in my path.

04:20 12 do not exist.

04:21 Fully 12 of them.

04:22 And four of which that do are duplicates.

04:25 Yeah, I've got a bunch of problems with mine.

04:28 Okay.

04:28 Who knew, right?

04:30 Well, you know, you kind of like, you know, keep things around, you install stuff, change things.

04:34 Yeah, this stuff is right only, right?

04:36 Why would you take stuff out of your path?

04:38 You know, you just keep adding to it and adding to it.

04:40 But then, like you say, you uninstall things, stuff changes, etc.

04:44 Yeah, I have like added my user users, Aachen dot local slash bin.

04:52 Apparently, that doesn't exist anymore.

04:54 And I don't even remember ever using that.

04:56 So.

04:57 Okay.

04:58 Cool.

04:59 Interesting.

05:00 Yeah, it's easy to adopt and use.

05:02 You just pipx install it and you just run the thing and it tells you what's up.

05:06 Cool.

05:06 Well, that's exciting.

05:08 I have like, you know, doom and gloom next.

05:11 So no.

05:12 Yeah, the the XZ backdoor.

05:15 I'm I don't know if everybody's heard about this.

05:18 It just really sort of popped up last Friday.

05:21 So it's fairly recent.

05:22 Have you been keeping up on XZ?

05:24 Yeah, it definitely has caught my attention and makes me quite nervous.

05:28 I think we just missed this in getting released to basically every server on the Internet,

05:35 which is really good.

05:36 Yeah.

05:38 So if you've just sort of heard about it, I'm going to provide a there's a lot of articles

05:44 on it, and some of it has good information.

05:46 Some of it has dubious, a little bit, maybe opinionated stuff, which is fine.

05:51 But I'm linking to an article from Evan Bowen, but Evan Bowes, B-O-E-H-S.

05:57 Not sure how to pronounce that.

05:58 Anyway, everything I know about the XZ backdoor, and it's a fairly curated timeline of what

06:06 the backdoor is.

06:07 But it well, it's about the timeline of how it happened.

06:10 But the the gist, if you haven't heard about it, this is that there was a backdoor added

06:15 to I think it's XZ Utils.

06:17 XZ is a compression or like an unzipper zipper and zipper sort of thing and archive tool

06:24 for Linux and other Unix like distributions.

06:28 So it's a weird story that start this multi-year.

06:33 That's the part that's freaky is a little utility that's included everywhere that starting

06:42 in 2021, somebody well, they went by the name of Gia Tan, but nobody really believes that

06:48 that's really their name, started contributing to open source, added a patch and these patches

06:55 were added like in long, long times apart, and then ended up becoming a maintainer of

07:01 XZ and then creating in part of the test code.

07:05 And this, the there wasn't a vulnerability in the in GitHub, but there was in the distributed

07:12 tar release.

07:14 I don't know.

07:14 There's a lot of details that I didn't quite follow all of it over yuck and weird.

07:20 And so the part that I want to talk about really is one, you should just be aware of

07:24 this and we're going to link to a good article.

07:26 I think it's right before before you go on a little farther because before we watch this

07:30 the real basics of it, the basically this, this vulnerability was intentionally put there

07:37 as a backdoor to break open SSH connections.

07:41 So the idea was if you can SSH to your server, this was going to give other people SSH access

07:48 to your server, which is extraordinarily bad.

07:50 Yeah.

07:51 And SSH into it with root access.

07:53 So they have like full access really.

07:56 Yeah.

07:57 Terrible.

07:58 Would have been a terrible backdoor.

07:59 Glad it got caught.

08:00 So it got caught by like somebody at Microsoft, Microsoft Postgres team, I think looking at

08:07 some of their over like an update of XC causing or actually a slowdown in some of their I

08:14 think it was in their test suite or something.

08:16 They were running micro benchmarks and they saw like a 600 millisecond slowdown or something

08:21 like, geez, that's weird.

08:22 How about that testing for the wind, Brian?

08:24 Yeah.

08:25 And then also I guess Valgrind caught some problems with it as well.

08:30 So I guess good thing that people were paying attention to that and then tracked it down

08:34 fairly rapidly to a update of XZ.

08:39 But then some of the unraveling of this is just, okay, so there was a vulnerability.

08:45 It got caught.

08:46 People are updating.

08:47 That's good because you really don't want this here.

08:50 However, some of the ways in which this happened are disturbing.

08:56 And so that's why I think it's useful to read up on this a little bit, partly because this

09:02 XC utility was not, it's mostly maintained by one person over years.

09:08 Right.

09:09 So, and then somebody comes along and wants a patch and is sort of, there's some sort of

09:15 kind of not nice things said, including things like clearly don't do patches to this because

09:22 they're, they don't, the current maintainer has lost interest or doesn't care anymore.

09:26 Saying mean things like this kind of pressured, and this is way back in 2022, pressuring the

09:32 person into adding another maintainer.

09:34 Then, Hey, there's another maintainer ready and they're adding garbage to it.

09:39 So.

09:39 And they just happened to work for some state sponsored hacker group.

09:44 I'm sure they'll do a good job maintaining it for us.

09:46 Yeah.

09:47 Maybe.

09:49 And there's, you know, basically, I guess, watch out for this, but also I think, so one

09:56 of the things I wanted to talk about is how do we, how do we avoid stuff like this?

09:59 This is, I don't have an answer for it, but there's a lot of people discussing like, what

10:04 do we do about it?

10:05 Including a glyph whose answer may have been just is I'm willing to link to his article

10:11 called software needs to be more expensive.

10:13 Essentially we hit a lot of free software.

10:16 Maybe we should start paying the maintainers so that people, I mean, burnout is a real

10:20 thing, but you pay people, they will work on stuff or somebody else will.

10:24 However, don't think that's this.

10:26 That's quite one of the interesting thing, his idea.

10:29 I'll just mention this because I think it's interesting is he's got an idea called just

10:35 JGMM, just give maintainers money.

10:38 And his idea is not to have companies try to figure out who to give money to.

10:42 It's, it's his idea is just give every software engineer with your company a discretionary

10:48 budget of like, say 50 bucks a month or whatever you want to do.

10:51 And, and they can distribute that money to open source maintainers however they want.

10:56 Interesting idea.

10:58 I don't think if, even if that was in place, I don't think that it, which I think is a

11:01 good idea.

11:02 I don't think it would be have gone to XZ really.

11:07 Because I would have thought things like, you know, Django or, you know, Python, but

11:12 would I give money to a little zip utility?

11:16 Probably not.

11:17 Anyway.

11:17 So I think this is a good thing to keep up on.

11:21 And, and I do this idea of like bringing on maintainers, you have to be able to do that,

11:27 but you have to, how do you tell somebody is going to be malicious a couple of years

11:31 from now?

11:32 I don't know.

11:32 That's, that's how do you, I don't think you can check for that.

11:35 It's tough.

11:37 Yeah.

11:37 That person, that person played the long game for sure.

11:41 Yeah.

11:41 So I thought, well, okay, well, I don't run any servers, so I'm fine.

11:45 But then I ran across Jeff triplets article called upgrade, update and upgrade homebrew

11:52 and the XZ versions.

11:53 I'm like, what?

11:54 Yeah.

11:55 So if you, you should, if you run homebrew on your Mac, you should run brew info XZ.

12:00 And if, if it shows up at five dot six X you need to update.

12:06 And sure enough, I had the vulnerability on my machine.

12:09 I checked it and I was, I was out of date or actually I was, I had upgraded to the new

12:15 one and.

12:15 Thanks.

12:17 Yeah.

12:17 I just checked.

12:17 I don't seem to have it, which is very good.

12:20 But the thing is you probably didn't install XZ.

12:23 You probably installed the other thing, which depended on something, which depended on XZ,

12:28 which is all parts of the supply chain problems, which is scary.

12:31 Yeah.

12:32 But I guess thanks dude at Microsoft that found this.

12:37 Yeah, indeed.

12:38 You know, you say probably would think that the 50 bucks wouldn't go to XZ, but I really

12:43 like glyphs article.

12:44 First of all, well done glyph.

12:46 That was a very nice article you wrote and I enjoyed reading it.

12:50 It's also a very thoughtful idea.

12:52 I think his idea is basically instead of trying to get large companies to come on and be

12:57 sponsors of open source projects, usually that's a huge negotiation and there's all

13:03 sorts of stuff and right.

13:04 It's just not easy.

13:05 Just give everybody 50 bucks a year or a month.

13:07 I can't remember.

13:08 I think it was maybe a month.

13:09 Anyway, give people a card and they could just, just donate it to whichever open source

13:14 project that they would like.

13:15 And I agree if there's a thousand people that did that, Brian, that XZ wouldn't probably

13:20 wouldn't make it, but wouldn't it be awesome if there was a world where there were so many

13:25 people who were just donating to open source that it became super lucrative that second

13:29 tier projects were even potentially full-time things like rockstar developers, you know,

13:34 like ballers are rolling up in their Ferrari cause they, cause they're running FastAPI

13:38 or, you know, Sebastian is doing that.

13:41 I mean, that would be really cool thing.

13:43 How much more open source should I get created if it was sort of a gold rush as well.

13:47 So yeah, I think it would be neat.

13:50 And also even not necessarily a full-time job, but just to be able to say, even if I

13:55 have to take the time unpaid from my normal job, if I took like a, like a day, a week

14:01 off to, and just worked on open source, my open source project instead.

14:06 And sometimes it's not even adding features.

14:08 It's just going through issues, doing all of the, the bookkeeping and the maintenance

14:12 and everything.

14:12 There's a lot.

14:14 Yeah.

14:14 Or maybe you're a consultant.

14:16 You take one for your clients on something like that.

14:18 Right.

14:19 Yeah, exactly.

14:20 So thanks.

14:20 Pretty cool.

14:21 Yeah.

14:22 Yeah.

14:22 I'm glad you covered this.

14:23 well, we would like to thank Scout APM for sponsoring this episode.

14:27 Thanks Scout.

14:27 Let me tell you real quick about Scout APM.

14:32 They're big supporters of Python Bytes.

14:34 So we appreciate that very much.

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15:04 ORM, and then you say, Oh no, why is it so slow?

15:07 Why are you doing 200 database queries for what should be one?

15:10 So you can find out things like that.

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15:36 And I just learned this, Brian.

15:38 They also have, they provide the pro version for free to all open source projects.

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16:12 Indeed.

16:13 All right.

16:13 Now, Brian, let's talk about some fast stuff.

16:17 Okay.

16:17 El Python.

16:18 Have you heard of El Python?

16:19 No.

16:20 This is news to me.

16:21 So El Python is a high performance type Python compiler.

16:25 So basically if you type annotations or type hints on your Python code, it can aggressively optimize and compile your Python code.

16:33 And it uses multiple backends, which is pretty interesting.

16:38 So you can compile it using LLVM.

16:40 You can compile it to C.

16:41 You can compile it to C++.

16:43 Or you can compile it to Wasm, WebAssembly.

16:45 That's wild, right?

16:46 Yeah.

16:47 Yeah.

16:47 So right now, just a heads up before people get too excited.

16:50 It's an alpha stage.

16:51 So it's not quite ready for maybe adoption.

16:55 But if you're curious about it, you should definitely check it out.

16:58 You can play with it and so on.

16:59 And so it's starting to pick up speed.

17:02 It's got a little over 1,000 GitHub stars.

17:03 And you can try it in your browser.

17:06 Let's try the browser, huh?

17:08 Before I move on, though, let's say it's fast.

17:10 It's built from the ground up to translate primarily data science-y code,

17:14 because that's primarily where things get slow and actually matter in Python.

17:18 But numerical array-oriented code into simple, readable, and fast code.

17:22 Basic math.

17:23 So it knows about, you know, sized integers, for example, n32 and so on.

17:30 It has just-in-time compilation, which you can get if you don't want to run a compiler itself.

17:36 You can just put an @lpython decorator onto a function, and it'll just compile at a runtime, which is kind of cool,

17:42 because then I guess you probably don't need to distribute binary versions

17:45 on your packages, your wheels, and so on.

17:47 It's interoperable with CPython.

17:50 So basically, you can call all the CPython functions.

17:53 And it's also, if it works in CPython, it works here, it'll work in CPython, basically.

18:00 Is it a subset, I guess, in a sense?

18:02 And open source.

18:03 All right, let's play with it for just a second.

18:04 So if you go to dev.lpython.org, it loads up in the browser.

18:08 And you can notice it loaded pretty quickly, although I have gigabit internet, it still loaded pretty quickly.

18:12 See this picture here on the screen?

18:15 This is the Mandelbrot set, which I don't know how many people have done fractals,

18:19 but it's drawing two different copies of the Mandelbrot set.

18:24 And what is that?

18:25 A 600 by 600 image, maybe?

18:27 Got a black and white one and a color map one.

18:31 It says it took a little under half a second to compile it, and 80 milliseconds to generate those two images.

18:37 And you can come over here and you can say, like, all right, what I'm going to do is-- what is that number?

18:41 I'm going to make this, let's say, 355 iterations.

18:45 And then we'll run it again.

18:47 And 100 milliseconds.

18:49 Right, if I make this something really silly here, like--

18:52 oh, no, why did that go away?

18:54 Back button is not supposed-- or the delete button is not supposed to navigate backwards.

18:58 Hold on.

18:58 Ooh, really big.

18:59 There we go.

19:00 All right, there we go.

19:01 OK, so if I run it again, though, watch how fast this is.

19:04 Like, boom, that's it.

19:05 And then I'll put it back to-- what was it before?

19:07 I'm a little weird the way it's, like, capturing my mouse.

19:09 But anyway, people can come check this out and see it running.

19:12 It runs super fast as Python.

19:15 And you think all this iterative generating, a ton of paralyzed computation in WebAssembly,

19:22 in the browser, with Python, I'm pretty impressed.

19:25 Yeah, that's pretty cool.

19:26 Hey, who's behind this, do you know?

19:28 Mr. L. Python?

19:29 I have no idea, honestly.

19:30 It's by L Compilers, is what it says at the bottom.

19:34 So what is that?

19:36 Lcompilers.org.

19:38 Yeah, good question.

19:41 It has no public members.

19:43 But it is exciting.

19:44 So yeah, nor does it have a web page.

19:46 Hopefully it's not an APT crew.

19:51 Anyway, no, seriously, it looks like a cool project.

19:53 And people can check it out.

19:54 There's a lot of these ideas happening now.

19:56 But yeah, it's quite interesting.

19:58 Yeah.

19:58 Well, my last topic was kind of dramatic with the whole XZ thing.

20:05 So I'd like to continue the drama and bring it into Python.

20:11 And with the help of Trey Hunter, he has a way to make your Python more dramatic.

20:17 Actually, your Python output more dramatic.

20:20 With a-- I'm just kind of joking, but it's kind of fun with the name.

20:24 He's got a tool called Dramatic.

20:27 And what it does is it slows down the print output, which--

20:32 why would you want this?

20:35 I don't know.

20:36 It might be kind of fun if you're doing a demo or doing a presentation or something.

20:39 But it's just pretty fun.

20:42 There's a lot of ways you can use Dramatic.

20:44 Once you install it, you can just use a context manager so that it's only around certain print statements.

20:52 You can decorate certain functions so it temporarily does it.

20:56 And you can even-- there's a start and print to do it targeted.

21:03 One of the fun things-- and he's got examples on his readme how to do this.

21:07 One of the fun things you can do-- I'm not sure why he included this--

21:10 is you can do it outside the whole thing.

21:14 He's got a Dramatic interpreter.

21:16 So if you run Python-M Dramatic, it just slows down everything.

21:22 You can turn it off, though.

21:26 He's got a way to turn it off as well.

21:29 But you can do speed ups and make it-- anyway.

21:32 I think this--

21:33 You want your Python code to look like ChatGPT or something like that, right?

21:37 Yeah, as it's typing out and stuff.

21:39 I think it's kind of-- especially if you're running-- I think it'd be useful--

21:45 he gives an example of doing it.

21:47 Like, for instance-- I guess this isn't an example.

21:50 But if you're doing command line interface interactions with a user, I think it is helpful sometimes to have the output go slowly

21:57 so that it's visually interesting to have it not just pop up with a mountain of text for people to read.

22:05 But don't do it too slow because that's annoying also.

22:08 But anyway, I think it's kind of fun.

22:10 Fun thing.

22:11 Related to this, I thought it'd be--

22:15 when he submitted this the other day, I remembered somebody named Alan submitted a comment to us

22:23 that texture-- terminal text-- what is it?

22:26 Terminal text effects library is pretty cool.

22:29 And so I'll go ahead and link to that also.

22:31 That's a fun thing.

22:34 It's very dramatic.

22:36 That's quite dramatic.

22:38 You've got a whole bunch of cool effects.

22:41 There's a grid one where things show up gradually in a grid.

22:46 There's a bunch of great examples.

22:48 There's beams that pop back and forth.

22:50 This is beautiful.

22:51 Laser beams.

22:52 Laser beams.

22:52 I like that one.

22:53 Yes, let's do it.

22:54 The binary path kind of looks-- what is it?

22:58 Matrixy sort of a look.

23:00 I said, Neo, you can't go down there.

23:02 There was one that I really liked a lot.

23:05 The burn is neat.

23:07 Crumble is kind of--

23:09 These are all animated GIFs on the GitHub repo that Brian's linking to.

23:12 Yeah, yeah.

23:12 So I think it'd be cool for your--

23:16 I wouldn't do it all over the place.

23:18 But for instance, if you had a--

23:20 probably not a help, but an about.

23:23 And that's sort of where it's showing here, where you show the credits and who's worked on it

23:30 and some more info and stuff.

23:31 That'd be fun to do a fancy, dramatic output for that.

23:38 All right, with this terminal text effects thing, I think if you work in the movie industry

23:43 and you need to have a hacker breaking into a thing or somebody jacking into cyberspace

23:50 or whatever one of these weird things are, where you're going to show a terminal and make it dramatic,

23:54 oh my goodness, you could just basically do this for Hollywood.

23:56 Yeah.

23:57 Yeah.

23:58 Couldn't you?

23:59 Yeah, definitely.

24:00 What is this language?

24:02 Oh my gosh, this is VB6.

24:03 I know this.

24:04 I'm tracking his IP.

24:05 Like, wait a minute, what?

24:06 [LAUGHTER]

24:07 You could do this.

24:07 It would be a little bit better.

24:09 Yeah, it'd be great.

24:11 So anyway, that'd be fun.

24:14 If you use both this and textual to turn it into--

24:17 Oh, yeah.

24:18 --like a Vim clone or something like that with fun effects.

24:23 Ooh, that's fun.

24:24 The pour is neat.

24:25 Yeah, it's almost like the Tetris terminal, in a sense.

24:28 Not quite, but almost.

24:29 Anyway, I guess that is a fun wrap up of our topics.

24:34 But we have some extras.

24:36 Do you have any extras?

24:37 Go do yours first, since you got your screen up.

24:39 Yeah, OK.

24:39 So the only thing--

24:40 I mentioned textual a little bit.

24:42 I'll go ahead and say that textual has released a new version.

24:46 And I'm highlighting this because there's an inline feature, which is fun.

24:52 So with the inline feature-- let's see if we can get an example up.

24:56 You can kind of run textual in--

25:00 will it run?

25:02 It's not running for me.

25:03 But anyway, you can run it inline.

25:07 So normally, if you run a textual application, it takes up your whole terminal area.

25:12 But this will just take a subset.

25:15 So you can have a little input screen.

25:17 So you can have kind of like an input dialogue, maybe.

25:19 And it's very visual, but doesn't take over everything.

25:24 Yeah.

25:25 Yeah, anyway, kind of fun.

25:27 Textual Enriched, continue to impress.

25:29 Yeah.

25:29 How about you?

25:30 Any extras?

25:31 I've got a few.

25:32 Let's see.

25:33 Let's start with a broadcast straight out of the Philippines.

25:38 So my keynote, which was entitled "The State of Python in 2024," I gave two weeks ago at

25:46 PyCon Philippines, is out.

25:48 And the production quality is super high on this video.

25:51 So they did a really great job.

25:53 It was a fun conference.

25:54 But if you would have loved to hear me give a presentation on the state of Python in 2024,

25:58 but you weren't there, then you can still check it out now.

26:01 It's awesome.

26:02 And--

26:03 I really enjoyed it, by the way.

26:06 Yeah.

26:06 Yeah.

26:06 Oh, thanks so much.

26:08 A bunch of the people whose projects we talk about on this show actually get a shout out

26:12 there.

26:12 So all right, that's thing one.

26:14 Thing two, I just want to encourage people.

26:16 I'm not logged in my GitHub, so I can't unfortunately show it here.

26:19 But Brian, do you go to your GitHub and you know, there's that feed in the middle that

26:23 shows all the stuff that's going on and who starred this and who's doing that and stuff.

26:28 Do you ever use that thing?

26:30 No.

26:30 That's what I'm like, that's stupid.

26:32 This is like 80% of the page and it's in the way.

26:34 What is this?

26:34 How do I get past this?

26:37 I've started paying attention to it and I've found so many cool projects.

26:40 So I want to inspire people to follow people on GitHub.

26:45 You can follow Brian and me and see what we're starring.

26:47 But who's starred what, who's forked what?

26:49 I found probably three or four really interesting projects just last week by just kind of skimming

26:54 that for five minutes a week, you know?

26:56 So--

26:56 That's pretty cool.

26:57 Yeah, I was really surprised that that was useful.

26:59 I guess I need to follow more people.

27:01 I don't know how many--

27:02 Exactly, because I should as well, because I hadn't really been following more people

27:06 because why do you follow them?

27:07 Well, maybe this is why.

27:08 On to the thing that continues to perplex me, which is interesting, is that the official

27:13 way that Python works is through blogspot.com.

27:16 But nonetheless, important stuff for you all.

27:19 If you are living in the past, like when I ran JustPath earlier, it said your Python

27:24 3.10 thing is stupid because that doesn't exist on your computer anymore.

27:27 But if you have 3.10, 3.9, or 3.8, there are security updates for the older versions of

27:33 Python, but not the new one.

27:35 They call them boring security releases.

27:37 I never think of security releases as boring.

27:39 They either go from slightly interesting to, oh my gosh, you have my full attention, like

27:45 the XE thing.

27:48 Anyway, people can check that out and should probably upgrade if they're running one of

27:53 those versions, 3.10, 3.9, or 3.8.

27:55 And if you're running 3.7 or older, too bad, so sad, no updates for you.

27:59 They may be vulnerable, they may be not, I don't know.

28:01 And that's just the way it works if you're out of support.

28:04 That's why you should stay on some of the new stuff somewhat.

28:06 >> Like the new stuff's really been fairly easy to upgrade to.

28:09 I haven't...

28:10 >> It has been.

28:11 >> And a lot of, most of the part, well, maybe it's just my projects, but I haven't run into

28:14 any issues really.

28:16 >> I think if you stay one version behind, there's no effort at all almost to do it.

28:22 Going from 3.11 to 3.12 was actually the hardest upgrade I've ever done because there was quite

28:27 a few dependencies I had that used something that was removed as part of the dead batteries

28:31 thing or something like that.

28:32 And I can't, and it just wouldn't run.

28:35 And I'm like, oh my gosh, I got to, I was just waiting until some dependency of a dependency

28:39 got fixed, but it was slow for some reason.

28:42 I don't know why, but that got fixed within a few weeks, right?

28:44 So if you waited a little bit longer, it should be easy.

28:47 >> Yeah, so one of the questions I got while we're looking at this, how many, I used to

28:51 run a lot of versions of Python on my Mac, but I got a new Mac recently and I decided

28:58 to mostly push most, I only run a couple and then I push, do most of my multi Python version

29:05 testing in CI instead of locally.

29:07 How many do you have on your machine or regularly?

29:10 >> Let's see which Python, or one year Python rather, I think.

29:16 >> I'm sorry to put you on the spot there.

29:18 >> Oh, no problem.

29:19 You know, I think I have, I think I have 3.11 and 3.12 and that's it.

29:25 >> Yeah.

29:25 >> I think that I don't have 3.9, I don't have 3.10, I definitely don't have anything

29:30 else.

29:31 So 3.11 or 3.12, those are the ones that I got right now.

29:35 I'm with you.

29:36 I try to, I did not put too much stuff on there.

29:38 The only reason I really have older stuff on there is because I haven't gone to the

29:42 trouble of removing it because there's some, a bunch of virtual environments I've created

29:46 off it that I wanted to deal with.

29:47 But ideally, I would just have the latest.

29:49 >> Yeah, I think my normal, I don't know what I've got, but it's, well, with the packages

29:55 I maintain, I usually have the newest and the oldest that I maintain.

29:59 And so 3.12 and then however far back I wanted to go.

30:03 >> Yeah.

30:04 >> And then, so that talks can find those and I can find those locally, but yeah.

30:09 >> Yeah, you know what I might do?

30:10 I'm not doing it because I don't have a huge set of older Pythons I test for.

30:16 But if I was like you where I did that, maybe I would have Docker.

30:19 We have some Docker containers, so older ones, you can just do Docker run Python, this command,

30:23 you know, this file or whatever.

30:24 I don't know.

30:25 >> Yeah, maybe.

30:26 >> Keep it cleaned up.

30:27 >> Yeah, but they run side by side pretty well.

30:30 >> Yeah, they do.

30:31 >> Anyway.

30:32 >> Just got to keep your path in order.

30:33 So just path.

30:34 >> Just path, just path, just Jack.

30:36 So should we have some fun, something funny?

30:41 >> Ah, yes.

30:42 This one, actually, I got it pulled up, but this one is from you.

30:45 So I'm going to let you take the lead on telling us about this, Joker.

30:48 >> Okay, so I saw this on LinkedIn, actually.

30:52 It's from Matt Watson, don't know him, but it's pretty funny.

30:56 So we've got some definitions of some software definitions for you.

31:01 So starting, I've got a whole bunch of them.

31:04 So I'll try to go through them.

31:05 Technical debt, what technical debt is move fast and don't fix things.

31:09 Agile development is admitting you have no plan.

31:13 Test-driven development, guessing the future one test at a time.

31:16 I love that.

31:18 Open source is asking somebody else to fix it.

31:21 Yeah, it's not always working.

31:24 >> Maybe a slightly different term based on the topic I said this week, running someone else's code from the internet.

31:31 >> Yeah, right.

31:34 So CI/CD, automating your mistakes into production.

31:37 That's awesome.

31:39 API is also asking somebody else to do it.

31:42 DevOps, I love this.

31:43 DevOps is the belief that more tools fix any problem.

31:46 Microservices are creating enough small problems to avoid one big one.

31:51 Cybersecurity is playing hide and seek with hackers.

31:54 And serverless is pretending servers don't exist until the bill comes.

31:58 Oh yeah, Scrum, I like that.

32:00 Scrum is group therapy for being behind schedule.

32:03 >> Hi, my name is Michael, I'm blocked.

32:08 Hi, Michael.

32:12 >> I've been blocked for two months.

32:15 >> Yeah, that's great.

32:18 >> Yeah.

32:19 >> We have to do that.

32:21 Next, I'll have to try to incorporate that.

32:24 >> There you go.

32:25 Thanks, Brian.

32:27 >> Well, thanks a lot.

32:28 Thanks again for a wonderful episode.

32:30 And thank you everybody for making, helping to make Python Bytes a wonderful podcast.

32:34 And we don't ask this much, but if you find this amusing or helpful, please share with a friend.

32:41 And you can sign up for one of the great ways to do that is to sign up as a friend of the show,

32:46 get the newsletter, and then you can send that.

32:48 You can spam your friends with that.

32:50 We're not going to spam people, but you can.

32:52 So thanks.

32:52 >> Indeed.

32:53 Yeah, thanks.