Transcript #406: What's on Django TV tonight?

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

00:05 This is episode 406, recorded Monday, October 21st, 2024.

00:11 I'm Michael Kennedy.

00:12 And I'm Brian Nockin.

00:14 And this episode is brought to you by Scout APM.

00:17 We would love to tell you more about them later.

00:20 If you want to stay in touch with us, send us show ideas.

00:23 We love it when people send us ideas like, hey, you should check out this because...

00:28 Brian, usually it starts with, I'm sure you've heard of this, but here it is.

00:32 I'm like, I've not heard of that.

00:33 And I really appreciate you sending it.

00:34 So keep that kind of stuff coming.

00:36 It helps us a lot, right?

00:37 Definitely.

00:38 And even if we have, we at most get a couple duplicates.

00:42 That's fine.

00:43 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

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01:08 Yeah.

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01:18 Everything will be good.

01:19 Brian, I want to listen to what you want to tell us about first.

01:22 What's up?

01:23 I think people should pay more money to open source.

01:25 So I'm going to cover open source pledge.

01:29 And I'm going to hop over to the Django site to begin with, because that's where I found out about it.

01:35 Because the Django community, Django Software Foundation announced that they are supporting the open source pledge.

01:43 And what does this mean?

01:45 Well, the open source pledge is really simple to do.

01:48 All you have to do is you have to say that you're going to pay open source maintainers.

01:54 Minimum to participate is $2,000 per year per developer at your company.

02:00 So you don't have to count your salespeople.

02:02 You don't have to count the janitor.

02:05 Stuff like that.

02:06 But how many devs you have, $2,000 per year seems like more than reasonable, because you know you're getting that much value out of open source.

02:12 So you self-report.

02:15 So you pledge this, and then you self-report annually, click a blog or make a blog post to say how you've paid.

02:22 Well, there's a whole bunch of, if you take a look, there's a list of members already.

02:28 And I'm not sure how long this has been out, but the list of members includes people like Sentry, have 135 devs.

02:38 And they're pledging 3,704 per dev, which is pretty cool.

02:44 Laravel's in there, so it's not just Python people.

02:47 And yeah, a bunch of great names in here.

02:50 So what is this?

02:52 Oh, button down.

02:52 That's nice.

02:53 Even one dev.

02:54 They're doing 5K per developer, but it's just nice.

02:58 Anyway, so Django says, let's do that also.

03:01 And to help make the Django community more sustainable.

03:06 And I think this is great.

03:09 So they're pledging it.

03:10 I don't know how many devs the Python Software Foundation has now.

03:15 We know they have at least two full-time, but I think it's growing.

03:20 So that's pretty cool.

03:21 So I think this is a great idea.

03:23 And it's neat.

03:24 I pledge your support for open source.

03:26 It's an interesting time for money and open source.

03:29 And I do think it's a good idea as well.

03:31 But there's some crazy stuff.

03:32 Yeah.

03:33 See WordPress.

03:34 It's so insane.

03:36 But that's not pledging money to open source.

03:38 That's something else entirely.

03:40 I do want to put this up there, but I do want to point out there's a cool post by Armin Roeneker

03:47 who talked about the inevitability of mixing open source and money.

03:50 And also just give a shout out to Sentry, who I believe this open source pledge was their idea.

03:55 And Armin was behind the launch of it.

03:57 So well done, Armin.

03:59 Well done, Sentry.

04:00 You know, Sentry's a big sponsor.

04:02 Yeah, a big sponsor of Talk Python.

04:04 So, and I believe they sponsored Python Byte some as well, but certainly Talk Python.

04:08 But there's, if you want to see a bunch of interesting reading, I'll put that article in there as well.

04:13 But moving on, let's talk about TV.

04:17 Let's watch some TV, Brian.

04:18 Okay.

04:19 What's on tonight?

04:20 Catch the nightly news, Three's Company, Four, maybe some Django.

04:25 So I believe this project is put together by Jeff Triplett.

04:30 So well done, Jeff.

04:31 And it's called Django TV at DjangoTV.com.

04:34 And the idea here is these are videos from, it's like a kind of a little mini YouTube-like thing, sort of,

04:41 but for all the conferences.

04:42 So, you know, you want to see the conferences at DjangoConUS of 2023.

04:49 Boom.

04:49 There they all are.

04:50 You want to find all the videos about HTMX.

04:53 There are many because HTMX is awesome and so on.

04:56 Search for it and see friends of ours up there speaking and doing things like that.

05:02 So not a big, deep thing to go into.

05:04 However, it's nice, right?

05:06 Basically, it's a curated list with the descriptions.

05:09 You know, you always want to know, like, when is something published, right?

05:13 That's often the thing with conferences.

05:15 Like, I saw there was going to be a cool talk.

05:17 It happened three months ago.

05:19 Eventually, somebody's going to put it on the internet.

05:21 Probably, we think.

05:23 We're not entirely sure.

05:24 So you can come down here and just hit the RSS feed and subscribe to that.

05:29 And it'll just, all the Django videos start popping up when you subscribe.

05:34 Pretty cool.

05:34 Yeah, it's pretty cool.

05:35 And this is pretty new.

05:36 So if you've got old videos or new conference videos that are not listed here, especially Django-related.

05:43 Yeah, fix it.

05:44 Fix it.

05:44 Fix it indeed.

05:45 All right.

05:46 Well, that is my main one.

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06:57 And I just learned this, Brian.

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07:33 Brian, over to you.

07:34 Yep.

07:34 So I'd like to talk about dependencies a little bit.

07:38 So projects have dependencies.

07:40 We often stick them in requirements.txt files or PyProject.toml files.

07:45 But there's a new PEP that just came out.

07:48 Well, it's been out for a bit.

07:50 It was created in 2023, November, but it just got resolved.

07:54 And so I think it just got accepted recently.

07:56 So the resolution date of 10th of October.

07:58 So PEP 735 is dependency groups in PyProject.toml.

08:04 And my first glance at this, I'm like, don't we already kind of have that in extras?

08:09 But that's addressed by this PEP.

08:14 So the idea is that we have other dependencies, not direct project dependencies, but extra stuff,

08:22 like when you're building your docs or you're running your tests or things like that.

08:26 So how do we specify those?

08:28 And there's a couple of ways that people have done it in the past.

08:31 One of them is the extras in PyProject.toml.

08:35 But preceding that, even before we had that, there were extra requirements.txt files.

08:40 So some projects have a main requirements.txt file.

08:43 And then some of them have a requirements.dev file or requirements.doc file or something or several.

08:51 And the problem with that really is that there's no standardization around it.

08:58 And then also there's not really a standardization about the requirements.txt file.

09:04 It's just whatever you can pass to pip install.

09:07 And so like even flags and stuff, which is actually kind of fun.

09:11 Anyway, tangent.

09:13 But so that's, I don't think a bunch of requirements files is the right answer.

09:19 How about extras?

09:20 Well, I was surprised to find out that the extras that you can put in extra dependencies

09:26 or optional dependencies, these are, these might not, I learned that they're, they're using,

09:33 they're, they might not be resolved.

09:36 What am I trying to say here?

09:38 They, they're not guaranteed to be statically defined.

09:42 They could be dynamically defined.

09:44 And, and that I just didn't even know.

09:46 So we do need it to be statically defined so that, so that, you know, tools can read it easily.

09:52 And there's other limitations around using the extras as well.

09:57 Also, I think it's just, I think extras confuses people.

10:00 I know it's a feature of pyproject.toml, but I was confused by it at first, had to like, like

10:06 study it for a bit.

10:07 And it just somehow doesn't, doesn't fit right away with a lot of people's mindset.

10:12 But these dependency groups look pretty good.

10:14 So let's take a look at one example.

10:16 So their example in the PEP just shows you get a block of dependency groups section.

10:22 And then there's stuff like test with a list of, a list of things like pytesting coverage.

10:27 Docs might have Sphinx and, and the Sphinx read the docs theme.

10:31 Typing for doing type checking, like my py and type requests.

10:35 So these all totally make sense.

10:37 And then there's a, there's an extra bit about being able to group others.

10:41 So you could have a dependency group that includes other groups.

10:44 That's pretty cool.

10:45 And then there's some details around like, well, what happens if they conflict with each other

10:49 and stuff?

10:50 So that's well-defined, which is good.

10:52 But I just think like having something like this, like a small block that say, Hey, for tests,

10:57 we use pytesting coverage for docs.

10:59 We use these and have that be nice and succinct in a dependency group section.

11:03 I like it.

11:04 So this has been accepted.

11:05 I'm not sure when it's going to come to a pip near you.

11:09 But it's pretty cool.

11:11 There, there's an example of how it might work at the end.

11:14 Like how, I don't know, reference implementation, how it might work of like saying maybe pip install

11:21 dependency groups and be able to install that.

11:24 But, but that's up to PIP, the pip maintainers to figure out how, how that's really going

11:29 to be used.

11:29 Other interesting thing is extras are extras.

11:32 Extras are on top of the normal thing, everything needed for the, for the system.

11:37 But for example, like when you're doing the documentation build, you don't actually have to build your

11:42 thing to build the docs.

11:44 So these dependency groups do not, they're not extra, they're independent.

11:49 So you could build the, install the documentation dependencies without installing the project,

11:55 which is pretty interesting.

11:56 So anyway.

11:57 That's, that's one of the differences they highlight is the extras require, they add onto the base

12:03 requirements.

12:04 Whereas this, you can have one set of things installed for one scenario and another for another

12:08 without necessarily overlapping them, which you might think, whatever, right?

12:12 It doesn't matter.

12:13 Just install some extra stuff.

12:14 But there's certain things that say work in production, but won't install on windows.

12:18 For example, right?

12:20 I think last I looked, UV loop didn't work on windows, but it was like a speed up for async

12:25 IO on Linux.

12:26 Well, there also might be a, an incompatibility of a dependent library on like your, if you're

12:32 using Sphinx, maybe Sphinx depends on something that's a different version than what your project

12:37 depends on.

12:37 Yeah.

12:38 Yeah.

12:38 Yeah.

12:38 Good point.

12:39 So indeed Henry on the audience throws in that extras are public.

12:43 These are not, unfortunately we lose the ability to guarantee the package was installed.

12:47 Sometimes you want this.

12:49 Sometimes you don't.

12:49 Thanks.

12:50 Yeah.

12:50 hat tip to a transition.

12:52 You didn't know what's coming.

12:53 So overhead talk by the on training.

12:57 We have a free course called static sites and API docs with Sphinx, Python and Markdown done

13:02 by Paul Everett.

13:03 And he unwittingly introduced me to this next topic through that course on here.

13:09 Live reload as in pip install live reload.

13:13 Do you know this?

13:13 No.

13:14 So it's kind of a generic file watcher, mostly focused on web apps, but you could use it for

13:19 literally anything.

13:20 And it's just, you can say, here's a set of file patterns, multiple ones.

13:26 And it can, you can use the star star slash something to like look at sub directories and

13:32 whatnot.

13:32 You know, the, the file pattern craziness to however much you want.

13:38 And then if something changes, it will just run an arbitrary shell command for you and potentially

13:45 restart your web app as well.

13:46 If you give it a web app, like a flask or Django, a whiskey app type of thing.

13:51 So that's pretty cool.

13:51 If you look at the documentation, you will find it to be sparse.

13:55 Like the description of it literally is about eight words, one sentence.

14:00 It tells you how to install it, but like, well, okay.

14:04 But why would I install it?

14:05 You look at the API reference and it's, it's basically just a signature.

14:08 So if people are looking to contribute to a project, you know, maybe given this a little

14:12 example, a little bit of a, a few paragraphs would be awesome.

14:15 But, I gave you an example that we can all use from Python bytes and from talk Python,

14:21 similar apps.

14:22 So similar use here.

14:23 And so I, I'm sharing a gist with folks that will, if you run it a little file here, you

14:30 can just run this as in your terminal or just however you start it and just leave it running

14:36 while you're working on a project and what it'll do.

14:39 It'll track down using pathlib.

14:41 It'll track down the root folder and then find a CSS folder and a JavaScript folder.

14:45 And then it'll run Python against some file that does bundling.

14:51 So for example, at Python bytes, we take maybe six or seven CSS files and minify and bundle them

14:57 into a single one in a certain order.

14:58 And then share that over a CDN.

15:00 Yeah.

15:01 And so depending on how it's running, you may or may not see those changes if you're doing

15:07 like CSS design stuff, same thing for JavaScript, right?

15:10 So what you can do is you just set this up, pointed the right places on your file system,

15:15 say, watch the CSS folder, watch the JS folder and run a shell command, which is tell Python

15:22 to run that Python script that does the bundling.

15:25 Boom, off it goes.

15:26 And you just run that in the background while you're working.

15:28 What do you think?

15:29 That's pretty cool.

15:30 So with this, if you change the JavaScript and CSS, it just automatically updates then?

15:34 Right.

15:35 It looks for any file change within the search pattern, like star star slash CSS slash dot

15:43 star dot CSS or whatever, you know.

15:44 And then if it sees that, it just runs the command, which the command that I gave it is

15:49 to run Python to rebundle our assets.

15:52 So for whatever reason, because one of the things that can happen is, you know, change something

15:57 about a CSS file, forget to bundle it, publish the site.

16:01 And you're like, huh, why does that look so weird?

16:03 Like, why is that not changed?

16:04 But the, you know, the, the, the, the packed version of that one that runs in production,

16:09 but not in development is out of sync.

16:11 And then it's weird.

16:12 Right.

16:12 So if you just, as long as you have this running somewhere, just chilling, then you're good.

16:16 Cool.

16:17 But it doesn't have to be, I mean, the context is web and it's very focused on static websites,

16:22 which is super annoying.

16:23 Like the way you run it, as you say, server dot serve, and it literally starts up a web

16:27 server at some route you give it.

16:29 But I don't want to look at it.

16:30 I'm not trying to look at the website through it.

16:32 I literally just wanted to run the file.

16:35 So there should be some secondary command, like just start watching or something like that

16:40 in the background.

16:41 But it starts a little web server.

16:42 You can just ignore it and, or point it to nowhere and ignore it.

16:46 And then you could get it to do basically when a file changes, run a shell command of

16:51 your choosing, which is pretty flexible.

16:52 Yeah.

16:53 It does.

16:54 I guess to give them a little credit, they do have pages for how to, how to use this with

17:00 Django and Flask and Bottle.

17:02 I don't know anybody that uses Bottle anymore, but.

17:04 No, no, I know.

17:05 But I mean, the pages for it.

17:07 But unnecessarily the right details.

17:10 Yeah.

17:11 It doesn't like, it doesn't really tell you what happens.

17:13 Okay.

17:14 It just shows you what to do.

17:15 And then you can imagine, well, will it restart the app or will it not restart the app?

17:19 Will it just restart the CSS?

17:21 Will it reload the templates?

17:22 There's options of what could be happening, but it doesn't really say.

17:25 Anyway, it's a cool project.

17:27 I would love to see a little bit more description just so that I can get a little more traction.

17:31 But yeah, there you go.

17:33 Paul was using it for when he changed a markdown file in the course.

17:37 It would run make HTML out of Sphinx to automatically rebuild the website as you just typed in it.

17:44 Oh, that's cool.

17:45 Yeah.

17:45 All right.

17:47 Well, do you want to jump into extras?

17:49 Let's jump.

17:50 Okay.

17:51 Do you want to hit yours first?

17:52 Yeah, I'll go first.

17:53 Mine are super short.

17:54 So, a couple of things.

17:56 First of all, I was looking at our Umami.

17:59 That is Umami Analytics.

18:03 Is it .is?

18:04 I think it is.

18:05 Umami.is.

18:06 Analytics.

18:07 Yeah, perfect.

18:08 And I noticed something unusual, that 14% of our listeners are from Germany.

18:14 Oh, that's cool.

18:15 That's pretty interesting, right?

18:17 Especially given, you know, this is in English.

18:19 It's not their native language.

18:21 But, like, more than Australians, the Germans are listening to our stuff.

18:24 So, thank you, Germany.

18:25 Maybe we should have a competition to try to get the country.

18:29 Exactly.

18:29 Exactly.

18:30 And then, not that I intended this to be a German episode, but here are German extras.

18:37 But, the German company, Hetzner, have you heard of them?

18:40 They're like DigitalOcean, Linode, so on, AWS.

18:43 So, I've heard a few people talk about them.

18:46 And they have really interesting hosting models.

18:49 Like, they'll give you super affordable VMs, lots of bandwidth, so on.

18:54 So, for example, for an 8 gig, sorry, 16 gig, 8 CPU server in DigitalOcean, it's $112.

19:04 And it's hard to tell exactly on AWS and Azure, but I believe AWS is $200 and Azure is $350 per month, okay?

19:12 Okay.

19:13 I go over here to Hetzner, prices, and you pick, say, shared AMD, and you pick your country to be US.

19:21 Come here.

19:23 Oh, where'd you go?

19:24 Same server is $25.

19:26 Wow.

19:26 And it comes with 20 terabytes of bandwidth, which, quick math, I believe that's about $2,000 at AWS.

19:35 Okay.

19:36 And that's included in the $25.

19:37 Cool.

19:38 So, the news is, why am I even mentioning this?

19:40 The news is, they recently came to the US.

19:42 All right.

19:43 They used to be just a European company.

19:46 Now, they're available in the US.

19:48 So, that opens up a lot of interesting hosting possibilities.

19:51 Are you switching anything?

19:53 I'm thinking about playing with it.

19:55 We'll see how it goes.

19:56 I actually asked people in Mastodon, what do you guys think about this company?

20:00 And I got a lot of German folks who said they're having a lot of good experiences with it.

20:05 So, we'll see.

20:06 Okay.

20:06 But I'll let you know if we do.

20:08 I haven't switched anything around.

20:10 But it's pretty interesting, right?

20:11 That you can get so much compute for so affordable.

20:14 Yeah, that's pretty cool.

20:15 Anyway, those are my extras.

20:16 Over to you.

20:16 A couple blog posts that I wanted to highlight that were kind of neat.

20:22 K.J. Miller.

20:23 Personal blogs are no longer personal when AI gets too involved.

20:28 So, I know people are using AI and chat-like things to come up with some ideas and stuff.

20:35 And that's pretty much what K.J. Miller is talking about.

20:39 It's not necessarily terrible to do that.

20:42 But be careful what you're doing and why you're doing it.

20:46 So, for instance, coming up with ideas or if you're stuck on how to phrase something,

20:52 having somebody help with that is great.

20:55 And writing is hard.

20:57 So, getting some advice, fine.

20:59 But it should still be your voice.

21:01 So, I love, I was wanting to hop down to his advice.

21:05 It says, obviously, if you're reading this and not, obviously, if you're reading this and

21:12 not getting ChatGPT to summarize it for you, you care about my words to some degree.

21:18 So, you are reading somebody's blog for their voice.

21:21 So, keep that in mind when writing your own blog.

21:23 So, especially if you're writing a blog to try to get hired later, it doesn't help you

21:28 any to just regurgitate some ChatGPT stuff and copy and paste it.

21:33 We don't need more people like that.

21:35 I mean, if you're doing it to try to fill up your blog for selling something, I still don't

21:41 like that, but you know, your business.

21:43 But if you're trying to do it to highlight what you write like, then you need to write it.

21:49 And also, if you're doing this to help your future self, make it personal.

21:53 Also, like, if you're not writing it or at least rewriting it, writing it in your voice,

21:58 it's not going to stick in your head.

22:00 So, you're not doing yourself any favors.

22:02 There is a bit about, he talks about if you're doing this to create content in another language,

22:08 learn about that community's writing style, which makes sense.

22:12 But I kind of think there's translation tools already built into some browsers.

22:18 And if somebody from another country really want to read your stuff, maybe they probably

22:22 will anyway and translate it if they want to.

22:25 So, I got really no interesting opinion about that.

22:28 But I think I like these ideas about if you're doing it to gain, you know, build your personal

22:34 brand or put yourself up as an expert in an area, using AI to do that's really not helping

22:40 you.

22:40 I think people can figure that out because there'll be an inconsistency in writing styles in different

22:46 posts.

22:47 And then also, it's your personal thing.

22:51 People are trying to reach you.

22:53 So, be you.

22:53 Anyway, that was one extra.

22:56 The other one was something that I just didn't think about, and I probably should, is mind your

23:01 image metadata.

23:01 This is an article from Stephanie Mullen right there at the top.

23:09 She presented at PyCon Estonia.

23:11 Anyway, the talks about the EXIF interchange format.

23:17 Basically, pictures have tons of metadata in it.

23:20 And if you don't want to have that published everywhere, and you might not, you might not want personal

23:27 locations for exactly where your photos are.

23:29 She talks about how to tell using tools to figure out what's in there and also talks about tools

23:36 to rip them out.

23:38 And then even talks about using a pre-commit hook to strip out pictures that you're including as your

23:44 static images or in your Git repo.

23:47 That's cool.

23:48 If you're putting your Hugo static site, just none of it has any of that in there.

23:52 That's a pretty cool idea.

23:53 I like that.

23:54 Those are just my two extras.

23:56 Excellent.

23:58 I'm having Stephanie on Talk Python Thursday.

24:01 Cool.

24:01 Three or four days from now.

24:02 Sweet.

24:03 Yeah.

24:03 All right.

24:04 How about our joke?

24:06 Let's do it.

24:07 Okay.

24:07 How are you?

24:08 This is a dumb joke, but I love it.

24:09 It's an oldie, bitty, goodie.

24:11 I'm linking to a savvy programmer blog, but I've heard it before.

24:17 Essentially, it's, okay, a programmer's partner asked them, hey, would you go get a loaf of

24:24 bread from the store?

24:25 And if they have eggs, grab a dozen.

24:27 So while later, the programmer returns with 12 loaves of bread and says they had eggs.

24:31 So literal.

24:34 I love it.

24:34 Anyway, there's a handful of jokes here.

24:39 Pretty decent.

24:40 Okay.

24:41 I didn't read very many.

24:42 I'm going to go check some of them out.

24:44 That's awesome.

24:44 Anyway.

24:45 Excellent.

24:46 Yeah.

24:47 Very funny.

24:47 Thanks again for the show together.

24:50 And everyone, thank you for listening.

24:51 Talk to you later.