Transcript #8: Python gets Grumpy, avoiding burnout, Postman for API testing and more

00:00 This is Python Bytes, Python headlines and news delivered directly to your earbuds.

00:04 It's episode 8, recorded January 10th, 2017.

00:08 This is your host, Michael Kennedy, along here with my co-host, Brian Okken.

00:12 Hey, Brian, what's up, man?

00:13 That's going really good.

00:14 Yeah, glad to hear it, glad to hear it.

00:16 I kind of feel like everybody's still kind of getting going after the winter break.

00:21 I know we're both in Portland and our world has been covered in ice repeatedly recently,

00:26 so it's been a bit of a strange start, but there's still Python news to talk about.

00:30 Yeah, there is.

00:32 I'm going to start with, actually, there was a PyBay 2016.

00:36 I actually don't remember when that happened.

00:39 It was sometime in the fall.

00:40 I want to bring up one video, which is from Jessica McKellar, titled Breaking the Rules.

00:46 From the talk, it sounds like it was pre-election, so at least it was in the fall.

00:53 But yeah, the video came up in December.

00:56 I was listening to it and was kind of blown away.

00:59 So Jessica was the director of the Python Software Foundation for several years, and she's been

01:05 involved with lots of stuff, like the Boston Python user group, and she's the diversity

01:11 chair for PyCon.

01:12 I guess she's an engineering director at Dropbox, which just sounds cool.

01:16 But anyway, this was a keynote speech or a talk, and she was talking about all of her work with Python was not really about Python, but about studying systems.

01:29 And here's some cool quotes.

01:31 learning how to program changes the way you think about debug and interact with the world.

01:37 And you learn a set of rules on how to build software, and then you learn that you can change the rules.

01:43 And programmers master a system that they know they can change.

01:47 And these sorts of comments that she talks about, I guess I knew, but I didn't really ever think about it before.

01:54 And she takes it and she realizes that as programmers, we often take it for granted that if we're using a tool that we want to make better, we can just go in and make it better.

02:06 It's an open source thing.

02:07 And that this should carry over to the rest of your life.

02:10 She takes the idea and applies it to politics and voting and stuff.

02:17 I guess she ran a polling station by herself and her husband did a different one, which actually is pretty cool.

02:23 But it's neat to hear somebody firsthand say it's not that hard to get it done.

02:28 But I like the idea of thinking about how the programmer mindset and how you can change the system that you're working in.

02:37 And I think more people should apply that to their workplace a little bit.

02:40 I hear about people that are unhappy at their job, like a cubicle farm or something, and they get out and do an entrepreneurial thing.

02:51 And that's great for some people.

02:53 But for others, I think maybe it's better to look at the system and realize that you're part of it and try to make it better yourself.

03:02 Picture yourself in your manager's shoes or your manager's manager.

03:06 Wouldn't you want to hear from all of the employees if there's something that could happen to make it a better place?

03:12 Yeah, I think it's a great message.

03:14 I think I really like Jessica's work.

03:17 And I actually had her on Talk Python on episode 30.

03:19 And she's done so much for diversity and the way the Python community actually is today.

03:26 Like 10 years ago, it was very different than today.

03:29 One of the things that she brought up in that talk was that I think she said five years ago, but not let's say a handful of years ago.

03:37 The number of women speakers at BiCon was like 1%.

03:40 And now it's like in the 30s, maybe low 40s percent.

03:44 It's, you know, traumatically different.

03:47 And there's a lot of changes like that that she was central in.

03:50 So I think she does a great bunch of work.

03:53 In that video, that was one of the questions is how did she do that?

03:56 And the answer is awesome.

03:57 She just emailed a lot of people and asked them to submit talks.

04:01 Yeah.

04:02 And sometimes, you know, you just got to ask, right?

04:05 And you want the world to be a different way.

04:07 Sometimes you just have to ask or take the first step or whatever it is, right?

04:11 Like I think two ideas that sort of come to mind as you said that.

04:16 One is there's a quote that goes something like this from Steve Jobs.

04:20 Like the world around you was made by people no smarter than you.

04:23 And you can change it.

04:24 And once you realize that, like you can't just accept the world the way it is.

04:28 You see that you can change it and you kind of must, right?

04:31 And the other is I really liked the notion of once you learn to program,

04:36 you control the system as much as it controls you.

04:40 And you can change it.

04:40 And you start to apply that thought to the greater world.

04:44 And I think that's really something valuable that people that are on this

04:48 learn to code, teach kids to code mission don't get, but would be a powerful benefit to students and just everyone.

04:54 And it's another reason to teach everybody, more and more people to code.

05:00 We don't have to generate an entire generation of programmers, but a generation that actually understood how computers work would be good.

05:08 It wouldn't be bad.

05:09 Yeah.

05:09 I definitely think the world needs more creators, fewer consumers, but not necessarily more programmers.

05:15 Right.

05:15 You know, people say that I'm a pretty happy guy, pretty optimistic guy,

05:21 maybe to a fault sometimes, but usually people don't say I'm grumpy.

05:24 But today I'm feeling a little grumpy.

05:27 Actually, I'm feeling grumpy also.

05:30 Yeah.

05:31 And grumpy, this time grumpy is good.

05:33 I think grumpy is good.

05:34 Grumpy is interesting.

05:35 So the guys at YouTube, particular guy named Dylan Trotter, wrote a blog post on the Google blog,

05:42 tech blog.

05:43 I don't remember exactly which one, but it's in the links.

05:45 Called grumpy is a Python on Go interpreter or runtime.

05:50 So at grumpy.io, there it redirects to the GitHub repository.

05:55 They've built this thing, and it was released really recently, like three weeks ago.

05:59 And what it is, is it's a transpiler.

06:01 It takes Python, legacy Python, sadly, so CPython27, and it compiles it or transpiles it into Go code,

06:10 which is then compiled and run on top of the Go runtime.

06:13 So there's a couple of interesting things.

06:16 It's one, there is no interpreter.

06:18 Two, it executes purely as Go.

06:22 So all the features, and I really think the reason they're doing this is the concurrency story around Go,

06:28 and maybe, maybe even a migration story.

06:30 We'll see about that.

06:31 But there's a lot of interesting things that they can do if they can get Python to run on top of Go.

06:37 Yeah.

06:38 So one of the things that also caught my attention about this is this seems to have really taken people,

06:45 captured their enthusiasm because it's on GitHub.

06:48 They announced it a few weeks ago, and it already has 6,000 stars, right?

06:53 For a project that's a few weeks old with 6,000 stars, that's pretty amazing.

06:57 So I'm actually having Dylan on Talk Python to Me on episode 95, which I think comes out next week.

07:02 So look for a bigger story there.

07:05 So is that one that's already recorded?

07:06 No, I'm going to talk to him Thursday.

07:09 So what's, do you know what the reasoning, I mean, like, I get why you'd want Go for Python stuff,

07:14 but why is the language Go not enough, and the Python language easier to write in,

07:20 or?

07:21 Well, I believe, I don't know, there's certain things that they can't talk about or don't want to talk about,

07:26 so I don't want to read too much into it for them.

07:29 Okay.

07:29 But Go is big at Google.

07:31 YouTube right now, the front end for YouTube is written in CPython 2.7.

07:38 So I would speculate that they're thinking of how do they not stay on Python 2.7.

07:44 Yeah.

07:44 Okay.

07:45 Yeah.

07:46 Pretty interesting.

07:46 You know, another thing that would make me grumpy, not in the Python way,

07:50 but really grumpy, is when I'm given a huge project, like, you know, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of lines of code,

07:58 and they said, here, look through this and understand this code base, and I look at some method or some set of classes,

08:03 and I'm like, I don't understand what effect this has.

08:06 It seems to do nothing in this code, and yet here it is, and I'll tweak it and play with it,

08:11 and it doesn't even seem to have any effect, and then I realize that code is never called.

08:15 Yeah.

08:16 Hopefully, it'd be cool if there was a way to say you could find some dead code.

08:20 You mean like if there was like a creature that could like soar through the sky

08:24 and then would find these bodies and like consume them, and they would be gone,

08:27 something like that?

08:27 Yeah.

08:28 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe, or maybe we could have like a cheesy segue bot,

08:33 but anyway.

08:34 Exactly.

08:34 There's an article by Dougal Matthews, and called Finding Dead Code with Vulture,

08:41 and Vulture is a Python tool that you can install with just pip install Vulture,

08:46 and it's really easy to use.

08:48 I downloaded it, applied it to some code I was working on, and you actually can just point it to a directory,

08:55 and it looks at all the Python code there, and tells you, I'm sure it analyzes stuff and does call trees and whatnot.

09:03 I don't know how it works, but it gives you a list of all the functions and variables and lines of code that are not used.

09:09 It was just really fast and really easy to use.

09:11 I liked it.

09:12 In the comment from Dougal was the, there's some people that use really aggressive unit testing and TDD strategies,

09:20 which makes it such that every function is going to have a test for it, but what if that internal function isn't used by anything else?

09:29 Well, there's a way you can take your unit tests and exclude them from the Vulture,

09:33 which is kind of neat.

09:35 I was thinking about, you know, the comparison.

09:38 Normally, I would find this sort of stuff by using Flake 8, but like the example you gave, you wouldn't want to try to convert,

09:45 you would fix all the, like the PEP 8 errors and things just to find dead code,

09:51 so this might be a good use case for that.

09:53 And also, there are some people that don't like static analyzers like Flake or whatever.

10:00 The other comment was that coverage, if you're running coverage over your code with your tests,

10:07 that should tell you that parts of the code aren't used also.

10:11 However, your test suite's got to be fairly complete in order for you to really be sure that that's true.

10:17 So anyway.

10:18 Yeah, it's tough to do it with coverage and testing, I think, because like you alluded to,

10:24 there might be some function that is never called, but you might have written a test about it,

10:30 so then it kind of looks like it's live again, right?

10:33 The thing where I find this to be really insidious is I'm looking at some function,

10:38 and I realize if I take it away, this other function depends on it.

10:43 And if I were to take that away, another function, and then maybe like three or four or five function calls back in this chain,

10:48 these are all kind of dependent on each other, but nobody ever calls the first one.

10:53 And so it's really hard to tell, like to follow all those chains and determine like,

10:57 actually this whole branch of code that you're trying to deal with, just forget it.

11:00 It's gone.

11:01 You have source control.

11:01 Delete it.

11:02 Yeah, that's pretty cool.

11:03 I like it.

11:04 Yeah.

11:04 Yeah.

11:05 They did warn about false positives, saying something wasn't used when actually it was.

11:10 So be a little careful.

11:11 Like, you know, systems that use conventions, like, you know, Pyramid or Django or something, right?

11:19 You map a route to a thing, and it doesn't look like you ever call that thing,

11:22 but obviously it's called by, you know, a URL, right?

11:25 So just be aware of those sorts of things.

11:27 But yeah, it looks really cool.

11:29 Speaking of tools that are cool, you know, I don't get much meaningful mail these days,

11:35 but I do like this thing called Postman.

11:37 Yeah, definitely.

11:39 I think it's at getpostman.com is a cross-platform GUI app that lets you test and visualize and play with APIs.

11:51 I love my APIs.

11:52 Yeah, so I've actually been doing some things that required me to write some APIs lately,

11:57 and I'm like, you know, obviously I could go into the dev tools in my browser

12:01 or I could write some, you know, some command line thing to test them, but this is really nice.

12:05 You can, like, create, you know, here's how I call this function as an authenticated user with this data,

12:10 and you can actually save that in this UI, and you can even create them and share them across teams,

12:15 integrate these into continuous integration for, like, testing deployments

12:20 or more, like, integration tests of your whole system.

12:23 It's really cool.

12:24 It's free.

12:25 It's cross-platform.

12:26 It's not written in Python, unfortunately, but, you know, it's still a really cool system.

12:31 Question about that.

12:33 When you say API, is that you're referring to, like, REST API or some other web API?

12:39 Yeah, yeah.

12:39 Yeah, I should, it says APIs, but I should maybe make it really clear.

12:42 Those are services, like, HTTP services, SOAP services, things like that.

12:46 Okay, great.

12:47 Not, yeah, yeah, not, like, APIs, like, pip install this package and then call this function.

12:51 Yeah, well, you know, when I'm testing or running on developing a new API,

12:56 sometimes I just, it's tiring, and I kind of get burned out on it.

13:01 Yeah, you know, you and I have been programming for a long time, and I don't know about you,

13:08 but I've certainly gone through a period or two where I'm just like, ugh, more of this,

13:12 and it usually depends a little bit on the project.

13:14 It's not really the programming.

13:16 It's kind of like all the other stuff, you know, nitpicking at your time and energy,

13:20 and so Kenneth writes, I'm going to just keep going with writes, not reads,

13:24 until I hear otherwise.

13:25 Kenneth writes, does a bunch of great work.

13:28 He's the, for humans, guys.

13:29 We talked about Maya last time, right?

13:31 Yeah, last episode, we talked about Maya, and he's, of course, the author of requests,

13:36 but he wrote this article called The Reality of Developer Burnout, and I really,

13:42 I'm glad he did it.

13:43 I had heard that he was, I don't remember last year or something, suffering from just like burnout

13:50 of being the main support person for an open source project.

13:55 Yeah, and he's not the only one, like, gosh, I can't remember the guy's name,

13:58 but he's in Lawrence, Kansas.

13:59 He's one of the founders of Django, also just got totally burnout and had to just step back,

14:05 and I remember there was like a, like a half hour conference presentation

14:08 that was kind of like a goodbye or something to that effect, if I'm remembering it correctly,

14:11 but yeah, there's, there's plenty of stories of people getting, not just requests,

14:17 but like angry email for stuff they're doing for free, right?

14:21 Open source projects and so on.

14:23 Definitely, and I think I'm not a, I don't maintain a large open source project,

14:27 but the, definitely maintain tools within our company and, and I think a lot of people

14:33 can relate to some of the things that Kenneth talks about in burnout in this article,

14:38 but I, I think he has some decent advice.

14:41 Some of the advice he gave was to just keep, keep producing, but possibly not at the same speed,

14:47 but stop consuming so much on your social networks.

14:51 He, he like disconnected from Twitter for a while.

14:54 He didn't quite pull a 410 gone.

14:57 Right, but, but like just stop following people, stop looking at it so much

15:01 and, and then he also talked about delegating more, trying to, it is a community,

15:06 so try to get other people of the community to take over a lot of the roles

15:10 that he had within the request community and, and, and then also generate

15:16 other hobbies.

15:17 Don't do all of your free time just doing coding.

15:20 There should be some non-programming hobbies I thought it was a great, great article.

15:24 and I was, I was poking around trying to get links for the show notes and I went,

15:30 came across, when I was looking at the Maya, the GitHub page on Maya and,

15:36 it said, say thanks to, to, Kenneth.

15:39 And I had never seen this before, but apparently, I, there's a say thanks.io

15:44 that's a Kenneth project that, that you, it just sends a little thank you note to,

15:49 to whoever, or the, the person that set it up.

15:52 So, I thought that was a cool project.

15:54 Yeah, yeah, that's really awesome.

15:56 So, for our final one, our final topic brings us snapping back to the future,

16:02 you know, away from Grumpy and Python 2.7, back to current Python.

16:07 Yeah, and hopefully, you're not burnt out on template languages.

16:12 No, I still, I'm still a big fan of server-side templated web applications.

16:17 And one of the real popular ones is Jinja, Jinja 2, by Armin Roeniger.

16:22 And he's, he's the guy behind Flask.

16:24 And he just released Jinja 2.9.

16:27 This is really cool.

16:28 And thanks to Hugh Blanford for sending us a note to say, here's a cool thing

16:33 you should, should talk about on Python Bytes.

16:35 So, here we go.

16:36 And one of the things that was, stood out both to Hugh and to myself was the deep integration

16:43 with Python 3.6 and the asynchronous concurrency story around that.

16:49 Armin says, while Jinja 2 supported Python 3 years ago, it never really fully

16:53 embraced the Python 3 features because they wanted to make it basically lowest

16:58 common denominator so it would work on Python 2 as well.

17:00 But now they say that it actually supports async generators, which fully support

17:06 the async and await keywords.

17:08 So, it means if you pass some kind of generator that is an async generator

17:14 to the template and it's going to like loop over them, it will await it as it does that,

17:19 which is fantastic.

17:21 That's just so cool to see async and await and the concurrency flow all the way

17:25 to the HTML.

17:26 So, where would this like affect it?

17:29 When does the template engine end up doing coroutines?

17:33 Well, yeah.

17:34 So, the template engine runs after your view method, your action method runs and you

17:39 pass back the model.

17:40 But the thing is the model itself could have a collection that is a generator

17:45 and normally you would just loop over it, right?

17:47 So, I've got like some kind of set of results and maybe that came from a database

17:52 query or computing it from a service, who knows?

17:54 And you're going to like do a for loop over it and generate a bunch of, you know,

18:00 10, 100, whatever, little sub HTML pieces in your template.

18:04 well, even if that was asynchronous, it wouldn't treat it that way, it would just

18:07 call it before.

18:08 So, now, it can call, it can do this in an awaitable way.

18:13 So, my understanding is that if each one of those steps like has to go to file

18:18 or network or something or it's like a database query and it's sort of flowing through

18:24 as you generate, as you pull the items out of the generator, it will free up

18:27 the thread to go to other web requests while that part is running, whereas before it would.

18:32 Oh, that's very cool.

18:33 I like it.

18:34 Yeah, it's quite slick, quite slick.

18:36 Another week in the Python world and we have a bunch of cool stuff.

18:41 So, you know, if you're using Jinja, get the new version.

18:43 If you're feeling burnt out, check out Kenneth Wright's things.

18:46 If you're doing APIs, check out Postman, bring out the vultures on that legacy code

18:51 and check out Grumpy as well.

18:53 Lots of cool things and system programming as a larger concept with Jessica.

18:58 These are good things to check out.

19:00 What's going on with you, Michael?

19:01 Do you have any news you want to share?

19:02 Oh, I don't really have too much news.

19:05 I'm just working like crazy on a couple of projects.

19:08 Some stuff that I'm doing got me interested in Postman.

19:11 I'm doing a bunch of API stuff right now for a project that I'm working on,

19:15 but nothing I'm ready to talk about.

19:17 How about you?

19:18 How's the book?

19:19 It's getting closer and closer to a, we're now targeting hopefully a beta release

19:26 for PyCon, but I am, I have a handful of people I'm going to try to, to get a hold of

19:33 to be beta readers and not beta readers but technical consults to technical editors

19:40 to just read through it.

19:42 I think it's a couple week thing but if anybody's listening and feel that they really

19:46 want to contribute to making sure I don't make any pie test mistakes, yeah,

19:51 hit me up and I'll put you on the list.

19:53 Yeah, that sounds great.

19:54 Get early access to the book and are you giving them credit?

19:58 Do they get like a little thanks to?

20:00 Oh yeah, definitely.

20:01 And it's all handled through Pragmatic so there's a limited number of people

20:07 so I don't know how many people they'll pick but I want to give them a bunch of names.

20:12 Excellent.

20:12 Well, glad to hear it's still moving.

20:14 Yep, thanks.

20:15 All right, thanks for sharing your stories with me and it was great to chat with you

20:19 and with everyone.

20:19 Oh yeah, thank you.

20:21 Yep, bye.

20:21 Talk to you next week.

20:22 Thank you for listening to Python Bytes.

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20:41 On behalf of myself and Brian Okken this is Michael Kennedy.

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