WEBVTT 00:00:00.020 --> 00:00:01.480 Hello and welcome to Python Bytes, 00:00:01.650 --> 00:00:04.700 where we deliver Python news and headlines directly to your earbuds. 00:00:05.110 --> 00:00:09.520 This is episode 463, recorded December 22, 2025. 00:00:10.360 --> 00:00:11.060 I'm Brian Okken. 00:00:11.360 --> 00:00:12.240 And I am Michael Kennedy. 00:00:12.560 --> 00:00:14.560 And this episode is sponsored by us. 00:00:14.880 --> 00:00:19.780 So support us by heading over to Michael's courses, 00:00:20.140 --> 00:00:23.940 my courses, Talk Python Training or python test.com, 00:00:24.600 --> 00:00:28.740 or just go over and see what we got at the pythonbytes.fm. 00:00:29.840 --> 00:00:34.380 Let me add one more thing real quick there, Brian. Sorry to hijack your intro, but hey, 00:00:34.900 --> 00:00:41.520 we're coming up on 2026 and it's about time to be scheduling sponsors on the ad calendar for the 00:00:41.640 --> 00:00:45.560 next year. So if companies out there, if you're listening, you're like, why does my company not 00:00:45.780 --> 00:00:50.000 support Python Bytes and sponsor it? Yes, a fine question you should be taking up with your 00:00:50.160 --> 00:00:54.660 marketing team. Have them reach out to me. And right now there's a bunch of openings. We'll see 00:00:54.720 --> 00:00:57.040 if they get bought up or not as things go. 00:00:57.200 --> 00:00:58.620 But yeah, just send me an email. 00:00:58.900 --> 00:01:00.480 Yeah, actually, that'd be great. 00:01:00.660 --> 00:01:02.820 I'd love to have more sponsors on the show. 00:01:04.640 --> 00:01:07.980 If you want to reach us for sponsoring 00:01:08.120 --> 00:01:09.260 or any other ways, 00:01:11.380 --> 00:01:16.020 there's links on the show page, pythonbytes.fm. 00:01:16.740 --> 00:01:19.080 You can also find links to all of our socials. 00:01:19.540 --> 00:01:21.500 We're at Mastodon and Fosstodon, 00:01:21.820 --> 00:01:23.900 both us individually and the show. 00:01:24.660 --> 00:01:27.820 And also, if you'd like to watch us live, 00:01:28.200 --> 00:01:31.180 you can go to pythonbytes.com/live 00:01:31.240 --> 00:01:33.280 and see what it is and find the links. 00:01:33.600 --> 00:01:35.720 And then as well, while you're there, 00:01:36.020 --> 00:01:37.660 sign up for the mailing list 00:01:37.840 --> 00:01:39.700 so we can send you all the links we talk about 00:01:40.000 --> 00:01:40.980 directly to your inbox. 00:01:41.640 --> 00:01:43.940 Alrighty, oh, one more thing before we get started. 00:01:44.620 --> 00:01:48.400 We are taking, normally we record on Monday mornings 00:01:48.960 --> 00:01:51.400 and we are taking next week off 00:01:51.820 --> 00:01:53.500 and we will be back in 2026. 00:01:54.160 --> 00:01:56.120 All right. Kick us off, Michael. 00:01:56.740 --> 00:02:01.780 It's end of the year. As you said, we'll be back first week of January. 00:02:02.240 --> 00:02:07.180 But it's a little bit of an introspective end of the year is what I want to leave people with. 00:02:07.840 --> 00:02:13.680 So people may have noticed I usually cover tools, libraries, or updates to those kinds of things and so on. 00:02:14.000 --> 00:02:20.280 But on this episode, I want to cover two articles that I came across recently that I think they'll make you think. 00:02:20.540 --> 00:02:23.280 They'll make you really evaluate the situation. 00:02:23.740 --> 00:02:29.960 One has to do with agentic coding and one has to do with why open source won and continues to win. 00:02:30.540 --> 00:02:34.280 But more importantly, what is one of the really key ingredients? 00:02:34.690 --> 00:02:40.640 So as we look towards the future for more sustainability, let's not kill the golden goose by changing that thing. 00:02:40.830 --> 00:02:45.740 So the first one is, has the cost of building software just dropped 90 percent? 00:02:46.260 --> 00:02:48.500 That's a pretty stark headline, isn't it? 00:02:48.860 --> 00:02:49.020 Yeah. 00:02:49.270 --> 00:02:50.480 And what are the consequences? Right. 00:02:50.660 --> 00:02:56.600 Does that mean, does that mean like, well, you thought it was hard to get a job earlier as a junior and just hang on to your pants now? 00:02:57.100 --> 00:02:58.260 Or does it mean something else? 00:02:58.330 --> 00:02:58.600 We'll see. 00:02:58.860 --> 00:03:02.140 Well, at least we'll see what Martin Alderson said, because that's the article. 00:03:02.190 --> 00:03:06.140 He wrote this article and I think it is super insightful and interesting. 00:03:06.460 --> 00:03:10.720 So I kind of want to just pull out some highlights and put it out there for you all to think about as you got some downtime. 00:03:10.800 --> 00:03:23.180 So the premise is basically that many of the recent programming quote advancements that are like gonna change the world, gonna actually absolutely change the way things work, haven't really. 00:03:23.680 --> 00:03:33.100 For example, test-driven development, cloud computing, especially hyperscale clouds, microservices, complex front ends like React and so on, Angular, whatever. 00:03:33.640 --> 00:03:38.340 Kubernetes, sure, they're advancements and they help in some way or another for various things, 00:03:38.560 --> 00:03:42.980 but they're not bending the curve dramatically on how we write software, how much more we get done, 00:03:43.260 --> 00:03:49.520 and so on. Somewhat, but not massively. But they say, let me see if I can find it. Yeah, here we go. 00:03:50.360 --> 00:03:56.760 The economics have dramatically changed now with agentic coding. And I agree. I think it really 00:03:57.380 --> 00:04:02.540 has. And I know a lot of people are frustrated with AI or they don't want to use AI and so on. 00:04:02.900 --> 00:04:08.060 I'm not here to make people do that, but I am here to put on your radar that this is something you're going to have to be paying attention to. 00:04:08.480 --> 00:04:09.520 And Martin thinks so as well. 00:04:09.690 --> 00:04:13.400 Says in 2026 is going to catch a lot of people off guard. 00:04:13.520 --> 00:04:14.320 And I think so too. 00:04:14.740 --> 00:04:24.360 So it kind of goes through the history a little bit of like changes, how open source actually made a huge change, how cloud was supposed to make a big change, but it just added a crap ton of complexity. 00:04:25.150 --> 00:04:25.900 A lot of other things. 00:04:26.240 --> 00:04:30.880 So in a lot of just sort of how complexity has grown over time, instead of these things 00:04:31.070 --> 00:04:35.420 making us able to write more software or better software, a lot of times it's just handle 00:04:35.530 --> 00:04:37.560 more complex software or kind of doing the same thing. 00:04:37.820 --> 00:04:40.640 So where's the 90% savings come from? 00:04:41.040 --> 00:04:46.660 So he says, like you, probably I was incredibly skeptical of a lot of AI coding tools at the 00:04:46.800 --> 00:04:49.360 beginning of the year, but things are changing fast. 00:04:49.840 --> 00:04:55.120 And previously, if I want to, let's say I want to add some small capability to my app. 00:04:55.290 --> 00:04:55.840 How do you do it? 00:04:55.940 --> 00:04:57.380 Well, you're going to assemble a team of people. 00:04:57.600 --> 00:04:58.860 You're going to set up continuous integration. 00:04:59.460 --> 00:05:00.940 You're going to build out data access patterns, 00:05:01.160 --> 00:05:03.060 and you're going to plan that out in an architecture meeting. 00:05:03.480 --> 00:05:06.140 Really, it's just a bunch of crud, but people make a big deal out of it. 00:05:06.820 --> 00:05:09.500 So you're going to over-engineer it probably. 00:05:10.100 --> 00:05:11.920 And you're going to set up some testing and so on. 00:05:12.320 --> 00:05:13.500 And that's just direct labor, right? 00:05:13.760 --> 00:05:14.440 You've got all the management. 00:05:14.820 --> 00:05:16.780 And one of the things that's really interesting about this article 00:05:17.300 --> 00:05:20.020 is the mythical man month aspect of this. 00:05:20.220 --> 00:05:21.660 Like, okay, well, that's going to take two weeks. 00:05:21.920 --> 00:05:23.380 Well, what if we add four people to it? 00:05:23.580 --> 00:05:24.560 Well, it'll take one and a half weeks. 00:05:24.720 --> 00:05:26.440 Like, wait, why is that not half a week? 00:05:26.800 --> 00:05:28.860 You know, it's like the coordination, the communication, 00:05:29.360 --> 00:05:33.040 the in factorial ways in which there can be like blocking 00:05:33.560 --> 00:05:36.780 or communication or meetings or coordination and so on. 00:05:37.020 --> 00:05:39.200 And so these coding tools have got really, really good. 00:05:39.580 --> 00:05:42.800 And as you add one of these coding tools in, 00:05:43.260 --> 00:05:45.340 you don't have to have meetings with it. 00:05:45.620 --> 00:05:48.520 You don't have to have it working with three other ones of them 00:05:48.920 --> 00:05:51.580 so that it can coordinate different skill sets and so on. 00:05:51.700 --> 00:05:56.380 And so in a sense, it really lowers the number of connections in that mythical man month, 00:05:56.410 --> 00:05:57.600 but still adds a lot of capabilities. 00:05:57.630 --> 00:05:58.300 So pretty interesting. 00:05:58.660 --> 00:06:02.600 So final takeaway is like on the face of it, this seems like incredibly bad news for the 00:06:02.710 --> 00:06:03.800 software development industry. 00:06:04.970 --> 00:06:05.080 Indeed. 00:06:05.820 --> 00:06:07.040 But a look at history. 00:06:07.680 --> 00:06:07.980 Let's see. 00:06:08.270 --> 00:06:16.660 So Jevons paradox comes from back in the day when coal usage became super efficient, right? 00:06:16.780 --> 00:06:21.660 Instead of just burning it in an open pit or whatever to like heat something, we put it 00:06:21.680 --> 00:06:27.460 know the steam engines and it does way more work per you know joule of energy or whatever right 00:06:27.660 --> 00:06:32.440 it says look at least this guy martin thinks this applies jevon's paradox also is going to apply to 00:06:32.640 --> 00:06:37.220 software that when something becomes cheaper to produce it's not that we just use it less it's 00:06:37.300 --> 00:06:41.940 like well we've got five developers but now they're way more efficient so let's get rid of four of them 00:06:42.260 --> 00:06:45.900 that's one possible outcome the other is like let's just build five times as much software 00:06:46.200 --> 00:06:47.220 as we used to, right? 00:06:47.580 --> 00:06:49.240 And so an example is from history 00:06:49.520 --> 00:06:51.920 is when coal became way cheaper, 00:06:52.420 --> 00:06:54.100 its use skyrocketed, 00:06:54.440 --> 00:06:56.060 not cheaper, efficient, right? 00:06:56.200 --> 00:06:58.020 Like you didn't need to spend as much coal 00:06:58.340 --> 00:06:58.960 to get stuff done. 00:06:59.180 --> 00:07:02.400 But in fact, it actually blew up way, way more. 00:07:02.620 --> 00:07:03.660 So super interesting. 00:07:03.900 --> 00:07:04.900 And I think there's something to that. 00:07:04.900 --> 00:07:07.860 I think there's a ton of latent demand for software. 00:07:08.500 --> 00:07:10.660 So anyway, there's a whole section on that 00:07:10.740 --> 00:07:11.900 that's pretty interesting, I think. 00:07:12.540 --> 00:07:14.260 Yeah, I think there is a lot of, 00:07:14.840 --> 00:07:17.640 I've mixed emotions about this. 00:07:17.640 --> 00:07:19.160 I think there is a lot of light in demand. 00:07:19.540 --> 00:07:27.460 I am dealing with both agent-driven or agent-developed software on a professional basis, 00:07:27.880 --> 00:07:32.520 both from experts and from novices in a company. 00:07:33.460 --> 00:07:39.580 And it's producing five times as much code, but you get five times as much bad code from 00:07:39.960 --> 00:07:40.520 bad developers. 00:07:41.180 --> 00:07:50.280 I'm just saying, there is a, like, let's say we have five times the amount of code or five times the product, you know, do more things. 00:07:50.900 --> 00:07:55.200 That's 5xing your code base that you have to maintain in the future, too. 00:07:55.620 --> 00:08:04.060 And we really haven't figured out how to deal with the increased maintenance cost of this agent-driven software yet. 00:08:04.840 --> 00:08:06.080 Yeah, I agree with that. 00:08:06.420 --> 00:08:12.780 Also, the test-driven development, I think we didn't get the gains out of that because people were teaching it wrong. 00:08:14.240 --> 00:08:16.100 Just kind of a point from my book. 00:08:16.980 --> 00:08:17.640 Of course. 00:08:17.870 --> 00:08:24.260 But I think also there's a difference between full-on extreme programming and just, hey, let's make sure we have tests for our code. 00:08:25.020 --> 00:08:28.480 Yeah, there's also, should we test our code and should we unit test it? 00:08:28.780 --> 00:08:31.700 And that's the big part that I get. 00:08:32.050 --> 00:08:35.919 But also, can we scroll up to that complexity chart? 00:08:36.400 --> 00:08:37.320 or the little graph, 00:08:37.760 --> 00:08:42.060 I think that AI agents are going to not drive down complexity. 00:08:42.979 --> 00:08:45.940 I think we might get efficiency gains, 00:08:46.220 --> 00:08:47.240 but I don't think, 00:08:47.370 --> 00:08:48.320 I think we're going to get some, 00:08:48.640 --> 00:08:51.060 the complexity is going to go up just like it did with cloud. 00:08:52.500 --> 00:08:54.460 You know, what's really interesting about all this discussion, 00:08:54.840 --> 00:08:56.220 and I'm not disagreeing with you on this. 00:08:56.530 --> 00:08:57.760 I think it's, 00:08:58.180 --> 00:09:01.280 if people have the opinion that are just going to like cut, 00:09:01.520 --> 00:09:03.180 set these things loose on code bases, 00:09:03.350 --> 00:09:05.100 or especially on greenfield projects, 00:09:05.460 --> 00:09:08.980 you're going to end up with all sorts of mishmashes of stuff. 00:09:09.030 --> 00:09:11.400 Like, oh, this time it decided it wanted to react, 00:09:11.640 --> 00:09:12.660 but last time it used Vue. 00:09:12.750 --> 00:09:13.900 Like, now I have to know two frameworks. 00:09:13.990 --> 00:09:15.280 Like, why am I doing this, right? 00:09:15.580 --> 00:09:15.860 Yeah. 00:09:16.120 --> 00:09:19.920 There are a bunch of engineering practices and tools 00:09:20.100 --> 00:09:22.760 to apply to this stuff to get much more constrained, 00:09:23.240 --> 00:09:26.260 uniform output out of it than just letting it go free, right? 00:09:26.460 --> 00:09:28.740 And also, to Martin's defense, he says, like, look, 00:09:29.120 --> 00:09:30.340 this is not vibe coding. 00:09:30.480 --> 00:09:32.180 This is not just letting the thing go. 00:09:32.340 --> 00:09:34.580 This is, like, engineer plus... 00:09:34.580 --> 00:09:35.100 Working with it. 00:09:35.180 --> 00:09:40.320 these tools right like human in the loop all the way and even if we can get like your expert 00:09:40.600 --> 00:09:44.740 engineers at your company to work twice as fat like get twice as much productivity out of them 00:09:44.920 --> 00:09:50.100 and they're going to actually be happier because they're um it's like they've got a second brain 00:09:50.440 --> 00:09:57.460 working with them even 2x like is incredible to get incredible yeah to get your best engineers 00:09:58.140 --> 00:10:05.140 um to get to figure out stuff faster also um even not generating code but even just having stuff 00:10:05.160 --> 00:10:08.340 explain it to you. Like, how does this algorithm work? What should I care about? 00:10:09.820 --> 00:10:15.160 Asking it what tests you should write, asking it where the problem areas might be. Those are 00:10:15.340 --> 00:10:20.820 incredible things that we couldn't do before without trying to pull other people off of their 00:10:20.820 --> 00:10:25.900 own projects. So, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So two more thoughts before we wrap this up quickly. 00:10:27.120 --> 00:10:33.240 One down at the bottom here talks about, hold on before I lose track of where I was. Yeah, 00:10:33.400 --> 00:10:37.860 Greenfield. Okay. So one objection is just not in a header sort of thing. One objection that I hear 00:10:37.860 --> 00:10:42.940 a lot is LLMs are only good at Greenfield projects. And you were kind of talking about that as well, 00:10:43.080 --> 00:10:48.720 Brian, but I actually strongly disagree with this based on my experience. And so does Martin, 00:10:48.840 --> 00:10:54.920 by the way. Yeah, I do too. So I think when you turn an agentic LLM loose on a Greenfield project, 00:10:55.340 --> 00:11:00.340 it just does whatever is popular on the internet that it's done, or it thinks it's trained on or 00:11:00.360 --> 00:11:04.520 whatever, when you turn it loose on a greenfield project, if you're careful and you set up the 00:11:04.640 --> 00:11:08.860 guidelines, it can follow the same patterns that are already established in the code and use the 00:11:08.980 --> 00:11:15.460 same libraries and use the same techniques. And I just used, I spent, I would say probably an hour 00:11:15.880 --> 00:11:22.000 coming up with a prompt to do a security review for some of my code, an hour before I started, 00:11:22.400 --> 00:11:28.640 even before I try that, working on exactly what I wanted it to do, how I wanted to do it, 00:11:28.700 --> 00:11:30.300 how I wanted to go about fixing it. 00:11:30.480 --> 00:11:36.600 And I got what looks like top tier security pen testing analysis on a code base. 00:11:36.980 --> 00:11:38.240 And I thought that is awesome. 00:11:38.380 --> 00:11:40.380 And that's because it was not a greenfield project. 00:11:40.780 --> 00:11:44.760 It was thousands and thousands of lines of code that had been around for a long time 00:11:44.880 --> 00:11:46.560 with established patterns of solving things. 00:11:46.700 --> 00:11:48.260 And it was very, very, very good. 00:11:48.540 --> 00:11:53.200 So yeah, I would like to put it on the world that that is when done right. 00:11:53.340 --> 00:11:56.600 That is not, I think greenfield projects are less good, not better. 00:11:56.960 --> 00:11:57.060 Yeah. 00:11:57.200 --> 00:11:58.560 Because they have nothing to go on. 00:11:58.680 --> 00:12:02.740 right they just go on whatever they feel like i haven't really done a lot of greenfield on 00:12:03.030 --> 00:12:10.840 stuff i think greenfield for for throwaway code or for just like uh like scripts that you it just has 00:12:10.840 --> 00:12:16.560 to get the job done sort of the internal thing i think those are fine but um oh gosh i had an 00:12:16.960 --> 00:12:23.160 incredible recent experience with just um getting stuck on an algorithm that was too slow and uh 00:12:23.300 --> 00:12:31.120 i spent an hour with an llm uh and an agent um trying to um get it faster and it was like an 00:12:31.360 --> 00:12:37.840 intense hour you know yeah exactly and then i just threw it in a branch and slept on it and 00:12:37.980 --> 00:12:43.200 came back the next day and made spent another hour trying to make sure i understood all of it 00:12:43.370 --> 00:12:48.800 and i and um and tweaking it more there were some non-pythonic things that i got rid of it had 00:12:48.700 --> 00:12:53.140 recursion in there and i'm like let's get rid of that and we actually made it faster than we did 00:12:53.300 --> 00:12:59.300 before so spending a like don't don't stop with it works go a little bit further to make sure that 00:12:59.400 --> 00:13:03.740 you can maintain it in the future it doesn't take that much extra time and you're going to still be 00:13:03.840 --> 00:13:08.620 proud of it and it was an incredible experience and i'm definitely going to do that again so yeah 00:13:09.280 --> 00:13:15.519 definitely should be partners like a like a super excited coding buddy not not just a junior you just 00:13:16.420 --> 00:13:22.460 send stuff to and make it go and then i but i also spent some time an hour recently or two 00:13:22.960 --> 00:13:30.000 reviewing some test code from a junior developer and i obviously this stuff was just spit out by a 00:13:30.140 --> 00:13:38.980 agent and um and it didn't make sense and i and so it just took time away for me to review bad code 00:13:39.110 --> 00:13:44.660 and that's going to take away from your experts as well so yeah yeah that's a very good 00:13:44.460 --> 00:13:44.540 Good point. 00:13:45.060 --> 00:13:46.220 It is indeed. 00:13:47.400 --> 00:13:47.720 All right. 00:13:47.760 --> 00:13:49.240 We should have a warning or something about that, Brian. 00:13:49.360 --> 00:13:50.460 A warning, yeah. 00:13:50.730 --> 00:13:54.600 So last episode, we talked about deprecation warnings. 00:13:55.480 --> 00:13:59.180 And I have to admit, I didn't do enough research on that. 00:13:59.250 --> 00:14:01.160 So I'm glad that listeners chimed in. 00:14:01.820 --> 00:14:03.380 We got a couple of listener feedbacks. 00:14:03.400 --> 00:14:06.500 One of them I'm going to credit because we got his email right up here. 00:14:06.660 --> 00:14:12.140 John Hagan mentioned you should totally use from warnings, import deprecated, 00:14:12.360 --> 00:14:17.500 And instead of calling your own, calling warn, use the decorator deprecating. 00:14:17.820 --> 00:14:20.900 And I totally, now after playing with it, totally agree. 00:14:21.120 --> 00:14:21.420 It's awesome. 00:14:21.580 --> 00:14:22.940 So let's back up a little bit. 00:14:23.100 --> 00:14:29.440 We started with this Seth Larson article about deprecations via warnings don't work for Python libraries. 00:14:29.760 --> 00:14:34.860 And I kind of agree after experimenting because I played with it a bit. 00:14:35.020 --> 00:14:41.880 And one of the things that I found out was in, so in the Python documentation, one of the things that's cool. 00:14:42.020 --> 00:14:45.440 somebody mentioned this and I didn't really know about it is development mode. 00:14:45.690 --> 00:14:51.220 So there's dash X dev and you can also set it with a Python dev mode environmental variable. 00:14:52.740 --> 00:14:57.020 And it sets a bunch of stuff, including setting the default warnings to W. 00:14:57.340 --> 00:15:00.320 And the reason why that's important, I'm like, why is that important? 00:15:00.680 --> 00:15:04.900 The reason is important in Seth alludes to it, but doesn't point it out directly, 00:15:05.300 --> 00:15:10.820 is in the dash WR argument for Python, you could say just ignore, 00:15:11.420 --> 00:15:12.640 like ignore all warnings. 00:15:13.420 --> 00:15:14.720 And I think it's just, 00:15:14.880 --> 00:15:16.200 you can either ignore all warnings 00:15:16.440 --> 00:15:18.140 or it even tells you, for example, 00:15:18.520 --> 00:15:20.300 to ignore all your deprecation warnings, 00:15:20.440 --> 00:15:20.920 do this. 00:15:21.400 --> 00:15:24.360 Ouch, I kind of wish they hadn't mentioned that. 00:15:25.520 --> 00:15:26.960 Don't encourage people, come on. 00:15:27.160 --> 00:15:28.000 Don't encourage people. 00:15:28.400 --> 00:15:29.980 Instead of ignore, somebody else, 00:15:30.540 --> 00:15:33.280 and then again, sorry for whoever mentioned this, 00:15:33.280 --> 00:15:36.480 but somebody mentioned just use once. 00:15:36.860 --> 00:15:40.180 Ignore, like dash W once makes any warning 00:15:40.180 --> 00:15:42.960 in your code show up once and not a whole bunch of times. 00:15:43.200 --> 00:15:47.220 And it's the whole bunch of times that I think people turn it off for because it fills up 00:15:47.220 --> 00:15:48.860 your CI logs and everything like that. 00:15:49.240 --> 00:15:50.680 But you really should see it at least once. 00:15:51.000 --> 00:15:51.640 I like the once. 00:15:51.820 --> 00:15:53.020 You know what else I like about once? 00:15:53.120 --> 00:15:57.140 The W once is the pronunciation is the same as just once. 00:15:57.460 --> 00:15:58.320 That's just once. 00:15:58.780 --> 00:15:58.900 Yeah. 00:16:00.040 --> 00:16:00.200 Okay. 00:16:00.360 --> 00:16:01.540 So I played with it. 00:16:01.580 --> 00:16:03.340 I looked at this deprecation warning thing. 00:16:04.900 --> 00:16:10.160 And we'll link to the documentation in Python as well. 00:16:10.560 --> 00:16:14.980 But you can do it, combine both solutions, which I love. 00:16:15.200 --> 00:16:20.240 So you can just go ahead and declare your own warning and use the deprecated. 00:16:20.560 --> 00:16:23.020 And so I tried this out. 00:16:24.340 --> 00:16:30.580 So what you do is you just say, create your own, just a class and derive it from user warning. 00:16:31.040 --> 00:16:32.660 And you don't have to import anything for this. 00:16:32.820 --> 00:16:33.700 This is just built in. 00:16:34.320 --> 00:16:36.100 It doesn't have to do anything, just a passing class. 00:16:36.450 --> 00:16:49.140 But then if you use this deprecated decorator and pass your new warning category as deprecated, 00:16:49.280 --> 00:16:52.120 and this sounds complicated on the air, it's not. 00:16:53.860 --> 00:16:54.800 We'll do a code example. 00:16:55.580 --> 00:17:01.360 But what you get is this, I had it, warning both. 00:17:01.620 --> 00:17:03.880 Oh, yeah, it's over just right on the same screenshot. 00:17:04.400 --> 00:17:12.140 The cool thing is that mypy and other type checkers, when you use the deprecated, will flag that it's a problem. 00:17:13.100 --> 00:17:14.500 And I was doing it. 00:17:14.520 --> 00:17:18.839 I think PyCharm does the same thing, but I was doing it in VS Code. 00:17:19.060 --> 00:17:24.800 And what happens if you've got this deprecated decorator is that the IDE will just cross it out. 00:17:25.180 --> 00:17:26.760 And they're like, why is this crossed out? 00:17:26.860 --> 00:17:29.500 And if you hover over it, it'll say, oh, this is deprecated. 00:17:29.820 --> 00:17:30.880 Yeah, it's like a strikethrough. 00:17:30.880 --> 00:17:31.780 It says, don't use it. 00:17:31.780 --> 00:17:32.220 I love it. 00:17:32.460 --> 00:17:36.360 Yeah, it's very visual and it will make you like look at it. 00:17:36.390 --> 00:17:41.600 So I think that instead of just calling more and yeah, please use the deprecated. 00:17:42.500 --> 00:17:44.840 And then I was playing with pytest as well. 00:17:45.440 --> 00:17:46.740 And what did we get? 00:17:47.620 --> 00:17:49.220 I wrote it down in the show notes. 00:17:50.900 --> 00:17:54.260 Yeah, you want to pass in the dash W just like you would for Python. 00:17:54.460 --> 00:18:02.260 If you do dash W error within pytest, at least in one of your tests to find out actually all of the tests. 00:18:02.360 --> 00:18:03.220 So that'll turn. 00:18:03.630 --> 00:18:07.320 Well, even by default, pytest will warn you and do the warnings. 00:18:07.700 --> 00:18:10.060 But if you're in CI, maybe you're not watching those. 00:18:10.990 --> 00:18:18.060 So in CI, having a check for those deprecation warnings with dash W error will flag all those failures. 00:18:18.620 --> 00:18:22.540 So anyway, lots of great information from readers. 00:18:22.770 --> 00:18:23.920 So thank you for listening. 00:18:24.420 --> 00:18:28.720 We got, if they read the newsletter you send, they could be readers. 00:18:29.160 --> 00:18:30.060 Yeah, they could be readers. 00:18:31.040 --> 00:18:34.520 John pointed out that you can set an environment variable, 00:18:34.980 --> 00:18:39.660 and people may be hesitant to just set an environment variable for their computer 00:18:40.020 --> 00:18:44.160 to turn Python into dev mode, which makes it slower potentially. 00:18:44.580 --> 00:18:47.920 But if you create a virtual environment, which you should be doing, 00:18:48.360 --> 00:18:51.000 there's an activation script in that virtual environment, 00:18:51.420 --> 00:18:56.520 And you can just go and export that environment variable 00:18:56.860 --> 00:18:59.220 set to debug or whatever mode you want to set it to. 00:18:59.300 --> 00:18:59.620 - Oh yeah. 00:19:00.500 --> 00:19:02.560 - Only when you activate that virtual environment. 00:19:02.630 --> 00:19:03.920 So if you're on a particular project, 00:19:04.160 --> 00:19:05.040 you're like this one really, 00:19:05.470 --> 00:19:06.540 I don't care about speed right now, 00:19:06.540 --> 00:19:07.800 I just care about getting things right. 00:19:08.300 --> 00:19:09.340 Tweak its virtual environment, 00:19:09.960 --> 00:19:11.580 that doesn't have really many knock on effects. 00:19:11.760 --> 00:19:13.400 So that's a cool hack I think. 00:19:13.740 --> 00:19:15.760 - Yeah, it's a great place to throw in 00:19:15.940 --> 00:19:19.340 temporary pytest flags as well or any runtime flags. 00:19:19.780 --> 00:19:21.380 - Exactly, it's not just about 00:19:21.400 --> 00:19:24.240 This dev thing, like it's like a little shell script basically. 00:19:24.760 --> 00:19:24.840 Yeah. 00:19:25.380 --> 00:19:25.500 Indeed. 00:19:26.020 --> 00:19:27.320 You could do it for open source things, Brian. 00:19:27.720 --> 00:19:28.540 I love open source. 00:19:29.580 --> 00:19:30.260 So, oh yeah. 00:19:30.280 --> 00:19:31.220 So here's another article. 00:19:31.680 --> 00:19:36.340 And this one is by Thomas Dupree called How Foss One and Why It Matters. 00:19:36.440 --> 00:19:38.060 This is a pretty interesting article. 00:19:38.620 --> 00:19:43.940 And what it looks at open source, free and open source software angle from is not just 00:19:44.320 --> 00:19:46.520 why do people like writing open source software? 00:19:46.820 --> 00:19:56.060 Why do they like it better than having locked away software or having to pay or having bugs you can't fix or black box security issues potentially? 00:19:56.460 --> 00:20:00.820 As we've seen lately, open source has its whole supply chain story on that. 00:20:00.940 --> 00:20:02.600 That's different in a different way. 00:20:02.740 --> 00:20:09.300 But anyway, it really looks at it from why has it won from a company perspective, especially large companies. 00:20:09.800 --> 00:20:09.880 Okay. 00:20:10.240 --> 00:20:10.440 Okay. 00:20:10.660 --> 00:20:13.120 So it's really interesting. 00:20:13.600 --> 00:20:16.360 So it says like, look, why did it win? 00:20:16.500 --> 00:20:17.680 Well, people want to pay less. 00:20:19.000 --> 00:20:23.320 So paying less, aka free software, that's great, right? 00:20:23.720 --> 00:20:25.420 Well, how do companies make more money? 00:20:25.680 --> 00:20:30.280 They either make more profit or they have fewer expenses for a fixed level of profit. 00:20:30.480 --> 00:20:32.140 So not paying for software is great. 00:20:32.420 --> 00:20:34.400 But that's not just open source software. 00:20:34.560 --> 00:20:35.660 That's for everything. 00:20:35.940 --> 00:20:38.620 And so companies implement what's called cost control. 00:20:38.880 --> 00:20:44.020 So business term for making buying things painful, hard, and time consuming as possible. 00:20:44.100 --> 00:20:47.220 So employees will either not or hate doing it. 00:20:47.520 --> 00:20:47.760 All right. 00:20:48.580 --> 00:20:54.300 So an example is like, hey, I need a cool date picker for our site that imagine open source doesn't exist. 00:20:54.740 --> 00:21:00.320 Well, someone's going to have to start by creating a ticket to get this date picker. 00:21:00.420 --> 00:21:04.480 And then, well, we have to research the various commercial options. 00:21:05.000 --> 00:21:07.060 We could go to procurement and have them find it. 00:21:07.060 --> 00:21:08.260 But what do they know about date pickers? 00:21:08.360 --> 00:21:09.260 So we're going to do that ourself. 00:21:09.440 --> 00:21:10.460 We're going to get a report. 00:21:10.840 --> 00:21:12.640 We're going to bring it to procurement. 00:21:13.000 --> 00:21:15.780 And when we get there, then procurement says, okay, great. 00:21:16.320 --> 00:21:17.820 You're going to go with this company? Fine. 00:21:17.960 --> 00:21:21.460 So what we're going to do is first we're going to need to set up a vendor agreement with them 00:21:21.600 --> 00:21:23.700 because it turns out they're not currently a vendor of ours. 00:21:24.480 --> 00:21:29.460 So we have contracts, we have reviews, we have negotiations, all for a stupid date picker, right? 00:21:30.440 --> 00:21:31.880 It's just like, what is going on? 00:21:32.660 --> 00:21:37.480 And then on top of it, there's all these copyright laws like indemnification of like, 00:21:37.520 --> 00:21:42.620 you prove you haven't stolen from another company then to resell this to me in like some other way 00:21:42.640 --> 00:21:47.180 of that stuff, it's like eventually you get permission to buy the thing and then you could 00:21:47.210 --> 00:21:51.860 start using it. So open source software enters the scene. It says this comes with a pre-agreed, 00:21:52.010 --> 00:21:57.800 pre-reviewed license, MIT, Apache, whatever. And so the lawyers are already like, yep, 00:21:57.890 --> 00:22:01.320 we know what that is. We know how to deal with that. There's no pain. So there's no 00:22:01.780 --> 00:22:07.640 vendor research, vendor approval, contracts, copyright, all that kind of stuff. And so it 00:22:07.620 --> 00:22:13.440 really interesting like is this hack to skip around this like make buying stuff at companies 00:22:13.980 --> 00:22:19.240 super hard right so it wasn't always that way though it took a long time for companies to 00:22:19.390 --> 00:22:24.040 realize that open source was fine yes that's for sure i mean they did have to work through it but 00:22:24.040 --> 00:22:28.120 i think once they kind of it feels like they had to go through this the same process we're kind of 00:22:28.280 --> 00:22:33.620 describing once in a sort of an abstract sense like okay then well now you can just go you know 00:22:33.460 --> 00:22:38.700 know what I mean? It says, Hey, look, it also works both ways. If you're a FOSS maintainer, 00:22:39.010 --> 00:22:43.980 the miracle of your software passing, bypassing copyright laws and liabilities and procurement 00:22:44.520 --> 00:22:49.360 means that you can get your software out there and have people use it pretty easy, right? Because 00:22:49.880 --> 00:22:55.440 your stuff is much easier to adopt because it's open source. I mean, I've been on the vendor side 00:22:55.440 --> 00:23:03.340 of these negotiations and paperwork and accounting and legal more than once. And it sucks. It sucks. 00:23:03.480 --> 00:23:05.880 I mean, look, Hey, people want to put me in as a vendor and buy stuff. 00:23:06.040 --> 00:23:06.520 I'm here for it. 00:23:06.600 --> 00:23:08.620 But at the same time, it is not fun. 00:23:08.900 --> 00:23:08.960 Right. 00:23:09.020 --> 00:23:11.540 And there needs to be like, if you're just a hobbyist, like, well, no. 00:23:12.000 --> 00:23:12.260 All right. 00:23:12.520 --> 00:23:16.240 So the final bit of this article, the final bit of this thought piece is you can't go back. 00:23:16.800 --> 00:23:22.400 So if we're trying to solve, if we're trying to solve the sustainability of open source 00:23:22.680 --> 00:23:27.140 software, you have to keep in mind the reason, one of the main reasons it's so popular is 00:23:27.200 --> 00:23:29.920 it skipped the copyright rule stuff. 00:23:30.040 --> 00:23:33.260 It skipped the vendor onboarding and all these things. 00:23:33.340 --> 00:23:41.180 So if your solution to fix sustainability is to recreate any of the supply chain framework problem, your solution is dead on arrival. 00:23:41.420 --> 00:23:45.220 So I think that's what this is why I wanted to bring up this article. 00:23:45.430 --> 00:23:46.720 I put it at the end of the year. 00:23:46.780 --> 00:23:50.920 It's kind of like I would love to see more sustainability options for open source. 00:23:51.130 --> 00:23:54.060 But I do think that this guy is on to something here. 00:23:54.310 --> 00:23:59.360