As developers we spend a lot of our work day in a terminal window, using shells that were designed 30 years ago. This week Liam Schumm joins me to explain why he decided to write a new, more ergonomic shell environment to simplify his workflow.
Analyzing and interpreting data is a large portion of the work involved in scientific research. Getting to that point can be a lot of work on its own because of all of the steps required to download, clean, and organize the data prior to analysis. This week Henry Senyondo talks about the work he is doing with Data Retriever to make data preparation as easy as “retriever install” .
We write tests to make sure that our code is correct, but how do you make sure the tests are correct? This week Ned Batchelder explains how coverage.py fills that need, how he became the maintainer, and how it works under the hood.
For any program that is used by more than one person you need a way to control identity and permissions. There are myriad solutions to that problem, but most of them are tied to a specific framework. Yosai is a flexible, general purpose framework for managing role-based access to your applications that has been decoupled from the underlying platform. This week the author of Yosai, Darin Gordon, joins us to talk about why he started it, his experience porting it from Java, and where he hopes to take it in the future.
There are dozens of decisions that need to be made when building an application. Sometimes this can lead to analysis paralysis and prevent you from making progress, so don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. This week Michael Kennedy shares his experience with evolving his application architecture when his business needs outgrew his initial designs.
In modern work environments the email is being edged out by group chat as the preferred method of communication. The majority of the platforms used are commercial and closed source, but there is one project that is working to change that. Zulip is a project that aims to redefine how effective teams communicate and it is already gaining ground. This week Tim Abbott shares the story of how Zulip got started, how it is built, and why you might want to start using it.
Routers and switches are the stitches in the invisible fabric of the internet which we all rely on. Managing that hardware has traditionally been a very manual process, but the NAPALM (Network Automation and Programmability Abstraction Layer with Multivendor support) is helping to change that. This week David Barroso and Mircea Ulinic explain how Python is being used to make sure that you can watch those cat videos.
The venerable ‘if’ statement is a cornerstone of program flow and busines logic, but sometimes it can grow unwieldy and lead to unmaintainable software. One alternative that can result in cleaner and easier to understand code is a state machine. This week Glyph explains how Automat was created and how it has been used to upgrade portions of the Twisted project.
Access to affordable and consistent electricity is one of the big challenges facing our modern society. Nuclear energy is one answer because of its reliable output and carbon-free operation. To make this energy accessible to a larger portion of the global population further reasearch and innovation in reactor design and fuel sources is necessary, and that is where Python can help. This week Dr. Katy Huff talks about the research that she is doing, the problems facing the nuclear industry, and how she uses Python to make it happen.
We all use items that are produced in factories, but do you ever stop to think about the code that powers that production? This week Jonas Neubert takes us behind the scenes and talks about the systems and software that power modern facilities, the development workflows, and how Python gets used to tie everything together.