Talk Python To Me

Are you coming to Python from another language and ecosystem? It can seem a bit daunting at first. But Python is very welcoming and has a massive array of tools and libraries. In this episode, I speak to my friend Cecil Philip who does both Python and .NET development. We discuss what it's like coming to Python from .NET as well as a whole bunch of compare and contrasts across the two ecosystems.

What would a modern Python project look like? Maybe it would use Poetry rather than pip directly for its package management. Perhaps its test automation would be controlled with Nox. You might automate its release notes with Release Drafter. The list goes on and on. And that list is the topic of this episode. Join me and Claudio Jolowicz as we discuss his Hypermodern Python project and template.

Python's place in climate research is an important one. In this episode, you'll meet Joe Hamman and Ryan Abernathey, two researchers using powerful cloud computing systems and Python to understand how the world around us is changing. They are both involved in the Pangeo project which brings a great set of tools for scaling complex compute with Python.

Python has come a long way since it was released in 1991. It originally released when the Standard Library was primary the totality of functionality you could leverage when building your applications. With the addition of pip and the 368,000 packages on PyPI, it's a different world where what we need and expect from the Standard Library. Brett Cannon and Christian Heimes have introduced PEP 594 which is the first step in trimming outdated and unmaintained older modules from the Standard Library. Join us to dive into the history and future of Python's Standard Library.

Are you working on or considering a machine learning project? On this episode, we'll meet three people from the MLOps community: Demetrios Brinkmann, Kate Kuznecova, and Vishnu Rachakonda. They are here to tell us about the lifecycle of a machine learning project. We'll talk about getting started with prototypes and choosing frameworks, the development process, and finally moving into deployment and production.

Pandas is a great library that allows you to accomplish a ton of filtering and processing in condensed syntax. But how well do you understand what's happening? Sam Lau and Philip Guo built a great site to help use visually explore how Pandas is processing your dataset with your specific syntax. It's called PandasTutor, and Sam is here to tell us about it.

Telescopes have been fundamental in our understanding of our place in the universe. And when you think about images that have shaped our modern view of space, you probably think about Hubble. But just this year, the JWST or James Web Space Telescope, was launch. JWST will go far beyond what Hubble has discovered. And did you know Python is used extensively in the whole data pipeline of JWST? We have two great guests here to tell us about it: Megan Sosey and Mike Swam.

Have you been considering launching a product or even a business based on Python's AI / ML stack? We have a great guest on the episode this week, Dylan Fox, who is the cofounder of AssemblyAI and has been building his startup successfully over the past few years. He has interesting stories of 100s of GPUs in the cloud, evolving ML models, and much more that I know you'll enjoy hearing.

What database are you using in your apps these days? If you like most Python people, it's probably PostgreSQL. If you roll with NoSQL like me, you're probably using MongoDB. Maybe you're even using a graph database focused more on relationships. But there's a new Python database in town, and as you learn in during this episode, many critical Python libraries have come into existence because of it. This database is called EdgeDB. EdgeDB is built upon Postgres, implemented mostly in python, and is something of a marriage of a traditional relational database and an ORM.

When you think about the power of Python, the clean language or powerful standard library may come to mind. You might certainly point to the external packages too. But what about the relative ease of picking up new libraries or even parts of the standard library? Documentation plays an important role there. And the tools in the Python space for building solid documentation and even publishing articles and books involving live code are huge assets.

Two frameworks that have taken the Python world by storm are FastAPI and Pydantic. Once you already have your data exchange modeled in Pydantic, you might want to use that code for storing it in the database. And, if you have DB models you might want to somehow use them to power and document the APIs built with FastAPI. But the popular ORMs, such as SQLAlchemy and others, far predate Pydantic. But could they be put together?

Do we talk about running Python in production enough? I can tell you that the Talk Python infrastructure (courses, podcasts, APIs, etc.) get a fair amount of traffic, but they look nothing like what Google, or Instagram, or insert [BIG TECH NAME] here's deployments do. Yet, mostly, we hear about interesting feats of engineering at massive scale that is impressive but often is also outside of the world most Python devs need for their companies and services.

The world of AI is changing fast. And the AI / ML space is a bit out of the ordinary for software developers. Typically in software, we can prove that given a certain situations, the code will always behave the same. We can point to where and why a decision is made. ML isn't like that. We set it up and then it takes on a life of its own.

For 30 years, Python was overseen by Guido van Rossum since he created and released it around in 1990. When he retired in 2018 he left the creation of the new governing body up to the core developers. After a few stressful months, they concept of the steering council became the way forward.

This podcast episode you're listening to right now was delivered to you, in part, by MongoDB and Python powering our web apps and production processes. But if you're using pymongo, the native driver from MongoDB to talk to the server, you're doing it wrong. Basing your app on a foundation of exchanging raw dictionaries is a castle of sand. BTW, see the joke at the end of the show about this.