The Python Podcast.__init__

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list. Summary Because of its easy learning curve and broad extensibility Python has found its way into the realm of algorithmic trading at Quantopian. In this episode we spoke with Scott Sanderson about what algorithmic trading is, how it differs from high frequency trading, and how they leverage Python for empowering everyone to try their hand at it. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS Follow us on Twitter or Google+ Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+ I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at pythonpodcast.com We are recording today on December 16th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we are interviewing Scott Sanderson on Algorithmic Trading Interview with Scott Sanderson Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? – Chris Can you explain what algorithmic trading is and how it differs from high frequency trading? – Tobias What kinds of algorithms and libraries are commonly leveraged for algorithmic trading? – Tobias Quantopian aims to make algorithmic trading accessible to everyone. What do people need to know in order to get started? Is it necessary to have a background in mathematics or data analysis? – Tobias Does the Quantopian platform build in any safe guards to prevent user’s algorithms from spiraling out of control and creating or contributing to a market crash? – Chris How is Python used within Quantopian and when do you leverage other languages? – Tobias What Pypi packages does Quantopian leverage in its platform? – Chris How do the financial returns compare between algorithmic vs human trading on the stock market? – Tobias Can you speak about any trends you see in the trading algorithms people are creating for the Quantopian platform? – Chris Picks Tobias Kinetic Sand Trivium Thrift Books Chris Threes Jessica Jones) Serial Scott Dota 2 Philosophical Investigations Logicomix Infinite Jest Keep In Touch Twitter Email GitHub Links QGrid SlickGrid Jupyter Hub Light Table CodeMirror Cython PyData NYC Talk by Scott Blaze Dask Theano TensorFlow Zipline Pyfolio PGContents SQLAlchemy Gevent quantopian.com/lectures The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list. Summary The Python language is built by and for its community. In order to add a new feature, change the specification, or create a new policy the first step is to submit a proposal for consideration. Those proposals are called PEPs, or Python Enhancement Proposals. In this episode we had the great pleasure of speaking with three of the people who act as stewards for this process to learn more about how it got started, how it works, and what impacts it has had. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS Follow us on Twitter or Google+ Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+ I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at pythonpodcast.com This episode is sponsored by Zato – Microservices, ESB, SOA, REST, API, and Cloud Integrations in Python. Visitzato.io to learn more about how to integrate smarter in the modern world. I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.__init__. Use the link hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus. Searching for Pythonistas with Disabilities We are recording today on December 7th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we are interviewing some of the PEP editors Interview with PEP editors Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? – Chris For anyone who isn’t familiar with them, can you explain what a PEP is and how they influence the Python language? – Tobias What are the requirements for a PEP to be considered for approval and what does the overall process look like to get it finalized? – Tobias How has the PEP process evolved to meet challenges posed by changes in the Python community? – Chris How many reviewers are there and how did each of you end up in that role? Is there a set number of editors that must be maintained and if so how did you arrive at that number? – Tobias What mistakes have other communities made when creating similar processes, and how has PEP learned from those mistakes? – Chris There are different categories for PEPs. Can you describe what those are and how you arrived at that ontology? – Tobias Is there any significance to the numbering system used for identifying different PEPs? – Tobias How does the PEP process maintain its sense of humor (e.g. PEP 20) while being sure to be taken seriously where it really counts? – Chris Along the lines of humorous PEPs, can you share the story of PEP 401? – Tobias How does the PEP process strive to prevent an undesirable level of control by any one company or other special interest group? – Chris How much control does Guido have over the PEP process? Has a PEP ever directly countered Guido’s wishes? How did it turn out? – Chris What is your favorite PEP and why? – Tobias Barry: PEP 20 Chris: PEP 479 David: PEP 20 What, in your opinion, has been the most important or far-reaching PEP, whether it was approved or not? – Tobias David: PEP 20 Chris: PEP 466 Barry: PEP 8 What was the strangest / most extreme PEP proposal you’ve ever seen? – Chris Chris: PEP 501 Barry: PEP 507 David: PEP 666 Picks Tobias Wagtail CMS Inside Out Spark Podcast Hymn for Atheists Chris Trumbo Kivy Crash Course Jihadology Podcast Barry Tox Nose2 Jessica Jones The Joy of Science Chris The Git Manpage Generator Daily MTG David Tim’s Vermeer Ready Player One The Aristocrats Scientific Songs of Praise Hollywood Babble On Keep In Touch Barry Blog Chris Blog GitHub David Website Blog Links Monty Python – All the Words Monty Python – On YouTube PEP 404 PEP 666 Raymond Hettinger PyCon 2015 PEP8 talk Python Dev Mailing List Python Ideas Mailing List Python Bug Mailing List The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list. Summary The first place we all go for learning about new libraries is the documentation. Lack of effective documentation can limit the adoption of an otherwise excellent project. In this episode we spoke with Eric Holscher, co-creator of Read The Docs, about why documentation is important and how we can all work to make it better. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS Follow us on Twitter or Google+ Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+ I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at pythonpodcast.com I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.__init__. Use the link hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus. Linode is sponsoring us this week. Check them out at linode.com/podcastinit and get a $10 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for your next project We are recording today on November 30th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we are interviewing Eric Holscher about Documentation Use the promo code podcastinit10 to get a $10 credit when you sign up! On Hired software engineers & designers can get 5+ interview requests in a week and each offer has salary and equity upfront. With full time and contract opportunities available, users can view the offers and accept or reject them before talking to any company. Work with over 2,500 companies from startups to large public companies hailing from 12 major tech hubs in North America and Europe. Hired is totally free for users and If you get a job you’ll get a $2,000 “thank you” bonus. If you use our special link to signup, then that bonus will double to $4,000 when you accept a job. If you’re not looking for a job but know someone who is, you can refer them to Hired and get a $1,337 bonus when they accept a job. Interview with Eric Holscher Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? – Chris You are one of the people behind the Read The Docs project. What was your inspiration for creating that platform and why is documentation so important in software? – Tobias What makes Read The Docs different from other static sources for documentation? – Chris The Python community seems to have a stronger focus on well-documented projects than some other languages. Do you have any theories as to why that is the case? – Tobias Can you outline the landscape of projects that leverage the documentation capabilities that are built in to the Python language? – Tobias Can you estimate the overall user base for Read The Docs? – Chris Do you have any advice around methods or approaches that can help developers create and maintain effective documentation? – Tobias Can you list some projects that you have found to provide the best documentation and what was remarkable about them? – Tobias Newcomers to open source are often encouraged to submit improvements to a projects documentation as a way to get started and become involved with the community. Do you have any general advice on how to find and understand undocumented features? – Tobias Do you have any statistics on the languages represented among the projects that host their documentation with you? – Tobias What are some of the challenges you’ve faced and overcome in maintaining such a large repository of documentation from so many projects? – Chris How can our listeners contribute to the project? – Chris Picks Tobias The Man from Uncle Minute Physics Chris SigAvdi Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS Veritassium Eric Khao Soi Climate Change Gardening & healthy eating – Classic Keep In Touch Twitter @ericholscher @readthedocs @writethedocs Links Stripe docs Django Girls Tutorial Write The Docs Write The Docs Meetup Talk Write The Docs Slack Channel The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list. Summary The Python AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) is a powerful abstraction that allows for a number of innovative projects. ASTroid is a library that provides additional convenience methods to simplify working with the AST. In this episode we spoke with Sylvain Thénault from Logilab about his work on ASTroid and how it is used to power the popular PyLint static analysis tool. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS Follow us on Twitter or Google+ Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+ I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at pythonpodcast.com I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.__init__. Use the link hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus. Linode is sponsoring us this week. Check them out at linode.com/podcastinit and get a $10 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for your next project We are recording today on November 23rd, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we are interviewing Sylvain Thénault about ASTroid On Hired software engineers & designers can get 5+ interview requests in a week and each offer has salary and equity upfront. With full time and contract opportunities available, users can view the offers and accept or reject them before talking to any company. Work with over 2,500 companies from startups to large public companies hailing from 12 major tech hubs in North America and Europe. Hired is totally free for users and If you get a job you’ll get a $2,000 “thank you” bonus. If you use our special link to signup, then that bonus will double to $4,000 when you accept a job. If you’re not looking for a job but know someone who is, you can refer them to Hired and get a $1,337 bonus when they accept a job. Use the promo code podcastinit10 to get a $10 credit when you sign up! Interview with Sylvain Thénault Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? – Chris Can you explain what an Abstract Syntax Tree is and why it is a useful language feature? – Tobias What was your inspiration for creating ASTroid? – Chris What features does ASTroid offer over Python’s standard AST package, and what makes those features important? – Chris I know that the ASTroid package is used in Pylint which is also maintained by Logilab. How does the AST facilitate static analysis of Python projects and are there cases where you have to fall back to text parsing? – Tobias Beyond static analysis, what are some of the other possible uses for the Python AST? – Tobias The documentation for the AST package in Python mentions that the specific syntax objects in the tree are subject to change between releases. Does the ASTroid package provide any abstractions to maintain a consistent API between versions or does it just provide a pass-through? – Tobias Have you encountered any challenges in testing ASTroid given that it operates at such a low level in the language? – Chris Do you have trouble attracting contributors given the great understanding of Python’s inner working required? – Chris Does the implementation or representation of the AST differ between different distributions of Python such as CPython, PyPy and Jython? – Tobias What are some of the most interesting applications ASTroid has been used in? – Chris Picks Tobias Pre-Commit Existential Comics htmlPy Chris Pretty Things – Fluffy White Rabbits Fallout 4 Sylvain PyReverse CubicWeb Keep In Touch Code Quality Mailing List PyLint Dev Mailing List Twitter @sythenault @logilab Logilab Links Visitor pattern Pylint The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list. Summary What is Solar Physics? How does it differ from AstroPhysics? What does this all have to do with Python? In this episode we answer all of those questions when we interview Stuart Mumford about his work on SunPy. So put on your sunglasses and learn about how to use Python to decipher the secrets of our closest star. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS Follow us on Twitter or Google+ Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+ I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at pythonpodcast.com I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.__init__. Use the link hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus. Linode is sponsoring us this week. Check them out at linode.com/podcastinit and get a $10 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for your next project We are recording today on November 17th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we are interviewing Stuart Mumford about SunPy Use the promo code podcastinit10 to get a $10 credit when you sign up! On Hired software engineers & designers can get 5+ interview requests in a week and each offer has salary and equity upfront. With full time and contract opportunities available, users can view the offers and accept or reject them before talking to any company. Work with over 2,500 companies from startups to large public companies hailing from 12 major tech hubs in North America and Europe. Hired is totally free for users and If you get a job you’ll get a $2,000 “thank you” bonus. If you use our special link to signup, then that bonus will double to $4,000 when you accept a job. If you’re not looking for a job but know someone who is, you can refer them to Hired and get a $1,337 bonus when they accept a job. Interview with Stuart Mumford Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? – Chris Can you explain what the research and applications of solar physics are and how SunPy facilitates those activities? – Tobias What was your inspiration for the SunPy project and what are you using it for in your research? – Tobias Can you tell us what SunPy’s map and light curve classes are and how they might be used? – Chris Are there any considerations that you need to be aware of when writing software libraries for practitioners of the hard sciences that would be different if the target audience were software engineers? – Tobias Can SunPy consume data directly from telescopes and other observational apparatus? – Chris I noticed on the project site that SunPy leverages AstroPy internally. Can you describe the relationship between the two projects and why someone might want to use SunPy in place of or in addition to AstroPy? – Tobias Looking at the documentation I got the impression that there is a fair amount of visual representation of data for analysis. Can you describe some of the challenges that has posed? Is there integrated support for project Jupyter and are there other graphical environments that SunPy supports? – Tobias What are some of the most interesting applications that SunPy has been used for? – Chris Picks Tobias Elm Avro Common Sense Media Chris Massdrop 21st Amendment Fireside Chat Extra Creditz Stuart Live ISS Stream with space-to-ground radio Live ISS HD video stream 24/7 yt Calf Studio – Live Audio Processing Keep In Touch Twitter(@sunpyproject) SunPy.org GitHub IRC The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list. Summary The Software and Data Carpentry organizations have a mission of making it easier for scientists and data analysts in academia to replicate and review each others work. In order to achieve this goal they conduct training and workshops that teach modern best practices in software and data engineering, including version control and proper data management. In this episode we had the opportunity to speak with Maneesha Sane, the program coordinator for both organizations, so that we could learn more about how these projects are related and how they approach their mission. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS Follow us on Twitter or Google+ Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+ I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at pythonpodcast.com This episode is sponsored by Zato – Microservices, ESB, SOA, REST, API, and Cloud Integrations in Python. Visit zato.io to learn more about how to integrate smarter in the modern world. I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.__init__. Use the link hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus. Linode is sponsoring us this week. Check them out at linode.com/podcastinit and get a $10 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for your next project We are recording today on November 10th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we are interviewing Maneesha Sane about Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry Interview with Maneesha Sane Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? Can you explain what the Software and Data Carpentry organizations are and what their respective goals are? What is the history of these organizations and how are they related? What does a typical Software Carpentry or Data Carpentry workshop look like? What is the background of your instructors? Can you explain why Python was chosen as the language for your workshops and why it is such a good language to use for teaching proper software engineering practices to scientists? In what ways do the lessons taught by both groups differ and what parts are common between the two organizations? What are some of the most important tools and lessons that you teach to scientists in academia? Do you tend to focus mostly on procedural development or do you also teach object oriented programming in Software Carpentry? What is the target audience for Data Carpentry and what are some of the most important lessons and tools taught to them? Do you teach any particular method of pre-coding design like flowcharting, pseudocode, or top down decomposition in software carpentry? What scientific domains are most commonly represented among your workshop participants for Software Carpentry? What are some specific things the Python community and the Python core team could do to make it easier to adopt for your students? What are the most common concepts students have trouble with in software & data carpentry? How can our audience help support the goals of these organizations? Picks Tobias Vivaldi Browser vyte.in Pocket Casts Chris Chiptunes = Win ESM – Electronic Study Music Supergalactic Expansive Maneesha QPython New Boston Lunar Baboon Keep In Touch Twitter @swcarpentry @datacarpentry @maneeshasane Blog Software Carpentry Data Carpentry Links NumFocus Software Carpentry GitHub – Training Courses Instructor Training Discussion Mailing List The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and subscribe to our mailing list. Summary Erik Tollerud is an astronomer with a background in software engineering. He leverages these backgrounds to help build and maintain the AstroPy framework and its associated modules. AstroPy is a set of Python libraries that provide useful mechanisms for astronomers and astrophysicists to perform analyses on the data that they receive from observational equipment such as the mountain observatory that Erik was preparing to visit when we talked to him about his work. If you like Python and space then you should definitely give this episode a listen! Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS Follow us on Twitter or Google+ Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+ I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at pythonpodcast.com I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.__init__. Use the link hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus. Linode is sponsoring us this week. Check them out at linode.com/podcastinit and get a $10 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for your next project We are recording today on November 2nd, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we are interviewing Erik Tollerud about AstroPy On Hired software engineers & designers can get 5+ interview requests in a week and each offer has salary and equity upfront. With full time and contract opportunities available, users can view the offers and accept or reject them before talking to any company. Work with over 2,500 companies from startups to large public companies hailing from 12 major tech hubs in North America and Europe. Hired is totally free for users and If you get a job you’ll get a $2,000 “thank you” bonus. If you use our special link to signup, then that bonus will double to $4,000 when you accept a job. If you’re not looking for a job but know someone who is, you can refer them to Hired and get a $1,337 bonus when they accept a job. Use the promo code podcastinit10 to get a $10 credit when you sign up! Interview with Erik Tollerud Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? What was the inspiration to create AstroPy and what kinds of astronomical research can it be used for? Can you tell us what AstroPy’s modeling functions are and give us examples of where they might be used? Are there any considerations that you need to be aware of when writing software libraries for practitioners of the hard sciences that would be different if the target audience were software engineers? What are some of the most interesting applications that AstroPy has been used for? Are there open data sets that are available for people outside of academia to do analysis of astronomical data using AstroPy? Have there been any useful discoveries made in this way? Could you please tell us about AstroPy’s Virtual Observatory capabilities? What are some interesting use cases for AstroPy’s Cosmological calculations? Are there other libraries available that provide similar capabilities, perhaps in other languages? What makes AstroPy unique among them? Can AstroPy consume data directly from telescopes and other observational apparatus? The amount of data generated from observing astronomical phenomena must be immense. What are some of the tools used to manage that data and how does AstroPy interface with them? How might AstroPy be used to prove or disprove the cold dark matter hypothesis? What are some of the architectural choices that have been made to allow for the AstroPy library to serve as the core for a number of other add-ons? Does AstroPy provide a common data format to allow for easy interoperability between the various addons? I noticed that AstroPy adheres to the PSF code of conduct, as well as having adopted an enhancement proposal process modelled after PEPs. Can you explain why that is important and what kind of an impact it has had on the community around AstroPy? Picks Tobias Citizen Ex piprot Open Culture Chris The Allusionist Criminal Hardcore History Erik HubbleSite Great Courses – History of the Ancient World Keep In Touch astropy.org AstroPy User Mailing List AstroPy Dev Mailing List Links tutorials.astropy.org AstroQuery Cython The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list. Summary Service integration platforms have traditionally been the realm of Java projects. Zato is a project that shows Python is a great choice for systems integration due to its flexibility and wealth of useful libraries. In this episode we had the opportunity to speak with Dariusz Suchojad, the creator of Zato about why he decided to make it and what makes it interesting. Listen to the episode and then take it for a spin. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS Follow us on Twitter or Google+ Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email, leave us a message on Google+, or leave a comment on our show notes I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.__init__. Use the link hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus. Linode is also sponsoring us this week. Check them out at linode.com/podcastinit and get a $10 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for your next project. We are recording today on October 27th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we are interviewing Dariusz Suchojad about Zato Interview with Dariusz Suchojad Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? Can you explain what Zato is and what motivated you to create it? What makes Zato stand out from other service bus implementations? What are some signs that someone should consider incorporating Zato into their software architecture? Does zato perform well in restricted resource environments like ec2? What performance bottlenecks are common when using zato? It seems that most other ESB projects are written in Java. What advantages does Python have over Java for this kind of project and in what ways is it inferior? The architectural nature of ESBs are such that they form the central backbone of a software system. How have you been able to ensure an appropriate level of reliability and stability in Zato while still delivering new features and improvements? What are the scalability and high availability characteristics of Zato? Does zato run well using pypy? For anyone wanting to use Zato, what are the infrastructure requirements for deployment? What are some of the security ramifications you took into account in zato’s design? What are some of the most novel uses for Zato that you have seen or heard about? Picks Tobias SPY Eric Royer’s One Man Band pip-tools Chris Rational Security New Rustacean Podcast Johan Goes to Mexico Dariusz Sublime Text Editor Keep In Touch zato.io Twiter Github The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list. Summary Tom Rothamel is an embedded systems engineer who spends his free time working on Ren’Py, a visual novel engine written in Python. Ren’Py allows you to write interactive fiction experiences and deploy them across desktop and mobile platforms. By creating a purpose-built DSL for describing the interactions, users of Ren’Py can focus on crafting polished experiences without fighting through the vagaries of programming languages, while still providing access to the internals when necessary. Listen to our interview with Tom to learn more about this long-running project and what makes it so interesting. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS Follow us on Twitter or Google+ Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+ I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.__init__. Use the link hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus. Linode is also sponsoring us this week. Check them out at linode.com/podcastinit and get a $10 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for your next project. We are recording today on October 19th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we are interviewing Tom Rothamel about RenPy On Hired software engineers & designers can get 5+ interview requests in a week and each offer has salary and equity upfront. With full time and contract opportunities available, users can view the offers and accept or reject them before talking to any company. Work with over 2,500 companies from startups to large public companies hailing from 12 major tech hubs in North America and Europe. Hired is totally free for users and If you get a job you’ll get a $2,000 “thank you” bonus. If you use our special link to signup, then that bonus will double to $4,000 when you accept a job. If you’re not looking for a job but know someone who is, you can refer them to Hired and get a $1,337 bonus when they accept a job. Interview with Tom Rothamel Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? What is Ren’Py and what was your inspiration for starting it? I noticed that Ren’Py supports a number of different styles of gameplay. Can you explain the differences between interactive fiction, kinetic fiction and RPGs? I notice that RenPy has clearly been around a while (Some of the games for OSX are PowerPC binaries!) – what problems have you encountered maintaining such a long lived project and keeping it current? What libraries does Ren’Py leverage and how did you go about selecting them to allow for cross-platform development and deployment? What underlying Python graphics toolkit does RenPy use for display, and how did that choice affect RenPy’s design? While reading through the quickstart in the documentation I noticed that there is a special syntax that you have created for defining the dialog and narratives. Can you explain how you created the DSL for building the storylines? It feels to me like RenPy was heavily inspired by the JRPG genre and as such there are games where sex plays a prominent role(I noticed a mention of Hentai in the docs), which is less readily accepted in the west. Have you ever encountered any pushback on this issue? I noticed that some of the games that were created with Ren’Py are available on the Steam platform. What elements of the Ren’Py project lend themselves to producing games with enough polish to be published on such a mainstream platform? If you were just starting out today implementing RenPy, would you still use Python? Why? Picks Tobias DJ Logic git-extras Radon Chris Narcos The Rust Programming Language Kent Falls Brewing Shower Beer Tom Cython NPR One The Seinfeld Method Keep In Touch renpy.org Twitter Links Long Live The Queen Moonlight Walks The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list. Summary Anthony Scopatz is the creator of the Python shell Xonsh in addition to his work as a professor of nuclear physics. In this episode we talked to him about why he created Xonsh, how it works, and what his goals are for the project. It is definitely worth trying out Xonsh as it greatly simplifies the day-to-day use of your terminal environment by adding easily accessible python interoperability. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS Follow us on Twitter or Google+ Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+ I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at pythonpodcast.com I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.__init__. Use the link hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus. Linode is also sponsoring us this week. Check them out at linode.com/podcastinit and get a $10 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for your next project We are recording today on October 12th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we are interviewing Anthony Scopatz about Xonsh On Hired software engineers & designers can get 5+ interview requests in a week and each offer has salary and equity upfront. With full time and contract opportunities available, users can view the offers and accept or reject them before talking to any company. Work with over 2,500 companies from startups to large public companies hailing from 12 major tech hubs in North America and Europe. Hired is totally free for users and If you get a job you’ll get a $2,000 “thank you” bonus. If you use our special link to signup, then that bonus will double to $4,000 when you accept a job. If you’re not looking for a job but know someone who is, you can refer them to Hired and get a $1,337 bonus when they accept a job. Use the promo code podcastinit10 to get a $10 credit when you sign up! Interview with Anthony Scopatz Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? Can you explain what Xonsh is and your motivation for creating it? For people transitioning to Xonsh from a shell like Bash or Zsh, what are some of the biggest differences that they will see? What are some really powerful one-liners that showcase Xonsh’s capabilities? What is it about Python that lends itself to this kind of a project and what are your thoughts on building something like Xonsh in another language such as Ruby or Node.js? If you had to single out one killer feature that Xonsh brings to the table, what would that be? Is it possible to specify which shell, such as bash or zsh, gets used in subprocess mode? I started using the Xonsh shell as my daily terminal recently and have been enjoying it so far. One of the things that I have been wondering is how to hook into the completion system to provide eldoc style completion from parsing the output of help flags. Do you have any advice on where to start? Perhaps using the docopt library to handle parsing of help output and generate completions from that? What are your thoughts on adding a section to the project documentation for people to list various extension modules that people can take advantage of? Or perhaps creating something along the lines of Oh my Xonsh? How do bash function definitions interoperate with the Xonsh environment and functions defined in Python? It seems as though there could be some potential path or compatibility issues when moving between virtual environments and having access to extension modules loaded into Xonsh. Can you shed some light on that? Do you have any suggestions for people who may not have the privileges to set their own login shell but who want to try Xonsh? What are some of the most interesting uses of Xonsh that you have seen? What does the future hold for the Xonsh project and how can our audience help? Picks Tobias Mortdecai Alembic SQLAlchemy population.io Chris Consider Phlebas The Martian – Movie Fantastic Planet Anthony The Worst Journey In The World Keep In Touch Mailing List xonsh.org #xonsh on OFTC GitHub Twitter: @scopatz Links Effective Computation in Physics Python Prompt Toolkit The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list. Summary Kay Hayen is a systems engineer from Germany who has dedicated his spare time to the creation of Nuitka, a library that will compile your Python project to C++. In this episode we talked to Kay about what inspired him to create the project, how it operates, and some of the challenges he has faced. It is a very interesting project and it has the potential to let you run your Python code in a whole new way! Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS Follow us on Twitter or Google+ Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email, leave us a message on Google+, or leave a comment on our show notes I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at pythonpodcast.com I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.__init__. Use the link hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus. Linode has also sponsored this episode and you can get a $10 credit using the link linode.com/podcastinit to try out their fast and reliable linux virtual servers. We are recording today on October 6th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we are interviewing Kay Hayen about the Nuitka project On Hired software engineers & designers can get 5+ interview requests in a week and each offer has salary and equity upfront. With full time and contract opportunities available, users can view the offers and accept or reject them before talking to any company. Work with over 2,500 companies from startups to large public companies hailing from 12 major tech hubs in North America and Europe. Hired is totally free for users and If you get a job you’ll get a $2,000 “thank you” bonus. If you use our special link to signup, then that bonus will double to $4,000 when you accept a job. If you’re not looking for a job but know someone who is, you can refer them to Hired and get a $1,337 bonus when they accept a job. Use the promo code podcastinit10 to get a $10 credit when you sign up! Interview with Kay Hayen Introductions German, family with 2 kids, one cat Working in ATM (Air Traffic Management), tracker product Systems Engineer Nuitka as a hobbyist How did you get introduced to Python? Once was Perl “Guru”. Python was getting a lot of positive press Team decision to want to use readable stuff CPAN was still more complete, but Python was making inroads Can you describe how to pronounce the name of your project? Wife Anna, Russian, Annuitka -> Nuitka Can you briefly describe what Nuitka is and what your motivation was for creating it? I was thinking a fully integrated and compatible compiler should be possible. Why is nobody doing it? I can do it. I am doing it. Take Python beyond current use cases. Everbody currently using Python needs no compiler, or wouldn’t use it Less need for time consuming C++/Python hybrid coding Simple code should compile to fast code by default Complex code should still work On the project web site it says that Nuitka does a lot of clever things after being fed a Python project. Can you provide some details as to what some of that cleverness is? Re-formulations of Python into simpler Python No “class” No “assert” No complex assignments SSA tracing Attaching uses to assignments properly Despite try/finally Loops Avoids checks for known defined/undefined values Function inlining (coming) Constant propagation Closure variable removal What is libpython and how is it used in both Nuitka and CPython? Core of the Python interpreter With Python VM and C interface Nuitka can fall back to it Avoiding it as often as we can, key to performance Is there any way to provide hints to Nuitka to generate more optimized output? Nuitka is yet to make a difference based on type information Not yet there, but coming soonish. SSA was pre-requisite PEP 484 will be unreliable type information, mostly useless I want type hints that are checked at Python run time What are some of the biggest challenges in generating statically compiled code from a language as dynamic as Python? Python is compiled to .pyc files Compatible Frame stack, cached Exception handling of Python is terrible CPython type system designed to be extensible Extension types for functions, bound/unbound methods, generators, etc. Many details to get right Are there any particular Python constructs that Nuitka is unable to translate and as a corollary to that is the compilation step lossy at all or do you have some way of ensuring that the functionality of the program remains unaltered? Big point, no price attached Except for not having bytecode, there is nothing missing No pdb support Edit / run cycle is not accelera

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list. Summary Trent Nelson is a software engineer working with Continuum Analytics and a core contributor to CPython. He started experimenting with a way to sidestep the restrictions of the Global Interpreter Lock without discarding its benefits and that has become the PyParallel project. We had the privilege of discussing the details around this innovative experiment with Trent and learning more about the challenges he has experienced, what motivated him to start the project, and what it can offer to the community. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS Follow us on Twitter or Google+ Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+ I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.__init__. Use the link hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus. We are recording today on September 7th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we are interviewing Trent Nelson about PyParallel On Hired software engineers & designers can get 5+ interview requests in a week and each offer has salary and equity upfront. With full time and contract opportunities available, users can view the offers and accept or reject them before talking to any company. Work with over 2,500 companies from startups to large public companies hailing from 12 major tech hubs in North America and Europe. Hired is totally free for users and If you get a job you’ll get a $2,000 “thank you” bonus. If you use our special link to signup, then that bonus will double to $4,000 when you accept a job. If you’re not looking for a job but know someone who is, you can refer them to Hired and get a $1,337 bonus when they accept a job. Interview with Trent Nelson Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? For our listeners who may not be aware, can you give us an overview of what Pyparallel is and what makes it different from other Python implementations? How did PyParallel come about? What are some of the biggest technical hurdles that you have been faced with during your work on PyParallel? I understand that PyParallel currently only works on Windows. What was the motivation for that and what would be required for enabling PyParallel to run on a Linux or BSD style operating system? How does Pyparallel get around the limitations of the global interpreter lock without removing it? Is there any special syntax required to take advantage of the parallelism offered by PyParallel? How does it interact with the threading module in the standard library? In the abstract for the Pyparallel paper, you cite a simple rule – “Don’t persist parallel objects” – how easy is this to do with currently available concurrency paradigms and APIs, and would it make sense to add such support? For instance, how would one be sure to follow this rule when using Twisted or asyncio? Are there any operations that are not supported in parallel threads? What drove the decision to fork Python 3.3 as opposed to the 2.X series? In the documentation you mention that the long term goal for PyParallel is to merge it back into Python mainline, possibly within 5 years. Has anything changed with that goal or timeline? What milestones do you need to hit before that becomes a realistic possibility? Can you compare PyParallel to PyPy-STM and Go with Goroutines in terms of performance and user implementation? What are some particular problem areas that you are looking for help with? Assuming that it does get merged in as Python 4, how do you think that would affect the features and experiments that went into Python 5? To be continued… Picks Tobias Testinfra Software Engineering Daily Chris Hello Webapp – Intermediate Concepts Grimm Rainbow Dome PBS Idea Channel Trent Show Stopper by G. Pascal Zachary Keep In Touch GitHub Twitter @PyParallel @TrentNelson

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our newsletter! Summary Dag Brattli is an engineer with Microsoft and in his spare time he created the ported the Reactive Xtensions framework to Python in the form of the RxPy library. In this episode we had the opportunity to speak with Dag and learn more about what ReactiveX is, why it is useful and how you can use it in your Python programs. It is definitely a very powerful programming patern when manipulating data streams which is becoming increasingly common in modern software architectures. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS Follow us on Twitter or Google+ Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+ I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.__init__. Use the link hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus. We are recording today on October 2nd, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we are interviewing Dag Brattli about the RxPy project On Hired software engineers & designers can get 5+ interview requests in a week and each offer has salary and equity upfront. With full time and contract opportunities available, users can view the offers and accept or reject them before talking to any company. Work with over 2,500 companies from startups to large public companies hailing from 12 major tech hubs in North America and Europe. Hired is totally free for users and If you get a job you’ll get a $2,000 “thank you” bonus. If you use our special link to signup, then that bonus will double to $4,000 when you accept a job. If you’re not looking for a job but know someone who is, you can refer them to Hired and get a $1,337 bonus when they accept a job. Interview with Dag Brattli Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? For our listeners who haven’t heard of it before, can you describe what RxPy is and why someone might want to use it? What problem domains are best suited for using the Reactive X approach? What is involved in integrating RxPy into an existing code base? When should we use RxPy over asyncio or asynchronous workers like Celery? What resources or tutorials do you recommend people use when trying to understand how and when to use the Reactive X tools? What in particular about Python lends itself to the ReactiveX pattern, and what features of the language does RxPy leverage in particular in its implementation? In what ways does the Python implementation of the Reactive X framework differ from those of other languages? The project description references the use of LINQ for querying the various data streams that RxPy enables consumption of. I had always heard of LINQ in the context of traditional database queries. What makes LINQ a good choice for stream processing? I mostly hear about ReactiveX in terms of UI design, but the project description seemed to indicate it was much more generally useful. What are some of the less common and more interesting problems that RxPy lends itself to solving? Picks Tobias icdiff Timeline card game Griatch’s Digital Art Chris elpy sshuttle Chimay Grand Reserve Dag ASTor How To Bake Pi – A book about the mathematics of mathematics Keep In Touch GitHub Links Main ReactiveX Site rxjava site for documentation rxmarbles MSDN Channel 9 Function Overloading in Python 3 The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, join the mailing list and support the show. Summary uWSGI is one of the most versatile application servers available. It was originally written for running Python applications and has since gained functionality to support Perl, Ruby, PHP, and more in addition to the incredible feature set. In this episode Tobias got to interview three of the core developers of this project and find out more about how the different pieces of it fit together and what its future holds. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS Follow us on Twitter or Google+ Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+ I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at I would also like to thank Hired, a job marketplace for developers, for sponsoring this episode of Podcast.init. Sign up at hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus. We are recording today on September 22nd, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we are interviewing the core developers of uWSGI (Adriano Di Luzio, Riccardo Magliocchetti, and Roberto De Ioris) Interview with uWSGI core developers Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? For anyone who hasn’t come across the project before, can you explain what uWSGI is and what makes it unique? How did you architect uWSGI in order to allow for supporting so many different languages? The feature set of uWSGI is truly incredible. Does this make the code complicated to understand and modify? Can you describe some of your favorite features in uWSGI? What have you found to be the most overlooked or underutilized features of uWSGI? Can you briefly describe how Emperor mode works and how that can be used to handle routing between microservices? Could you discuss some of the particular features UWSGI provides around load balancing? Is connection draining supported? Can nodes be dynamically added and removed from the pool or does the config need to be rewritten and UWSGI restarted? The configuration syntax looks like it provides a very rich set of capabilities. Is it based on a general purpose programming language or is it a DSL? What might be some common use cases for using UWSGI in tandem with another web server like NGINX? I have read that WSGI does not get along with http/2. Are there any plans to look towards supporting that protocol in some way? What new capabilities can we look forward to in the future of uWSGI? Picks Tobias Manjaro Linux Kontact Blackhat Riccardo Building Microservices book Django-Denis Adriano Paxos Algorithm Roberto The Brink Keep In Touch Mailing List #uWSGI on IRC GitHub latest docs Roberto Twitter GitHub Adriano GitHub Twitter Riccardo GitHub Twitter

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, sign up for our mailing list and support the show. Summary Griatch is an incredibly talented digital artist, professional astronomer and the maintainer of the Evennia project for creating MUDs in Python. We got the opportunity to speak with him about what MUDs are, why they’re interesting and how Evennia simplifies the process of creating and extending them. If you’re interested in building your own virtual worlds, this episode is a great place to start. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS Follow us on Twitter or Google+ Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+ I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at We are recording today on September 15th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we are interviewing Griatch about the Evennia project Interview with Griatch Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? Can you explain what MUDs are and what that has to do with Evennia? What is it about MUDs that keeps them interesting long after the technical restrictions that led to their creation are no longer present, especially in light of 3D multiplayer games like WoW and EVE Online? Can you give us a rundown of the various parts of Evennia (MUD engine, web interface, etc.) and how they fit together? How does Evennia handle the fact that a MUD world is comprised of many hundreds of objects containing various properties, maintaining consistent, persistent state as players interact with them? What concurrency tools or paradigms does Evennia use? During the height of MUDs popularity, one highly sought after feature was the idea of being able to have players travel from one MUD instance to another, would it be possible to implement this in Evennia? Has the Evennia core team given any thought to adding features to support a richer client interface? Graphical maps or the like? How difficult would it be to use Evennia to interface with something like Slack or Hipchat for a company-wide MUD? Have you ever heard of someone doing something like that? Are there any fully fledged running MUDs built with Evennia out in the wild? Picks Tobias libraries.io jsonapi.org Marshmallow Marshalling Library Chris The End of All Things David’s Tea Steeper Hello Webapp – Intermediate Concepts Griatch F2Py Designing Virtual Worlds Imaginary Realities Optional Realities Keep In Touch Evennia Website Evennia Github Freenode IRC Channel #Evennia Links roll20

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list Summary We got the chance to talk to some of the core developers of Hylang, which is a Lisp dialect that runs on the Python VM! We talked about how it got started, how it works and why you should try it. Of particular interest is our discussion about using Hylang to backport language features, or create entirely new ones due to the power of Lisp and the Python AST (Abstract Syntax Tree). If you need to level up your Lisp knowledge, they gave us a great list of references to help out. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS Follow us on Twitter or Google+ Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+ I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at We are recording today on August 27, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we are interviewing Paul Tagliamonte, Tuukka Turto, and Morten Linderud Interview with Hylang Developers Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? Before we get too far along can you explain what Hy is? What inspired you to create Hy? What do you recommend as reference material for Python developers to gain familiarity with idiomatic Lisp? What are some of the problem domains where implementation becomes easier or more elegant as a result of Hy’s LISP syntax? Given the ability to create powerful macros in Lisp, could Hy be used as a way of prototyping or backporting new language features in Python? What are some of the most challenging and interesting problems you encountered bringing an alternate syntax to the Python runtime? While playing around with the Hy REPL I noticed that it does visual matching of parentheses when closing an expression. What other niceties have been included in the REPL? What are your thoughts on adding autocompletion to the REPL as a way of encouraging discovery and exploration of the Hy language? Which LISP variant is Hy most similar to, and why? How does garbage collection work in Hy, and why? How hard would it be to port existing LISP packages to Hy like MACSYMA or CLOS? What kind of overhead in terms of runtime performance and memory usage does Hy impose? Has this been a challenge in Hy’s development? What are some of the most innovative uses for Hy that you have seen or created? What does the future hold for Hy? I noticed that there are a large number of core contributors to Hylang and I’m curious how you determine what features to work on? Picks Tobias Displacy The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker – Read it on Scribd Safari Online Chris Dash and Zeal Reasonably sound (podcast) PBS Idea Channel (Youtube) Paul Reproducible Build Project Model View Culture Tuukka SICP Lecture F# ReactiveX 1 Game Per Month (#!GAM) Morten Hackers Mr. Robot Keep In Touch Paul Twitter paultag on IRC Website Tuukka Twitter Morten Twitter Links Core features of Hylang Adderall – minicanron in hylang Books Joy of Clojure Let over Lambda Land of Lisp Clojure programming Herculeum – Tukka’s DSL for roguelikes Pixie – Lisp in RPython Dogelang BPython Github trending repos with Hylang Pineal hydiomatic – Algernon

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, subscribe to our mailing list, and donate to the show. Summary Bryan Van de Ven is the project maintainer for Bokeh, a plotting and visualization toolkit that allows Python developers to easily create attractive interactive visualizations for the web. We talked about the project’s history, some interesting use cases for it, and what its near future looks like. Bryan also told us about how Bokeh compares to some of the other visualization libraries in both Python and Javascript, as well as how to use Bokeh from other languages such as Scala and Lua. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS Follow us on Twitter or Google+ Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+ I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at There is a new Python podcast that just started up recently! It’s called the Python Test Podcast and covers the world of testing in Python, so go ahead and give it a listen. You can find it at We are recording today on Aug 18th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we are interviewing Bryan Van de Ven about the Bokeh project Interview with Bryan Van de Ven Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? For our listeners who aren’t familiar with what Bokeh is, can you describe it? What inspired you to create Bokeh? Bokeh has integrations with some of the other Python graphing libraries such as matplotlib and seaborn. I can see how this would be useful to easily update existing code to publish visualizations on the web. Are there other use cases for these integrations? I noticed that Bokeh has bindings for some languages other than Python. R and Julia are obvious candidates due to their strong focus on analytics work, I’m curious what made you choose Scala and Lua as languages worth targeting? Do you lose any capabilities using the javascript library by itself? Other than the sample data sets that come with Bokeh, can you suggest a good publicly available data set with accompanying tutorial for people who want to get started with data visualization using Bokeh? Can you provide some comparisons between D3.js and the Bokeh javascript library in terms of capabilities and performance? The Bokeh project has a server component that allows for streaming data to clients. Can you describe the architecture of that and some example uses for it? Why was the server written as a Flask blueprint as opposed to making it a component of another framework such as Django or Pyramid and how difficult would it be to port the functionality to another system? What’s the most interesting use of Bokeh you’ve seen? Are you aware of any projects in other languages that are comparable to Bokeh? Picks Tobias wappalyzer The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman Chris Edward Snowden Meets the IETF Between the World and Me Untapp’d Bryan Audiobooks Scribd – Subscription service for ebooks and audio books with a great selection Try Audible and Get Two Free Audiobooks Cartographies of Time The Post-Modern Jukebox Keep In Touch Twitter Mailing List Bokeh Web Site Links vispy Vincent vega D3.js nbviewer.org bokeh page million song dataset data.gov ggplot / ggvis mathematica

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show and sign up for our mailing list. Summary We got the chance to talk to Jessica McKellar about her work in the Python community. She told us about her experience as a director for the PSF, working as the diversity outreach manager for PyCon, and being a champion for improving the on-boarding experience for new users of Python. We also discussed perceptions around the performance of Python and some of the work being done to improve concurrency, as well as her work with OpenHatch. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS Follow us on Twitter or Google+ Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+ I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at We are recording today on Aug, 12 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we are interviewing Jessica McKellar Interview with Jessica McKellar Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? Attended MIT, originally for Chemistry Had friends pursuing CS degrees Toolset and skills seemed worth investingating Led to BA and MS MIT was in transition from LISP to Python Can you describe what your responsibilities are as a director of the PSF? A lot of outreach and investment in the community Do you think the PSF does a good job of making people aware of what it is, what it does for the community, and how they can help? Struggled with this historically but has gotten better in recent years Website re-design has helped A large focus of your work in the community has been around improving the experience of users who are new to Python and programming in general and I noticed that you just received the Frank Willison Memorial Award for your contributions to outreach and education in the Python community. What is your motivation behind this particular focus? Great deal of empathy for newcomers due to personal history Knowing how to program changes how you think about the world Has the situation for newcomers running Windows who wish to try Python gotten any better since your keynote at Kiwi PyCon? Some vaguaries of setup have gotten better with recent versions (e.g. setting path variables) Ruby has in-browser tutorial to get people hooked Do “Batteries Included’ distributions like Anaconda help or is it the same problem of visibility you discussed in your talk? Informatino flow / what are you default options question We could be much more opinionated about this You have presented a number of times about the future of Python and how we can all help to make sure that story is a happy one. How has the material for that talk changed over the past few years? As a largely volunteer community, how to maximize the impact of the bandwidth that we have Focus on the ‘top of the funnel’ to win over new users Python has the steepest positive curve of any language Community should invest in AP high school Python curriculum What do you anticipate will be the talking points for this topic over the next few years? We need to be smart about which areas we invest in to ensure success e.g. mobile, web, desktop. If you could grade the Python community on how well they have listened to and acted on the calls to action in your talks over the past few years, what would you give them? Rallying large groups of volunteers is a hard problem We need to think about commercial partnerships in key areas In your Kiwi PyCon talk you mentioned Kivy as an example of a great way to do mobile software development in Python. It feels to me like the Kivy team are still not getting the community involvement and buy in they should. How can we help make Kivy the mobile app development platform of choice for beginners? This will be a tough battle because Python is not the default platform for mobile compared to Java for Android, Objective C, Swift Users vote with their feet depending on what provides the most value to them Opportunity for a virtuous cycle here Game development as an entree to programming has been a recurring theme on our podcast. Has the Python game dev scene improved at all since 2013? And do you still see the same pitfalls holding people back (like app packaging), or have we moved on to different problems? The problems are largely the same Status quo still feels pretty broken Creative experiments around this definitely make sense for the community KivEnt could be a win here because Kivy apps are free standing binaries and require no dependencies. What do you view as the biggest threats to the popularity of Python currently and what can we do to address them? Other languages gaining popularity where Python has historically been strong (e.g. server-side development) A lot of this may be a perception issue May

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, comment on the show or find out more about us. Summary In this episode we had the opportunity to discuss the world of static site generators with Roberto Alsina of the Nikola project and Justin Mayer of the Pelican project. They explained what static site generators are and why you might want to use one. We asked about why you should choose a Python based static site generator, theming and markup support as well as metadata formats and documentation. We also debated what makes Pelican and Nikola so popular compared to other projects. Brief Introduction Welcome to Podcast.__init__ the podcast about Python and the people who make it great Follow us on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Give us feedback on iTunes, Twitter, email or Disqus We donate our time to you because we love Python and its community. If you would like to return the favor you can send us a donation}. Everything that we don’t spend on producing the show will be donated to the PSF to keep the community alive. Date of recording – August 08, 2015 Hosts Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we are interviewing the core developers of Nikola and Pelican about static site generators Interview Introductions Monitorial.net <- Justin Upriise <- Justin Works for Canonical <- Roberto How did you get introduced to Python? Justin: Needed a way to get order data to payment processor for commerce company Roberto: 1996 got involved with Linux Found XForms Wrote Python bindings For our listeners who might not know, what are static site generators and what are some of the advantages they bring to the table over other similar systems that perform the same function? Roberto Remove all the effort from the computer that serves the website Server runs no code Smaller ssurface area for security purposes Justin Better performance – important for responsiveness and uptime Easier deployment and maintenance Easier versioning and migration Can version both input and output There are a number of static site generators available in virtually every language. Why would a user want to leverage a Python solution vs Ruby, javascript, Go, etc.? ReStructured TeXT is best supported in Python Good language for supporting various markup syntaxes Most static site generators seem to have a primary focus on blogging. What is it about these tools that lend themselves so well to that use case? The author of the tools shape the purpose of the tool Most popular among programmers which is a demographic that is likely to have a blog Workflow is similar to what programmers are used to Still useful for non-chronological pages due to templating system Something that struck me comparing the two systems is that they have largely the same kinds of data going into the metadata block for each post, but it’s expressed in a different / incompatible way in each. Have you ever considered agreeing on a standard and even advertising it as such so all static site generators could make use of it? Challenging because of the idiosyncratic way problems are solved in each system Wouldn’t end up with the same site even if metadata were identical Roberto & Justin are talking, this may happen! The themes in Pelican and Nikola have very different feels and one of the things that initially drew me to Pelican is the larger catalog of themes available. What are some of the challenges involved in creating a theme for a static site generator? Many programmers who write SSGs aren’t amazing at HTML Pelican and Nikola seem to be the most widely used projects for creating static sites using Python. What do you think is the key to that popularity? Frequent updates, good documentation and large community Easy to get up and running Need to be productive inside of 2 minutes Good first impressions are key Importance of extensibility Core modularity and availability of plugins A lot of people have written about the importance (and difficulty) of writing and maintaining good documentation in open source projects. Nikola’s documentation is excellent. How did Nikola manage this in its development process and what can other open source projects learn from this? No secrets – just do it and keep it updated. Need to look at the tool as if using it for the first time What are some specific examples of unique and interesting uses your site generators have been put to? Justin: kernel.org, Debian, Chicago Linux Users, TransFX (translation house) all use Pelican Embedding Jupyter notebooks and MathML rendering in posts Site search plugin Nikola: Big adoption in the sciences (Jupyter notebook embedding supported in core) Output is forever Plugin to trigger internet archive to reindex site Nikola’s flexible deployment architecture (e.g. the use of doit tasks) seems to lend itself to some interesting use cases. What was the inspiration for this? Build was taking 1 1/2 hours, doit allowed for incremental generation Doit is a generic task system. Nikola has no “main” it’s a collectio

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, learn more about us, and support the show. Summary We got the opportunity to speak with Al Sweigart about his work on books like ‘Automate The Boring Stuff With Python’ and ‘Invent With Python’. We discussed how Python can be useful to people who don’t work as software engineers, why coding literacy is important for the general populace and how that will affect the ways in which we interact with software. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or RSS Follow us on Twitter or Google+ Give us feedback! Leave a review on iTunes, Tweet to us, send us an email or leave us a message on Google+ I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. For details on how to support the show you can visit our site at We are recording today on July 27th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we are interviewing Al Sweigart about Python for non-programmers Interview with Al Sweigert Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? Started in PHP/Perl, introduced to Python in 2006 Lack of curly braces took some getting used to Clarity of standard library was refreshing What inspired you to start writing books for non-programmers? Friend who took care of 10 year old interested in programming Lack of coherent introductory material Started writing a tutorial which grew to book length All books published under Creative Commons license You have written a few books about teaching Python to people who have never programmed, can you share your thoughts on the best order in which to introduce the various aspects of programming? Blog post driven development – http://blog.estimote.com/post/119525082855/user-stories-on-steroids-how-estimote-uses-blog?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss Where does software testing come in when teaching new coders how to program? Use the logger, debugger, and assertions effectively In invent with Python you use games as the vehicle to discuss the principles involved with writing code. What is it about computer games that makes them so popular as a means to introduce programming to newcomers? Something everyone is familiar with Easy to make a simple game to get started Good way to get creative with programming For automate the boring stuff with Python you focused on explaining how programming can be useful even if it is not someone’s occupation. How did you determine which kinds of activities to focus on for the book? Got the idea at a meetup talking to someone who works in an office doing repetitive tasks A lot of office jobs that involve tedious computer work which could be automated What are your thoughts on the need for software literacy among the general population? How much programming knowledge do you think is sufficient for a member of our modern society? You also wrote about using Python to decrypt simple ciphers as a means to learn about code. What was the inspiration for this approach to software education? One of the projects in invent with Python was a simple cypher, inspired further interest in the subject In episode 7 with Jacob Kaplan-Moss we talked about how we define what a programmer is. Can you share your opinions on what separates someone who can understand code from someone who is a programmer? Barriers to entry have been significantly lowered, making the distinction very fuzzy Definition of programmer is becoming much wider Books available at: Automate the Boring Stuff Invent With Python Picks Tobias Logbook Emacs Psychotherapist Ex Machina Mining the social web Chris Emacs Rocks Working Copy Feedly Tom Collins Al PyCon Selenium Python Module Seven Eaves by Neal Stephenson Keep In Touch Twitter Email

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, find additional content, sign up for our newsletter or learn about the hosts. Summary In this episode we talked to Liza Avramenko, the CEO of CheckIO, about Empire of Code and CheckIO. We discussed what differentiates them from each other and from the other coding games that have been spreading on the internet. One of the main differentiators for CheckIO in particular is the strong focus on community. The bottom line is that if you use Python then you should check out CheckIO and Empire of Code as a great way to practice your skills. Brief Intro Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. Follow us on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Give us feedback on iTunes, Twitter, email or Disqus We donate our time to you because we love Python and its community. If you would like to return the favor you can send us a donation. Everything that we don’t spend on producing the show will be donated to the PSF to keep the community alive. We are recording today on July 27th, 2015 and your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we are interviewing Liza Avramenko about CheckIO Interview Please introduce yourself How did you get introduced to Python? Learned about it from Co-Founder Alex For anyone not familiar with CheckIO, can you explain what it is? What was the inspiration for creating the CheckIO platform? Alex was bored working in a bank and wanted to create a place for sharing practice problems What is your goal with this platform? Become global community for most popular coding languages Remain open and supportive How do you deal with the question of ownership and licensing in CheckIO? Was this a tricky hurdle to get past in the site’s creation? Being willing to share solutions publicly is a core part of the site. This had to be more explicitly stated due to some users confusion early on. Growing a community is difficult because of the chicken and egg problem. How did you kickstart the growth of the CheckIO community? Community always number one priority Started organically Initially had 24/7 live chat to help new users Openness was attractive, led to critical mass As community grew, need for live chat decreased Nature of Python community lends itself well to a collaborative, open community Guido provided advice on how to grow and foster community Guido himself has participated in a number of conversations on your platform to critique submissions. Have you received any feedback from him directly about his impressions of the system? How does diversity play into CheckIO? Are there aspects of the site’s design that are purposefully meant to attract a diverse audience? CheckIO has always targeted people with basic coding experience Early live chat feedback focused around very new coders wishing there was more material for them These early challenges resulted in the development of Empire of Code There are a number of other online programming-oriented games available. What makes CheckIO and Empire of Code stand out from them? Priority of community Others are more about gaming, showcasing talent How did you design the gamification aspects of CheckIO, and how important do you think they are to the site’s success? CheckIO was never a game, more of a library of challenges that have game elements Empire of Code is all about gamification, code and algo improvement are baked into the gameplay You choose Python or Javascript “legions” at character creation time, this is a one time choice. Buildings, troop movements, materials, etc. are all based in code Players can steal code and algorithms from other players Incredible innovation Great adoption story for new users – can start playing without writing any code But in order to really excel you will WANT to start writing code So many people have their original motivations for coding come from playing games Cooperative play in the form of training missions with other players This is an opportunity to learn how people on the other side are solving the same problem New languages are planned – Ruby, maybe Java? Do you think that there is something about the Python language or community that inspires adoption of this kind of gamified practice? You recently released the beta of a new experience called Empire of Code which is more akin to the type of video game that many people are familiar with. What inspired that evolution? As part of the new experience, you also added JavaScript as an available language. Do you intend to add new languages in the future? Is there a particular demographic or set of demographics that you are targeting with Empire of Code vs CheckIO? What’s the monetization strategy for Empire of Code or CheckIO? For Empire, you can play for free but you might keep losing your resources until you can learn to code more effectively, OR you can buy a shield which will protect your resources for a time. In CheckIO, how do you label the difficulty level of the in

Visit our site for past episodes and extra content. Summary In this episode we had a nice long conversation with Glyph Lefkowitz of Twisted fame about his views on the need for an established code of ethics in the software industry. Some of the main points that were covered include the need for maintaining a proper scope in the ongoing discussion, the responsibilities of individuals and corporations, and how any such code might compare with those employed by other professions. This is something that every engineer should be thinking about and the material that we cover will give you a good starting point when talking to your compatriots. Brief Introduction Welcome to Podcast.__init__ the podcast about Python and the people who make it great Date of recording – July 21, 2015 Hosts Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Follow us on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, Google+ and Twitter Give us feedback! (iTunes, Twitter, email, Disqus comments) We donate our time to you because we love Python and its community. If you would like to return the favor you can send us a donation. Everything that we don’t spend on producing the show will be donated to the PSF to keep the community alive. Overview – Interview with Firstname Lastname about Topic Interview with Glyph Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? – Chris 2000 – large scale collaborative gaming system in Java Asynchronous IO Twisted Let’s start with the bad news What are some of the potential wide spread implications of less than ethical software that you were referring to in your Pycon talk? – Chris Robot Apocalypse (Not really) Much of the discussion around this derails into unrealistic nightmare scenarios THERAC 25 radiation machine Toyota unintended acceleration scandal Real worry – gradual erosion of trust in programmers and computers First requirement for a code of ethics – a clear understanding of the reality you’re trying to litigate The search for ethics will likely begin in academia where this aspect of software dev is more like psychology. In your talk you commented on the training courses that Lawyers are required to take as part of their certification. Do you think the fact that there is no standardized certification body for software development contributes to a lack of widely held ethical principles in software engineering? – Tobias Do you think that it is necessary to form such a certification mechanism for developers as part of the effort to establish a recognized ethical code? – Tobias If we were to create a certification to indicate proper training in the software engineers code of ethics, how do you think that would affect the rate at which people enter the industry? – Tobias Assuming we can all agree on a set of relatively strict professional ethics that would prevent the above from happening, how would we enforce those ethics? Or do you advocate an honor system? – Chris Ethics are by definition an honors system Enforcement would be straight forward – professional organizations to maintain a record and deviations from that record Need better laws & better jurisprudence We need an Underwriters Laboratory seal for software development ethics Code of software ethics will not and should not tell you how to be a decent human being. Devs / companies can create software that could be used for evil – “We are merchants of death and these are lethal weapons” – could conceivably earn the ethical software developer’s seal of approval. Where does accessibility of the software we make fit into a code of ethics? Do you think there should be a minimum level of support for technologies such as screen readers or captioning for audio content in the software that we build? – Tobias Minimum levels of knowledge required Minimum levels of content in curriculum In your talk you mentioned how Rackspace’s stance on user support matches the ideals you’d previously laid out, can you flesh that out a bit for us? What does that mean to individual Rackers in their day to day work lives? – Chris In your talk you mentioned that availability of the software source should be mandatory for compliance with a properly defined ethical framework. What mechanisms for providing that access do you think would be acceptable? Should there be a central repository for housing and providing access to that source? – Tobias Would the list of acceptable mechanisms change according to the intended audience of the software? – Tobias What responsibility do you think producers of software should have to maintain an archive of the source for past versions? – Tobias How should we define what level of access is provided? In the case of commercial software should the source only be available to paying customers, perhaps delivered along with the product? This also poses an interesting quandary for SaaS providers. Should they provide the source to their systems only to paying customers,

Visit our site to listen to past episodes, learn more about the show and sign up for our mailing list. Summary In this episode we talked to Holger Krekel about the py.test library. We discussed the various styles of testing that it supports, the plugin system and how it compares to the unittest library. We also reviewed some of the challenges around packaging and releasing Python software and our thoughts on some ways that they can be improved. Brief Introduction Welcome to Podcast.__init__ the podcast about Python and the people who make it great Date of recording – July 8th, 2015 Hosts Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Follow us on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Give us feedback on iTunes, Twitter, email or Disqus) We donate our time to you because we love Python and its community. If you would like to return the favor you can send us a donation}. Everything that we don’t spend on producing the show will be donated to the PSF to keep the community alive. Overview – Interview with Holger Krekel about his work on Pytest Interview with Holger Krekel Introductions Programming for 25 years Runs a consultancy Been to almost every EuroPyCon and PyCon US How did you get introduced to Python? – Chris Wanted to write an HTTP proxy and Java I/O was too confusing. Jython took less than a day to get it working after 2-3 days on it with Java. What inspired you to create Pytest, and how did the existing unittest framework play into the story? – Chris Introduced to agile methods through the Zope community Zope used unittest – didn’t like the boiler plate Not in the spirit of Python Only took ~200 lines of code to get a testing tool working Original name was ‘utest’ – 2003 Pytest name came in 2004 on Pypy project Huge number of tests on that project (20,000) – distributed test runner – xdist helped solve this. There are many different styles of testing, such as BDD, unit testing, integration testing, functional testing, what attributes of py.test make it suitable or unsuitable for these different approaches? – Tobias What are your views on black box testing and how would someone use py.test to implement this approach? – Tobias Pytest’s plugin architecture enables you to hook into the various phases of test execution enabling you to extend Pytest in all kinds of ways beyond the original design. I have been hearing a lot about property based testing which was popularized by the Quickcheck module in Haskell. Does py.test support anything like that? – Tobias hypothesis-pytest Do you think the characteristics and nature of the unit testing framework being used have any effect on the number and quality of the tests developers write? – Chris Developers find writing tests in Pytest to be fun compared to unittest Which will help people write better tests Encourages refactoring Is there ever a time when you would advice against writing tests? – Tobias When exploring a problem, writing tests first doesn’t make sense When getting feedback on a potential approach, writing tests first can be a waste of time What are some signs that you watch out for when writing tests that tell you that a particular feature needs to be refactored? – Tobias When the test code is fragile it should be refactored Requires experience to really understand when to refactor When it’s not fun anymore or the tests are repetitive For someone who is converting their existing unit tests from UnitTest/Nose style to use py.test in an idiomatic manner, what are some of the biggest differences to be aware of? – Tobias Generator/yield based testing should move to property based testing If py.test can’t run a UnitTest/Nose style test it is considered a bug and gets fixed Has the strict backwards compatibility policy presented any interesting technical challenges thus far? – Chris Yes it definitely makes more work However breaking the API in a large project like this will cause too many problems for users py.test supports execution of tests written with other frameworks, how much ongoing maintenance does this feature require as changes are made to the other implementations? – Tobias The web page says that Pytest is designed to work with domain specific and non Python tests, and in fact a coworker is using it to test a node.js project – how did Pytest’s design enable this? – Chris Pytest uses a collection tree model to represent your project This is not Python specific All classes and functions are just mapped into this tree, not directly on the Python function There are few Python specific hooks for fixtures etc. People have written plugins so they can express their tests in YAML, Microsoft Excel Tests are represented as items All plugins are written in Python What are some of the most interesting applications of py.test that you have seen? – Tobias Plugins! Pytest-BDD Pytest-C++ Pytest-sugar Py.test plugin list Speaking about adoption, do you have any sense of t

Visit our site for more news, information and past episodes of Podcast.__init__! Summary We talked to Damien George about his work on the Micro Python interpreter and the PyBoard SOC (Systom On a Chip). The combination of the interpreter and SOC allows Python developers to get involved in hardware hacking, as well as letting electronics afficionados try their hand at development. Damien explained to us where this fits in with the expanding landscape of low cost embedded devices and why you should get one to start playing with it. Brief Introduction Date of recording – June 29th, 2015 Hosts – Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Follow us on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Give us feedback! (iTunes, Twitter, email, Disqus comments) You can donate (if you want)! Overview – Interview with Damien George from the Micro Python project Interview with Damien George Introductions Postdoc in Theoretical Physics How did you get introduced to Python? What problem were you trying to solve when you first had the idea to create the Micro Python board and interpreter? Not really Python lets you get things done quickly Abstracts the hardware really well In the Kickstarter video you mention that Micro Python is a complete re-implementation of Python optimized to run on a micro-controller. How hard was it to create an alternative Python implementation? Did you have hard decisions to make as to what to include given the limitations of the hardware? To start with, was it even possible? Proof of Concept: Get a REPL running on the board Lots of tricks to get things to fit into RAM Stuffing integers into pointers Optimizing RAM at various points Runs the parser 4 times, looking for different things each time Lots of things are stored in ROM in the built-in Flash Very fine efficiency trade off between code size, memory usage, speed. REPL runs in 1K of RAM! Most of this is the parse tree 20 line script might take ~5K RAM 128K RAM on the Micro Python board Not 100% Python – but 90% – the most useful parts I know that people who have developed alternative Ruby implementations have run into issues due to the lack of a formal specification. Has the fact that there is a specification for Python made your job easier? Definitely, Python is very well defined Well documented Already multiple implementations The WiPy chip seems like an interesting device. What are some ways in which it could be put to use? A Micro Python cluster for instance? Small, cheap, low power little wireless chip that also runs Python You can telnet in and have a Python REPL Part of the Internet of Things What changes did you have to make to get the Python interpreter to run without an underlying operating system? When you were designing the hardware, what were some of the requirements that you were targeting in terms of performance or peripherals? Wanted the best chip for the least money Didn’t know ahead of time how many resources were required What level of hardware knowledge is required to start working with the Micro Python board? Virtually none Just need to plug into USB and login with a terminal program to get a Python prompt Can change frequency of CPU, turn on/off LEDs, etc. Connecting peripherals requires some hardware knowledge Module namespace to make hardware management easier For anyone who is interested in writing libraries, what kinds of restrictions do they need to be aware of? Be aware of RAM size limitations Prety much anything that will fit will work Libraries with C extensions won’t work because they rely on the CPython API What license is used for the Micro Python interpreter and the PyBoard? Are the compatible with commercial uses? MIT License Hardware schematics are open source as well, open and accessible design What are some of the most interesting/innovative projects that you have seen people make with the Micro Python board or runtime? Damien attempted to make a quadcopter – not completely finished Micro Python controlled guitar – PyBoard connected to actuators to play guitar How does the experience of using Micro Python compare to some of the other hardware projects that are popular right now such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi or Tessel? PyBoard in between Arduino and Raspberry Pi More approachable than Arduino Not a full OS like Raspberry Pi Tessel similar to Micro Python but runs Javascript EU Space Agency (Europe’s version of NASA) interested in Micro Python Prepared to fund Micro Python development to explore possibilities of space based applications Code needs to be well written and with few bugs See if it can be used for real-time systems Picks Tobias Machine Gun Preacher – Real life story of Sam Childers’ work in Southern Sudan Pocket Book Android App – E-Book app with good UI/UX and solid feature set Online access to digital media through local library memberships Hoopla Digital Overdrive Chris Real Ramen RedHat Summit The SELinux Coloring Book Damien MOSH – Mobile shell, resilient SSH that

Find past episodes and more information about the show at iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Give us feedback! (iTunes, Twitter, email, Disqus comments) You can donate (if you want) Overview – Interview with Allen Downey, Prolific Author and Professor of Computer Science Interview with Allen Downey Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? – Chris Wrote a Java book with an open license to allow anyone to make changes Jeff Elkner translated it to Python What attributes of Python make it well suited for use in teaching computer science principles? Syntax is simple, makes a difference for beginners Good error messages Batteries included One of the things I found very compelling about Think Like a Computer Scientist is its use of interactive turtle graphics early on. What makes the turtle continue to be a compelling educational tool and what made you choose it for this book in particular? Everything you do has a visible effect, makes it easier to see what’s happening and debug Used to introduce functional decomposition because of no return value in turtle graphics Great way to explore complex geometric concepts Did the structure of your courses change when you started using Python as the language used in the classroom? Were you able to cover more material as a result? Able to make material more interesting Less time spent fighting with syntax As a professor of computer science, do you attempt to incorporate the realities of software development in a business environment, such as unit testing and working with legacy code, into your lesson plans? Unit tests useful as a teaching tool Version control getting introduced earlier A number of your books are written around the format of ‘Think X’. Can you describe what a reader can expect from this approach and how you came up with it? Learning how to program can be used as a lever to learn everything else You can understand what a thing is by understanding what it does What are some of the more common stumbling blocks students and developers encounter when trying to learn about stastics and modeling, and how can they be overcome? Traditional analytic methods for statistical computation – get in the way and impede understanding P-values are a great example What test should I do? is the wrong question I’ve heard you refer to yourself as a ‘bayesian’. Can you elaborate on what that means and how bayesian statistics fits into the larger landscape of data science? Frustration with frequentist approach to statistics Wasted time over debate of objectivity vs subjectivity Bayesian approach takes modeling ideas and makes them explicit Can directly compare and contrast results of competing models Classical approaches don’t answer the most interesting questions *We’re big fans of iPython notebook which you’ve used in at least one of your books already – can you describe some of the ways you have implemented it in an educational context, as well as some of the benefits and drawbacks? Started using about 2 years ago Appreciated usefulness for books and teaching because of synthesis of text, code and results Working on DSP really highlighted the usefulness of IPython notebooks Picks Tobias IMAPy – IMAP for humans ScudCloud – Linux desktop Slack client Thrive – Online purchasing club for healthy and organic foods Floobits – remote pair programming Chris Testament of Youth Mastering Emacs – The Website / Blog StayFocused Fallout Shelter Keep in Touch Twitter Blog The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Listen to past episodes and find out more about the show at our website pythonpodcast.com Synopsis In this episode we talked to Jacob Kovac, creator of the KivEnt game engine and one of the Kivy core developers. He told us about what inspired him to create the KivEnt project, some of the ways that he has managed to optimize rendering time and some of the problems that he has encountered as part of his work on the project. We also discussed what the use cases and limitations of the KivEnt engine are and he shared some of the projects that have been made with it. Brief Introduction Date of recording – June 17th, 2015 Hosts – Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Follow us on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Give us feedback! (iTunes, Twitter, email, Disqus comments) We don’t have any corporate sponsorship or advertisements in the show because we are making it for the community and we respect our listeners and value your time. If you would like to help support the show and keep it ad-free you can find out how by visiting our website Overview – Interview with Jacob Kovac about the KivEnt Game Engine, based off of Kivy Interview with Jacob Kovac Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? – Chris Could you please give us a high level overview of KivEnt and how it differs from other game builder frameworks like Unity or Unreal? Manages memory for game objects and stores them contiguously in memory for greater efficiency Real-time focused rendering engine for Kivy Cython interface to provide performant game objects with Python API Increased speed of main render loop by 38X by removing a single Python list lookup Kivent is mainly 2D focused, vs 3D for Unity/Unreal Python all the way down Cython and pointer magic for optimization purposes Made to be familiar to Pythonistas Aiming for “A” level games Bringing modern advancements in making games to Python – GPU awareness Built with constraints in mind The Pacman Dossier What inspired you to create the KivEnt engine? Tried to create an Android infinite runner in Kivy, performance was unacceptable Looking for how to build games in Python with large amounts of data Is there a particular kind of game KivEnt is particularly suited for versus any of the other popular frameworks? Focuses mainly on 2D, agnostic as to ‘type’ of game Jacob’s interests largely focused on procedurally generated environments Could KivEnt be used to create networked multiplayer games and what challenges might that bring to the table for the aspiring KivEnt game developer? Multiplayer thought to be largely out of scope This doesn’t mean KivEnt is bad for multiplayer games, but that KivEnt in and of itself doesn’t wholly solve this problem. Plenty of other frameworks to draw on for handling the multi-player server or pulling data from it, KivEnt solves the client side problems germane to making a game in Python Does the fact that KivEnt games need to run on so many platforms present any unique difficulties in KivEnt’s development? Kivy has solved most of the cross-platform problems Difference in GPU vendors has proved the most difficult I hear game developers talk a lot about assets and asset formats. What kinds of assets can be used with KivEnt? 2D assets are simple – especially as compared to 3D KivEnt supports any image format that Kivvy does for your platform Coming next release – you can specify the vertex format for your model https://youtu.be/qe9fWC-2e3M?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss I have heard that unit testing games is difficult and rarely done for reasons of time pressure, as well as lack of determinism in the interactions. Does KivEnt provide any utilities to make this easier? Not currently well tested, but targeting that for next release Trying to add tooling to make testing games easier, though still somewhat difficult Platform Biased Podcast – by a bunch of Microsoft Studios SDETs How does KivEnt handle input and what kids of input devices are supported? Input handled entirely by Kivy, so any inputs supported by Kivy are accessible in KivEnt Rumors of using Kinect camera with Kivy/KivEnt applications Is there a built in physics engine or is that something that is pluggable? Mostly pluggable Chipmunk 2D integration provided via a module Particle Panda – one of the major inspirations for KivEnt New Particle engine coming in the next version of KivEnt How does KivEnt handle collision tracking? Mathematically difficult, very hard to get right Don’t do it! Use the physics engine – Chipmunk 2D is also a collision detection engine Kivy enables devs to use C, C++, Java and Objective C code in their games Game development has been democratized Entity / Component architecture enables great modularity Game objects that appear on the screen (Gun, ball, etc.) are not represented as such in the system Can you tell us about some of the projects that you have seen built in KivEnt which you are most excited by? https://github.com/chozabu/KivEntEd?ut

Listen to past episodes, read about the hosts or donate to the show at podcastinit.com Brief Introduction Date of recording – June 10th, 2015 Hosts Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Follow us on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Give us feedback! (iTunes, Twitter, email, Disqus comments) You can donate (if you want)! Overview – Interview with Eric Schles Interview with Eric Schles Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? What inspired you to take up the fight against slavery? Is there personal story behind this choice? Some of your work touches on the “Deep Web”. Can you provide listeners with some context around what that term means and role it plays in what you do? Tor .onion sites (Hidden Services) are examples Anonymous Web Experience Anonymity allows for illegal, immoral things like buying selling people Conceptually very important idea Bruce Schneier – Web technologies need to be more privacy aware Like a really scary version of “The Internet of the Old Days” Photos of young, exploited men and women Pedophiles are building communities, having parties through these hidden services Eric feels that Tor is an extreme Feels there had to be a way to protect the rights of legitimate while protecting against pedophiles Maybe a voting system? The Tor project feels that any compromise lessens the that’s so important for people in embattled or countries (Worded that poorly -Chris) No metrics on the amount of pedophilia that actually happens Tor – probably a lot Sexually abused victims of trafficking grow up damanged unable to do anything else Consumers of this type of porn were often themselves victims sexual abuse Structural dissonance which exists to create this problem society needs to be addressed Google puts the number to the anti-trafficking hotline at top of any trafficking search results Darren (Derek?) Hayes – redirect to trafficking resources when viewing advertisements for victims trafficking Why did you choose Python as opposed to any other tool for your search engine? Needed solutions quickly with the ability to evolve as needed Able to rapidly develop and incorporate new features rapidly Easy to scale as needed Flask is easier to prototype and iterate with Python data science tools make the analysis easy Able to finish a 2 year C++ project in 3 weeks using Python Doing data science in Ruby is challenging Pandas Dataframe galvanized the creation of a lot of other useful tools Vincent – write Python which compiles to D3 Can you provide a high level description of the technical details the search engine that you created, and what it’s like to with Tor through Python? Directed search engine “It would be like if you went to Google but everything watched was Porn which you were uncomfortabl seeing and you sad” Get most case information through regular old detective work Person arrested / in holding yields phone number, other attributes that can feed the search engine Google can’t scrape the deep web Memex tool indexes the deep web – Eric’s search engine uses that Eric does design work for the Memex project Developed by the amazing Chris White Eric’s search engine uses the Tor driver in Selenium to .onion sites What are some of the technical and legal challenges that you experienced in the course of your work? Most of the technical challenges are around automated processing Legal structure provides some limits on what can be worked on Does your search engine try to infer who might be engaged in work voluntarily as opposed to those being forced into it their will? No, because they get all their case referrals from detective work You have to have been hospitalized or in some other way come the attention of the authorities for being deprived of rights Trafficking looks very different in different cultures Global similarities Afraid to say why if hurt Forced into having sex against your will Clear patterns of indication Urban versus Suburban versus Rural Fracking towns Demographics are very different – mostly men very women, LOTS of ads for sex workers Only helping people that want to be helped What was the most surprising fact you uncovered as part of research? Imagery of exploited children is so depressing and sad Without revealing anything you shouldn’t, are you aware of being set free as a result of your work? “Not my work, our work” Not an individual effort lawyers, analysts, larger DAs office Given the complicated socio-economic aspects of human and prosecution of those who are responsible, can you discuss of the moral and ethical considerations that you have confronted with while building these tools? Privacy is the biggest concern Open source book to teach colleagues at the DA’s office how program to in Python Sometimes Eric works at Civic Hall Are there any projects out there that you consider similar to you are working on? Thorn’s Spotlight tool Memex Project Polaris Project Datakind Anti Trafficking dosomething.org – more broadly focused –

Listen to past episodes, read about the show and check out our donations section at podcastinit.com Brief Introduction Date of recording – Jun-10th, 2015 Hosts Macey and Chris Patti Follow us on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Give us feedback! (iTunes, Twitter, email, Disqus comments) You can donate (if you want)! Overview – Interview with Tracy Osborn, Naomi Ceder, Lynn Root Interview with Prominent PyLadies Introductions Tracy Osborn Naomi Ceder Lynn Root How did you get introduced to Python? In what ways do you think the Python community has succeeded in making itself more friendly and welcoming to women and other under represented minorities, and where could it do better? Python community leadership takes a positive stance on diversity Codes of conduct are taken very seriously Financial diversity needs more focus What can you tell us about PyLadies and DJango Girls? PyLadies started in a coffee shop in LA pip install PyLadies Over 70 locations on almost every continent – half on meetup.com What are some of the challenges you still face in being a part of the Python community, and how can our listeners help? Don’t be disparaging about women-focused events I had to read up to page 17 of the top authors list on PyPi to find a woman. Can you provide some insight into what may be contributing to this state of affairs and how we can help to improve it? pypi is confusing and intimidating Process and tools are tough to use Maybe Pyladies should host a “make your own package” night Mentorship and easy HOWTOs are needed You have all gained some notoriety in the Python community through work that you have done. Do you feel that you were faced with greater adversity than your peers in the course of your careers? Startup community more hostile than Python community We are talking to each of you because of your involvement in the Python community. Have you worked with and been involved in other language communities? If so, can you provide some comparisons between that and Python in how they manage the subject of diversity, gender and otherwise? Design community – lots of conferences with “all dude” conference speaker line up Startups very focused on males for employees and customers What effect do you think job descriptions play in excluding women and other minorities from roles in development positions? (In reference to https://blog.safaribooksonline.com/2015/06/08/on-recruiting-inclusiveness-and-crafting-better-job-descriptions/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss) Discourage more appropriate term than exclude Women less likely to apply for roles that they are not completely qualified for Spotify experimenting with blind resume review and cross-checking of job descriptions Result is more women applying and having better results For any women and young girls who may be considering a career in technology, do you have any words of advice? Go for it, but be aware that it’s hard Do you have any advice for the men in the Python community and technology as a whole? Actually listen when somebody tells you that it’s not the same for them (race, economics, gender) Have some compassion and empathy Men should educate themselves Old habits die hard but getting over them is important Is there anything we haven’t discussed that any of you would like to bring up? Picks Tobias The Banned and the Banished series by James Clemens Cool Hand Luke with Paul Newman Chris Baxter Stowaway IPA Mastering Emacs 99% Invisible – The Nutshell Studies Naomi Ceder Korey Schrum – Dying for a Living Into the Brambles – by “PyDanny – Danny Greenfeld” Lynn Root Jupyter – tmpnb – Kyle Kelly blog post Knit Your Own Zoo Bechdel Test The Good Wife Passes the Bechdel Test Inspiration for women being awesome in a male dominated industry Tracy Osborn EasyPost – Simplifies generating shipping labels for USPS Keep in Touch Naomi Ceder @naomiceder Lynn Root @roguelynn Tracy Osborn @limedaring Blog Hello Webapp The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

You can find past episodes and other information about the show at podcastinit.com Brief Introduction Date of recording – June 3rd, 2015 Hosts – Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Overview – Interview with Fernando Perez and Brian Granger, core developers of IPython/Project Jupyter Follow us on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Give us feedback! (iTunes, Twitter, email, Disqus comments) You can donate (if you want)! Interview with Brian Granger and Fernando Perez Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? – Chris For anyone who may not have heard of or used IPython, can you describe what it is? How challenging was it to port IPython to Python 3? Thomas Kluyver What prompted the name change from IPython to Project Jupyter and were there any associated changes in the project itself? Name inspired by Julia, Python and R – the three programming languages of data science Data scientists have adopted the use of IPython notebooks in their work on a large scale, what is it about notebooks that lend themselves to this particular problem domain? Bayesian methods for Hackers – Cameron Davidson-Pilon Signal processing in Python O’Reilly added support for notebooks into Atlas publishing platform IPython Notebook seems like an incredible tool for educators is advanced fields. Have you seen wide spread adoption in this area and is it a focus for the project? NBGrader – notebook grader Github recently added the ability to render notebooks in a repo. Did you work with them to build that integration? What are some of the most interesting uses of IPython notebooks that you have seen? Gallery of interesting notebooks on the wiki Reproducible academic publications Couple of dozen scientific papers, some very high profile Educational notebooks on various subjects Great learning resource, as well as entertaining MOOC taught between distributed team on Open EdX using IPython notebooks about numerical computing with Python Peter Norvig collection of IPython notebooks Includes analysis of traveling salesman problem notebooks.codeneuro.org– time series data analysis <- Couldn’t get this to work. -Chris Are there any notable projects that use IPython as one of their components? KBase for computational biology Sage – Open source mathematics project written in Python Created by number theorist William Stein Custom parser to allow for non-python syntax Quantopian – Collaborative platform for financial modeling. Runs on top of IPython Wakari from Continuum Analytics – hosted IPython with computing environment Rackspace hosts TempNB and other IPython services Where do you see Project Jupyter going in the future? Are there any particular new features you’d like to see added? – Tobias One of the biggest targeted features is real-time collaboration Prototyped by engineers from Google More modular UI and architecture Multi-user deployments with Jupyter Hub A few weeks ago we interviewed Jonathan Slenders who wrote ptpython, which brings IDE like capabilities to interactive Python. Have you ever considered including this in IPython? What are some of the features that an average user might not know about? Is there anything in particular that you would like to ask our listeners for help with? Pitch in with the development effort Organize community events on behalf of IPython/Jupyter Be patient while documentation improves Picks Tobias Dayworld trilogy by Phillip Jose Farmer ReadRuler.com Chris RubyTapas by Avdi Grimm CodeNewbies Tweetbot Brian Granger Data Science from Scratch – Joel Gruß Elements of Graphing Data – William Cleveland Fernando Perez Republic Lost – Lawrence Lessig Alvaro Mutis Keep in Touch Twitter @projectjupyter, @ipythondev, @ellisonbg, @fperez_org The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

You can find out more about us and view previous episodes at podcastinit.com. Brief Introduction Date of recording – 2015-06-02 Hosts – Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Follow us on – iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Give us feedback on iTunes, Twitter, email or Disqus Interview with David Baumgold Introduction How did you get introduced to Python? What problem does Flask-Dance solve that wasn’t covered by other libraries? What were some of the technical issues that you encountered while building Flask-Dance? What are some of the design considerations that you had when building Flask-Dance? You also built webhookdb for replicating GitHub’s information to be queryable. What are some use cases for which you would want to do that? What is Open EdX and what is its intended audience? What are some of the challenges implementing a system like Open EdX, and what can Python developers learn from the implementation of the project? Picks Tobias Evil mode Forgotify Wolf of Wall Street pipreqs Chris Dark Horse Brewing – “Smells Like a Safety Meeting” Medium Modern Gnu Emacs David Homebrewhttps://open.edx.org/ for OSX Homebrew Cask Arrow Moment.js The Imitation Game Keep in touch Twitter: @singingwolfboy GitHub Website Email

Read all of our show notes and find more information about us at Beautiful Soup Brief Introduction Date of recording – May 28th, 2015 Hosts – Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Overview – Interview with Mark Bagett Follow us on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Give us feedback! (iTunes, Twitter, email, Disqus comments) You can donate (if you want)! Interview with Mark Bagett Introductions How were you first introduced to Python? – Chris Started using it for automating tasks while working as a sysadmin Found code that launched an attack on FTP server – in Python What are some of the tasks in your job that you use Python for? -Tobias Trusted command & control backdoor for Windows Mostly not used by malware authors – thus far (at least Mark hasn’t seen it used that way) Flame virus – 5MB payload – incredibly advanced Lua interpreter bundled along with the scripts Vale framework – Python framework that takes payloads out of penetration testing executables What is it about Python that makes it useful for penetration testing and other information security tasks? Same thing that makes it useful for anything else mpacket from core security What are some of the more useful Python penetration testing tools? OFFENSE Beautiful Soup scapy Volatility DEFENSE Counter dictionary from collections Pandas iPython matplotlib We’ve noticed that a lot of the literature around information security and penetration testing focuses on targeting Windows. Can you enlighten us as to why that is? Windows event tracing logman event trace providers – implement packet sniffing (Can turn every browser into a key logger) Primary attack surface – Where most attacks are targeted Fewer purely Linux systems Very few ports open – maybe 80, 22 Very likely no user just sitting there waiting to run an executable you send More freedom on Linux – less formalized patching process, more variable tools = more exploits Will write code to only use built in modules for Python that will run in customer target environments What are some of the legal considerations that you have to deal with on a regular basis as a penetration tester? There have recently been a number of attacks based on hijacking the TCP/IP stack. Is Python being used for any of these exploits or tools to defend against them? Data analytics Detect repeated sequence numbers – Man in the Middle Attack As simple as 5 lines of Python code import scapy, start sniffing packets, pull together all packets – make list of associated packets Can pull together all packets inside of stream Time spefic source communicates with specific destination Bro – intrusion detection suite Built into Security Onion – Doug Berks FLOSS Weekly episode 296 with Bro developers What are some activities that you do on a regular basis for which you would turn to another language or toolchain, rather than using Python? Powershell – The Python of windows Whitelisted and ubiquitous Password cracking – compiled language like C or assembly For anyone who is interested in getting involved in the security industry, and penetration testing in particular, what resources or tools would you recommend? Developers make the best InfoSec professionals Lots of jobs and opportunities Developer -> Systems Administration -> Information Security Security conferences – BSides, Defcon, Black Hat Online capture the flag challenges (google it) – good practice for critical thinking and using code for security exercises Get involved in the industry – Meetups, etc. SANS institute course, Python for Penetration Testers, SEC573 by Mark Baggett – sans.org Lots of free online resources Violent Python PicoCTF Counter Hack Challenges Picks Tobias Authy OpenWRT TP-Link Archer C7 Schemas For The Real World by Carina C. Zona The Soul of Software by Avdi Grimm China Mieville Chris Rapscallion Munich Dark Write Marginal Way Frankie and Johnny’s pyenv Mark Bagett Corelabs impacket Google Labs – Rekall Adams peanut butter cup fudge ripple cheesecake BSides security conference Keep in Touch Twitter: @markbaggett In Depth Defense The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Read all of our show notes and find more information about us at podcastinit.com Brief Introduction Date of recording – May 18th, 2015 Hosts – Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Follow us on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Give us feedback! (iTunes, Twitter, email, Disqus comments) Overview – Interview with Jacob Kaplan-Moss Interview with Jacob Kaplan-Moss Introductions How were you first introduced to Python? So, we wanted to invite you on the show to discuss the keynote that you gave at this years PyCon. Can you tell us what you mean when you say that you’re a mediocre programmer and why that is such an important admission to make? What are some ways that we can change the tone of the conversation around programming skill? What do we gain by admitting to ourselves and others that we are not all phenomenal engineers? Where does the myth of exceptional vs terrible programmers come from? Can you provide some examples of times that you came in contact with this narrative? How do you think hiring tactics in technology companies contribute to this misconception and how can they be more accepting of average programmers? What are some ways that we can work toward eradicating the myth of the 10x programmer? Thinking about our industry’s problems retaining women and other undervalued groups, do you think the way many managers do performance reviews play a role? If so, how can we do better? What Works For Women At Work Can you tell us about some other ongoing narratives in the technology industry that you find equally as damaging as our misconceptions around skills and knowledge? – Tobias indie.vc Picks Tobias True Ability Manjaro Linux Vultr VPS Mage Wars Chris K is for Kriek Trello Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History Jacob Kaplan-Moss Hello Web App What Works For Women At Work Why Women Leave Tech: What the Research Says Library Extension for Chrome and Firefox Keep In Touch @jacobian

Visit our site at podcastinit.com for more show notes and news. Brief Introduction Date of recording – May 17th, 2015 Hosts – Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Follow us on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Give us feedback! (iTunes, Twitter, email, Disqus comments) Overview – Interview with Jonathan Slenders Interview with Jonathan Slenders Introductions How were you first introduced to Python? -Chris What inspired you to create the python-prompt-toolkit? What are some design considerations that you made when building prompt-toolkit? Make minimal use of inheritance Overly strong coupling Better clarity for the API of your library Completely event driven / asynchronous No global state ptpython completion benefits from asynchrony – The jedi completion library is too slow – completion happens in its own thread You have built a number of projects that use the prompt-toolkit as a core component, did you have them in mind from the beginning, or are they experiments to test the capabilities of the toolkit? tmux rewrite in Python, abandoned, original motivation for prompt-toolkit ptpython pgcli ptpdb pyvim Do you intend to bring PyVim to feature parity with Vim, or is it just intended for experimentation? Short answer: Don’t know – but will probably never be in full parity with Vim What inspired you to create ptpython and why did you choose to make it a stand-along project rather than extending iPython? How difficult was it to integrate with IPython and what were the benefits? IPython has its own event loop – this presented difficulties as prompt-toolkit has its own as well What are some of the most interesting uses that you have seen of the prompt-toolkit? PyVim – really challenged the design pgcli Picks Tobias vimsert Johnny Cash Project Interstellar Chris Grimm Telekinesis pandoc vimpager Homebrew Cask Jonathan Slenders Belgian Beer Rochefort Western European Folk Dancing Keep in touch Twitter – @jonathan_s GitHub – jonathanslenders

Visit podcastinit.com for information about the show and links to our iTunes and Stitcher feeds. Brief Introduction Date of recording – May 4th, 2015 Hosts – Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Overview – Interview with Ned Batchelder Follow us on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Give us feedback! (iTunes, Twitter, email, Disqus comments) You can donate (if you want)! Interview with Ned Batchelder Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? Zope … Implemented in Python How did you get started as the organizer for Boston Python Meetup? History is long and varied (Why is this switching to numbers? Started – 6 people sitting around a coffee table 5 or 6 years Co-organizer Jessica McKeller Built structures to help keep the community goingr Weekend Python Workshop People ‘adjacent’ to the male members – wives, mothers, etc. “What comes next” from weekend workshops – became Project Night How much of your time ends up being dedicated to the Python community? Also maitainer of coverage.py Active on Freenode IRC #python 20 hours a week What are your goals for the Boston Python community? Continue to grow More events, different events? chipy – Chicago UG very active – 1 on 1 mentoring program Smaller events – 5 person events – study groups All levels not just beginners Computational Biologists – study genomics Three user groups Pyladies Boston DJango Boston Boston Python Meetup What do you find to be the most important thing(s) for building a healthy community (particularly in reference to programming)? Consistency – good to know what to expect Pick a cadence – don’t burn out Speakers aren’t superheroes, they’re just people. ‘Everyone has at least one talk in them’. Value in having a blog, twitter stream – people talk back to you and by correcting your mistakes everyone benefits. How do you keep people engaged outside of the monthly meetings? Meetup.com – requires moderation python.org mailing lists – unmoderated – low traffic Need to do more in that regard What do you like the most/least about the Python community? Communities can improve – IRC has gotten better Turmoil on PSF mailing list over election for directors How do you strike a balance between sponsors and the rest of the community? Do you have policies around sponsored presentations / talks? Tend not to do sponsored talks Microsoft NERD – great benefit to Boston Python Provides monthly space for the group 1 minute slots for sponsors No sales pitches What are the steps I can take to start my own tech community? How can you get the word out? Meetup.com is useful People like free food and beer Be predictable. Pick something sustainable What is the State of Python, from your perspective? No signs of slowing down Ruby people are moving to other environments Python people are still using Python Python 2 to 3 conflict is unfortunate – transition could have been handled more smoothly Python 3 ecosystem is getting much better Next big drama – type hinting proposal Appears to be contrary to one of the basics tenets of the language at first blush Do you feel that Boston will ever have its own regional Python conference? Toyed with bid to bring Pycon to Boston Would require someone stepping up to do it Not sure how a regional conference ‘feels’ as a local event Try to have Boston Python be like a year long conference all year long Huge undertaking Picks Tobias Scribd Konch DupeGuru Chris The River Cafe Pythonista Rototo – IOS Game Stone Brewing Arrogant Bastard Ned Tox Pythonz Spell Tower Richard Feynman’s Cornell Lectures Keep in Touch Twitter: @nedbat and @bostonpython IRC: nedbat nedbatchelder.com bostonpython.com

For show notes and other content, visit our site at http://www.pythonpodcast.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss Brief Introduction Date of recording – Apr 28th 2015 Hosts – Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Overview – Interview with Travis Oliphant Interview with Travis Oliphant Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? I’m curious what inspired you to create NumPy and SciPy? Why did you choose Python for those libraries? Numeric, Jim Hugunin Morphology library in NumArray For those of us who aren’t in the know, can you provide a brief definition of what data science is and how you got involved in it? Term coined by DJ Patil Answer: Anybody who takes data and tries to derive insights from it Nobody really knows what this means Can you tell us the story of how Continuum Analytics came to be? What are some interesting projects that you have worked on with Continuum Analytics? Bokeh Wakari Anaconda Numba Blaze Can you explain a bit about what NumFocus is and how it got started? How can our audience get involved with NumFocus? For someone just starting out in the data science and data analytics space, what advice would you give? Download Anaconda, learn as much Python as you can Google search “Data Analysis in Python” iPython Notebooks in data analysis R community Meetups Online classes R Community can be helpful Of your myriad achievements, what are you most proud of? Picks Tobias Used bookstores The Book Barn Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs Kickin’ it Old School Chris Kids In The Hall MFA Boston Art in Bloom CodeNewbies Apple 27″ Retina iMac 5K Travis Oliphant Data Carpentry Tracy Teal (@tracykteal) Patterned on Software Carpentry Brain Science Podcast – Ginger Campbell, MD Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles Travis Contacts Twitter: Travis – @teoliphant NumFocus – @numfocus Continuum Analytics – @ContinuumIO The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

You can view all of the show notes for every episode at http://podcastinit.com?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss Brief Introduction Date of recording – Apr 21st 2015 Hosts – Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Overview – Interview with members of the Kivy core development team Interview with Kivy Core Developers Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? How did the Kivy project get started? What made you choose Python as the basis for Kivy? What were some influences on and inspirations for Kivy’s design? Raymond Hettinger – Beyond Pep 8 One of the amazing things about Kivy is that it’s comparatively simple to learn and get started with. Did this ease of use occur by design or accident? What were some of the biggest challenges to designing or implementing Kivy? If you could start the project over, what would you do differently? What are some of the most interesting things you’ve seen Kivy used for? Gabriel Pettier – http://www.tangibledisplay.com/en/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss Mathieu Virbel – https://www.digital-stories.fr/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss and https://vimeo.com/80051846?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss What are some changes/features that you are particularly excited about for the future of Kivy? Wiki for roadmap to 2.0 PyJnius PyObjus Kivy-iOS Buildozer Kivy Remote Shell Plyer Are there any platforms/operating systems that you are trying to add support for (e.g. Sailfish OS, Ubuntu Phone, Firefox OS)? Is there anything in particular that you would like to ask for our listeners to help with? Google Summer of Code – If you didn’t get accepted, DO it anyway! Start small – documentation fixes Fix issues Huge backlog – help answering questions Maintainers for subprojects – like PyJnius Sponsors – Kivy core team looking for new hardware Increase unit test coverage If you find a bug submit a test case Picks Tobias Zeal CommitStrip Chris Jack’s Abbey Smoke & Dagger Woman in Gold Mathieu Virbel YAPF Yet Another Python Formatter Learn Chinese With Cats! Rince Cochon Akshay Aurora Mangoes! Tic-Tac-Toe machine controlled by Kivy Ryan Pessa E-Cigarettes – The MilkMan by Vaping Rabbit Gabriel Pettier I3WM Tiling window manager Boulet Corp SMBC Contacting the Kivy Core Team Kivy.org – About Us page The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

Full show notes can be found at http://podcastinit.com/episode-2-reuven-lerner.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss Episode 2 Brief intro Recording date/time Hosts Overview Reuven Lerner Interview Please introduce yourself How did you get introduced to Python? How did you break into the field of providing Python trainings? What are the most common languages that your students are coming from? What are some of the biggest obstacles that people encounter when learning Python? Where does Python draw the inspiration for its object system from? In what way(s) does learning Python differ from learning other languages? What sorts of materials/mediums do you use for training people in Python? Python Tutor Do you use your book (Practice make Python) as follow up material for your trainings? In your freelance work, what portion of your projects use Python? Ruby is Oscar, Python is Felix Have you seen a change in the demand for Python skills in the time between when you first started using it and now? What types of projects would cause you to choose something other than Python? Picks Reuven Lerner Daily Tech Video Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by Brian Wansink Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos Chris Patti Spencer Trappist Ale Rich Hickey’s The Value of Values YouCompleteMe – Vim auto-completion SizeUp for OSX Tobias Macey CheckIO – Gamified practice programming Snap Circuits Nvidia Shield Tablet Samson Go Mic Portable USB Condenser Microphone Zoho Apps Closing remarks Reuven Contact: Website blog Twitter: @reuvenmlerner

Full show notes can be found at http://podcastinit.com/episode-1-thomas-hatch.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss Brief Intro Hosts Overview Python at Chefconf! Plug for Talk Python To Me Thomas Hatch Interview Picks Thomas Hatch Flow Based Programming IOFlo Imagine Dragons Chris Patti Stone Imperial Russian Stout Python One Liner Games Boston Python User Group Tobias Macey Noisli CopyQ Pelican Moving From Heroku to AWS With Salt Part 1 Moving From Heroku to AWS With Salt Part 2 Closing Remarks

Welcome to the first episode of a new podcast focused on bringing you the stories of the people who make the Python language and ecosystem great.OutlineIntroductionBrief Host BiographiesWhy We’re Doing ThisWhy We Love Python & Favorite ToolsThank YouPicks!PicksTobiasSummoner WarsDbeaverKDE ConnectPlayerctlChris ptpythonDuchesse de BourgogneThe intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish (The Freak Fandango Orchestra) / CC BY-SA 3.0