WEBVTT

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Hey, YouTube.

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Hey, Chad.

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Hey, Michael.

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Hey, great to have you here.

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Super excited to be doing this podcast today.

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Those of you out in the audience, please put some comments and thoughts and ideas into

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the live chat.

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We'll try to make part of the show.

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If you're watching afterwards, well, that's over, but thanks for watching anyway.

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All right, let's kick this off, Chad.

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Chad, welcome to Talk Bythonomy.

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Thanks, Michael.

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That's fantastic.

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You're going to be talking about Python.

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I'm going to be talking about Python.

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I'm going to be talking about Python.

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I'm going to be talking about Python.

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I'm going to be talking about Python.

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I'm going to be talking about Python.

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I'm going to be talking about Python.

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I'm going to be talking about Python.

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Anyway, all right, let's kick this off, Chad.

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Chad, welcome to Talk Python To Me.

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- Thanks, Michael.

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- It's fantastic to have you here.

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I and many listeners are such a fan of PIPX

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and really just love to have that tool around

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to allow us to use Python libraries

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and commands like applications.

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And it's gonna be so fun to talk about.

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And if you're out there and you haven't heard of PIPX,

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you're in for a treat.

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So before we get to that, though, let's start with your story.

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How did you get into programming in Python?

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- So I got into programming back when the internet was kind of like really

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popular with GeoCities, like early web development type stuff.

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So...

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- This is the time when people had like the animated digging Giphy and like a lot

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of sites were still permanently under construction?

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- Yes.

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And flashing text and stuff like that.

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So I thought that was pretty cool.

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I messed around with some Geocities pages.

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I wrote a little bit of JavaScript

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where you can hover over text, and it will change the image

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and stuff like that.

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And I kind of messed around with web pages for a while,

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but I didn't really get too serious with programming

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with web development until later, much later.

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So when I got more into programming was in college.

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I got a degree in aerospace engineering,

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and so we did kind of scientific computing.

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we used MATLAB a lot.

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So I used a lot of MATLAB in college.

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And then in my first job, we did a lot of MATLAB.

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So in the aerospace industry for making airplanes and flight

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control systems, we used MATLAB a lot.

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And so I kind of started hacking on MATLAB

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and making a bunch of programs and automating stuff,

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not really going into other programming languages, which

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were probably better suited for the job.

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I just kind of did everything in MATLAB.

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And--

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>>Victor: Well, but that's the way I think many people--

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most people do it, is they have a set of tools to pick from

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that they know how to work with them.

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And they're like, well, which one of these is going to be best?

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And if you're programming environments in MATLAB,

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then that's not a terrible choice, really.

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>>Chris: Yeah.

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So I got really into programming MATLAB,

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and then eventually ended up at a job

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where I got to start doing a little Python.

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>>Victor: Nice.

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>>Chris: And so that job was--

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What kind of airplanes were you working on?

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So my first job was on the Space Shuttle, which

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has been retired.

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And then I worked for Boeing.

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That's fantastic.

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Yeah, I worked from the 747, 787.

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So I worked for Boeing.

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So Boeing worked on the Space Shuttle,

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as well as, obviously, a bunch of other planes.

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And then none of the Python work was there, though.

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The Python stuff started at a startup

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funded by Google co-founder Larry Page.

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So it was an eVTOL,

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Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing Plane.

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So it's like a small plane.

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It was a startup.

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It was a small company.

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And we needed like basically some tools to be made.

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And I didn't really know Python,

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but I like to just take on new challenges

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and learn new things.

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So my first experience with Python was with Python 2

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and working on a Django app.

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It was an app to track all the parts and weights

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and moments of inertia of the aircraft.

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And another project was called a protocol compiler.

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So all the C code that ran on the avionics, a lot of it

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was generated.

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A lot of the inter-device communication

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was generated from this common protocol definition.

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And so this was all written in Python.

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So we could generate safety critical C code.

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We could generate documentation about the code.

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We could generate tests where we had like

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hardware in the loop tests.

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And so that was where I started to run into issues

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with challenges with packaging

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and getting dependencies installed on folks' computers

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because if you wanted to build the flight code,

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you needed to have a bunch of packages available.

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- Right, and so, you know,

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you had to have maybe some foundational thing in order,

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some libraries and other things.

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and you probably didn't want to teach necessarily

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see people how to set up Python and virtual environments

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and all that kind of stuff, right?

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Or documentation writers.

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Yeah.

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- Exactly.

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And yeah, it was a small company.

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So there wasn't really a Python expert in house.

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So we kind of made a lot of the mistakes

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and I had to go into the infrastructure side too

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and try to build all that out.

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And so, you know, we started out with,

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I think we started out with pseudo pip install

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and that was how we got our things installed.

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- Mm-hmm, yeah, for sure.

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Well, you talk about this, the small business

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or a small company you're at and sort of bouncing

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off the walls and just figuring it out yourself,

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but you were also at Boeing, which is a non-small company.

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Am I looking in from the outside?

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- Right.

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- I know a lot of people, they definitely dream of

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or look to get hired at these really large companies.

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And yet I feel like there's a huge advantage

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to at least spending a little time in a company

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like this VTOL one you talked about

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where you're taking on a lot of responsibilities

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and you're kind of working together to figure out stuff

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rather than slotting into like a narrow slice

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of what's getting done, what do you think?

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What was your experience in those places?

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- Well, so Boeing did offer opportunities

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to let you kind of like improve processes

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and stuff like that.

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But the scope of what you're working on at a small company,

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trying to build a similar product,

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I mean, you have a smaller team with no like legacy

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or decades of history building stuff.

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You're kind of just inventing it as you go.

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So yeah, there's a ton of stuff to experiment with

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and take on and learn from.

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- Yeah, cool.

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How about now?

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You're at another small company, right?

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- Yeah, I'm at a small company called Meta.

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I work for Reality Labs, and I work on developer infrastructure

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here as well.

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I work on things like language services, debuggers,

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and VS Code, VS Code extensions.

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>> Yeah.

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Do you have any exposure to the Cinder project or any

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of the stuff going on over there?

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>> No, I'm aware of it.

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I think it's super cool.

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But that's an Instagram thing, really.

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And so it's not really something I use day to day.

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>> Well, it looks like it's going to become a Python thing

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in little bits and pieces.

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>> Yeah.

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>> The pieces of it are being pulled over.

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We just talked about PEP 690 and lazy imports.

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And there's a couple of other things people

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are working to move in.

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So not the whole thing, but some of those features

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and improvements will make it to all of us.

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>> Yeah, that's the great thing about Python is if you come up

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with a good idea, the community is very open

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and willing to adopt new ideas.

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The best ideas win and can be continuously improving

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the language.

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- Yeah, that's pretty fantastic.

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So let's start our conversation here

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at a little bit higher level than just PipX.

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And let's just talk about packaging a little bit.

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So let me switch over here to this project.

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So you have over at chadsmith.dev,

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which is a great domain name.

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And I'm impressed with a name like Chad Smith

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that you can get it just straight up as your domain name.

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'Cause as Michael Kennedy,

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all the Irish politicians are all over me.

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Like I gotta go with some crazy variation

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to come up with it.

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But yeah, that's cool.

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That's a great domain name.

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And over there at slash Python dash packaging,

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you've got the big list of Python packaging

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and distribution tools.

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You wanna tell us about this?

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Kind of gives you a high level of like,

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what are the options, right?

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Yeah, so a lot of times, questions

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come up about what tools are out there, which tools do what.

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It's a big world in the packaging,

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in the Python packaging world.

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And I wanted to make something that was kind of non-opinionated

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and just kind of factual, like here's some data,

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here's some information about these.

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You can decide for yourself.

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It's not trying to persuade you to use this.

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It's not like saying, this is my tool.

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This one's the best.

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And this came about from PIPX's documentation,

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where one of the questions on PIPX was, what is it

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and how does it compare to other things?

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So I had a list on the documentation.

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And it kept growing.

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And I was thinking, this could be its own thing,

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because I don't want to make the PIPX documentation too big.

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Make it a survey of all the other things

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that it competes with or could have been put alongside, right?

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Yeah.

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So this is an interactive web app table type thing.

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And it pulls data from GitHub's GraphQL API.

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And it lets you select different features and filter on those.

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You can compare and group tools together.

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So on the top left, you'll see there's

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a bunch of little blue words with blue backgrounds.

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And you can click on those.

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And if you click on them, then it'll filter down the table.

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So if you want to find tools that can install and publish,

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you can click on Install CLI Apps and also Publish Packages.

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>> Nice.

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Look at that.

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This is a great little UI.

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Reminds me of an app I wrote once,

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and I'm having nice nostalgia here.

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It's cool.

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So you can click on these little categories or filters

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and turn multiple ones on and off.

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So if I want virtual environment management,

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I can install libraries.