WEBVTT 00:00:00.260 --> 00:00:04.920 Hello, and welcome to Python Bytes, where we deliver Python news and headlines directly to your earbuds. 00:00:04.920 --> 00:00:09.340 This is episode 98, recorded October 4th, 2018. I'm Michael Kennedy. 00:00:09.340 --> 00:00:10.160 And I'm Brian Okken. 00:00:10.160 --> 00:00:11.120 Hey, Brian. How are you doing? 00:00:11.120 --> 00:00:12.160 I'm doing great. 00:00:12.160 --> 00:00:16.500 Excellent, excellent. Happy to be back with you for another week's worth of news. 00:00:16.500 --> 00:00:18.380 Yeah, it's good to talk to you every week. 00:00:18.380 --> 00:00:22.920 Absolutely. So I also want to say thank you to DigitalOcean for making this possible. 00:00:22.920 --> 00:00:27.000 They're one of the biggest supporters of the show. So thank you to DigitalOcean. 00:00:27.000 --> 00:00:31.240 Check them out at pythonbytes.fm/DigitalOcean. Get $100 credit for new users. 00:00:31.240 --> 00:00:33.620 More about that later. They have some really cool stuff. 00:00:33.620 --> 00:00:36.840 I was just listening to It's All About the Pendiums. 00:00:36.840 --> 00:00:39.340 Do you remember that song from Weird Al Yankovic? 00:00:39.340 --> 00:00:40.100 No. 00:00:40.100 --> 00:00:41.220 Oh, my gosh. 00:00:41.220 --> 00:00:41.840 Must be missed that. 00:00:41.840 --> 00:00:42.220 We might have to put it on the show. 00:00:42.220 --> 00:00:46.860 Oh, it's like this funny, you know, Weird Al Yankovic type song. 00:00:46.860 --> 00:00:48.560 It just popped up for some reason. 00:00:48.560 --> 00:00:50.940 And from the 90s. 00:00:50.940 --> 00:00:53.780 And it's all about like tough rappers. 00:00:54.400 --> 00:00:56.880 And these rappers who are like, but they're like programmers. 00:00:56.880 --> 00:00:58.880 So they're like insulting each other, right? 00:00:58.880 --> 00:01:00.680 Like how slow their computer is. 00:01:00.680 --> 00:01:06.920 And one of the insults is my flat screen monitor is 40 inches wide. 00:01:06.920 --> 00:01:09.100 And yours says Etch-A-Sketch on the side. 00:01:09.100 --> 00:01:13.860 That's funny. 00:01:13.860 --> 00:01:15.320 That's awesome, right? 00:01:15.320 --> 00:01:19.500 So here we are, 20 years past then or whatever. 00:01:19.500 --> 00:01:21.600 And we're still talking about Etch-A-Sketch. 00:01:21.600 --> 00:01:22.420 Yeah, definitely. 00:01:22.420 --> 00:01:23.760 So, okay. 00:01:23.760 --> 00:01:25.400 So this article is about Etch-A-Sketch. 00:01:25.400 --> 00:01:28.460 And it's called Make Etch-A-Sketch Art with Python. 00:01:28.460 --> 00:01:29.980 And it's fabulous. 00:01:29.980 --> 00:01:31.300 So background. 00:01:31.300 --> 00:01:34.320 It showed up in Toy Story with like the... 00:01:34.320 --> 00:01:38.720 And it's shown up other places of like really, really fast Etch-A-Sketch drawings happening. 00:01:38.960 --> 00:01:43.220 And I'm sure a lot of people, other people have figured this out too or tried to think, 00:01:43.220 --> 00:01:50.920 man, if I could have, I could hook up some motors to those, the knobs and somehow get my computer to do all of this for me. 00:01:50.920 --> 00:01:51.980 That would be cool. 00:01:51.980 --> 00:01:53.140 So that's what this is. 00:01:53.140 --> 00:02:01.300 It's this great article about how this person put together some motors, a Raspberry Pi and some software. 00:02:01.580 --> 00:02:08.880 And a little bit of woodworking to get to keep everything all in one place and got it to draw pictures. 00:02:08.880 --> 00:02:13.880 It's so cool because it's one of those, it seems like a fun project you could do with your kids or something. 00:02:13.880 --> 00:02:19.460 And also it discusses some things like how do you get a picture into line format? 00:02:19.460 --> 00:02:23.060 And he uses something called canny edge detection. 00:02:23.320 --> 00:02:29.560 And then if you've got a line drawing and pixels, how do you translate that into like motor control? 00:02:29.560 --> 00:02:31.900 And you have to have a path. 00:02:31.900 --> 00:02:33.960 So he uses a library called networks. 00:02:33.960 --> 00:02:39.120 It's a Python library to do path, coming up with nice paths. 00:02:39.120 --> 00:02:40.940 And then he has some results there. 00:02:40.940 --> 00:02:44.880 He shows some pictures where the starting picture and then the end result of drawing. 00:02:44.880 --> 00:02:46.180 And it's just fun. 00:02:46.180 --> 00:02:51.920 You know, what I like about this is it's got this cool IoT aspect with the Raspberry Pis and the motors. 00:02:51.920 --> 00:02:54.640 And it's not just a software project. 00:02:54.640 --> 00:02:59.200 It seems like it'd be something really fun for people to explore if they're getting into programming. 00:02:59.200 --> 00:03:01.780 And then it also has like a really advanced thing. 00:03:01.780 --> 00:03:06.960 Like you could do a really cool like booth or something where you put up an Etch-a-Sketch. 00:03:06.960 --> 00:03:11.140 And when anybody walks up, it could do like face detection and like draw them. 00:03:11.140 --> 00:03:16.740 Like you could do all sorts of fun stuff with like the, you know, PyTorch, machine learning and all kinds of fun stuff. 00:03:16.740 --> 00:03:19.420 So yeah, this is a great one for people looking for cool projects. 00:03:19.420 --> 00:03:19.660 Yeah. 00:03:19.660 --> 00:03:24.460 If you could get that booth thing set up so that we have it ready for PyCon, that would be great. 00:03:24.460 --> 00:03:24.820 Yeah. 00:03:24.820 --> 00:03:25.640 I'm working on it. 00:03:25.640 --> 00:03:26.160 We're almost there. 00:03:26.160 --> 00:03:32.640 So one of the things I really like from PyCon 2017 was the keynote by Instagram. 00:03:33.080 --> 00:03:41.560 How they almost magically migrated their entire code to upgrade Django, completely switch from Python 2 to Python 3. 00:03:41.560 --> 00:03:48.060 And they did all of that without branching continuously in production, which was awesome, right? 00:03:48.060 --> 00:03:48.420 Yeah. 00:03:48.420 --> 00:03:49.760 That was an incredible talk. 00:03:49.760 --> 00:03:50.020 Yeah. 00:03:50.020 --> 00:03:53.400 And so certainly that was one of the major users of Python. 00:03:53.780 --> 00:04:04.060 But if you look at desktop applications, it may be that Dropbox is actually one of the most popular and quite large desktop apps in Python that there is. 00:04:04.060 --> 00:04:05.720 I would venture to say that's true. 00:04:05.720 --> 00:04:06.020 Yeah. 00:04:06.020 --> 00:04:06.300 Yeah. 00:04:06.300 --> 00:04:12.420 So the Python, they have over a million lines of code in Python, a million lines of Python. 00:04:13.320 --> 00:04:18.160 And it's installed, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of desktops at least, right? 00:04:18.160 --> 00:04:24.600 So the big news is Python has had a really big gravitational pull around Dropbox. 00:04:24.600 --> 00:04:26.620 We've had some of the core developers working there. 00:04:26.620 --> 00:04:28.640 Obviously, Guido Van Rossum works there. 00:04:28.640 --> 00:04:29.760 That's a big deal. 00:04:29.760 --> 00:04:36.740 So the fact that they were on Python 2, it's kind of a weird juxtaposition of like these two worlds, right? 00:04:36.740 --> 00:04:37.400 Yeah. 00:04:37.400 --> 00:04:41.460 So what's really cool is they have now migrated to Python 3. 00:04:41.580 --> 00:05:00.600 And it's not just like they've rolled out a web app on Python 3 where they control the servers, but they have done some really incredible engineering to allow them to ship Python 3 into these more modern operating systems, enabling interesting things like kernel level, smart sync, and all sorts of crazy stuff that's happening. 00:05:00.600 --> 00:05:03.080 So that's what we got this week. 00:05:03.080 --> 00:05:03.660 That's awesome, huh? 00:05:03.660 --> 00:05:04.040 Yeah. 00:05:04.040 --> 00:05:05.480 That's really exciting, actually. 00:05:05.480 --> 00:05:06.220 It is exciting. 00:05:06.220 --> 00:05:15.520 And what's great about their write-up is it talks a whole lot about the challenges that they faced, why they wanted to switch, all of those kinds of things. 00:05:15.520 --> 00:05:19.540 So they said they've relied on Python 2 for many years, most recently 2.7. 00:05:20.020 --> 00:05:24.160 And they actually began this transformation from 2 to 3 in 2015. 00:05:24.160 --> 00:05:31.980 But if you go through and read that article, you'll see like a lot of creation of technology had to be done in order to make this switch. 00:05:31.980 --> 00:05:36.920 So in their previous version, their Python 2 world, they were using freezers. 00:05:36.920 --> 00:05:42.460 So like Py2App, Py2Exe, I think it was BB Freeze for Linux. 00:05:42.460 --> 00:05:47.880 And they were also exploring PyInstaller, but they ended up not using PyInstaller for some reason. 00:05:47.880 --> 00:05:50.240 But they were using those types of things to package up Python. 00:05:50.240 --> 00:05:50.920 Yeah. 00:05:51.040 --> 00:05:55.200 And now what they're doing is they actually had to build native apps. 00:05:55.200 --> 00:06:01.560 So, you know, using Visual Studio for Windows, Xcode for macOS to build like .app files. 00:06:01.560 --> 00:06:09.800 And what they're actually doing is they're hosting the Python runtime in their native apps to bootstrap up their apps in order to get the deployment story working better. 00:06:09.800 --> 00:06:12.360 That makes sense, but that doesn't sound easy. 00:06:12.360 --> 00:06:13.160 No, it doesn't. 00:06:13.620 --> 00:06:22.880 They actually built a way so that they could host either Python 2 or Python 3 and flip a flag so that they could actually do that concurrently, right? 00:06:22.880 --> 00:06:26.700 So they built the Python 2 version and they started shipping that out and got that working. 00:06:26.700 --> 00:06:33.880 And then they slowly, for different sets of users, started turning on the Python 3 version on the same type of code there. 00:06:33.880 --> 00:06:34.920 Wow, that's cool. 00:06:34.920 --> 00:06:36.460 But they talk about why they had to do it. 00:06:36.460 --> 00:06:41.140 So, for example, SmartSync, which I actually just bought from Dropbox recently, is pretty awesome. 00:06:41.260 --> 00:06:47.280 So I've got like almost a terabyte of stuff in Dropbox with all the core stuff and whatnot, the videos and so on. 00:06:47.280 --> 00:06:54.200 And SmartSync will like let you go to your Finder or your Explorer and show you all of your files. 00:06:54.200 --> 00:06:56.480 And some of them are in your hard drive and some of them are in the cloud. 00:06:56.480 --> 00:07:01.000 And you can just like double click them and they just open, you know, or open them some other way. 00:07:01.000 --> 00:07:05.940 And they like Dropbox hooks into that and says, oh, hold on, we got to download that. 00:07:05.940 --> 00:07:06.840 Now you can have it, right? 00:07:06.840 --> 00:07:09.680 So it's really great for like saving drive space and whatnot. 00:07:10.120 --> 00:07:11.360 But you can't do that. 00:07:11.360 --> 00:07:14.540 You can't install that kernel type of stuff with Python. 00:07:14.540 --> 00:07:16.520 So they needed their native apps anyway. 00:07:16.520 --> 00:07:16.920 Okay. 00:07:16.920 --> 00:07:19.580 They also talked about why they might switch to Python 3. 00:07:19.580 --> 00:07:23.340 They said there's two major features that we really care about. 00:07:23.340 --> 00:07:27.340 And there's some pains that we're trying to get away from. 00:07:27.340 --> 00:07:30.700 The exciting features were they're really interested in type annotations. 00:07:30.700 --> 00:07:34.000 Remember, mypy is coming out of Dropbox. 00:07:34.000 --> 00:07:35.500 Gito Van Rassam is working on that. 00:07:35.560 --> 00:07:42.760 And mypyC that takes type annotated Python code and compiles it to C extensions also is coming from Dropbox. 00:07:42.760 --> 00:07:45.600 So they're really doing a lot with these type annotations, which is interesting. 00:07:45.600 --> 00:07:47.800 And they're also really interested in async and await. 00:07:47.800 --> 00:07:50.020 Apparently that helps a lot for what they're doing. 00:07:50.020 --> 00:07:51.200 Yeah. 00:07:51.200 --> 00:07:52.840 Asynchronous copying of files. 00:07:52.840 --> 00:07:53.380 You'd think. 00:07:53.500 --> 00:07:56.700 You would think a lot of IO happens on the network and on the drive. 00:07:56.700 --> 00:07:57.100 Definitely. 00:07:57.100 --> 00:07:58.300 So that was the positive. 00:07:58.300 --> 00:08:04.200 The other problem is they said that a lot of the tool chains they're using is really old and crusty. 00:08:04.200 --> 00:08:13.060 Like, for example, they had to have a separate fork of CPython so they could compile it with a modern C compiler, like Visual Studio 2013. 00:08:13.060 --> 00:08:16.720 So there's something super old and not supported on Windows. 00:08:16.880 --> 00:08:18.660 And they're like, this is just not cool. 00:08:18.660 --> 00:08:23.600 Like, why are we maintaining our own fork of the CPython just so we can compile it? 00:08:23.600 --> 00:08:24.060 Yeah. 00:08:24.060 --> 00:08:27.580 Anyway, there's a lot of weird stuff they had to get away from with Python too, right? 00:08:27.580 --> 00:08:28.620 And that's not getting better. 00:08:28.620 --> 00:08:30.040 Yeah. 00:08:30.120 --> 00:08:32.400 So they talked about all this stuff, a lot of details. 00:08:32.400 --> 00:08:35.200 And they also said, we're planning a bunch of future posts. 00:08:35.200 --> 00:08:42.300 So we're going to talk about how they report crashes on Windows and macOS and how they use that to debug both native and Python code. 00:08:42.300 --> 00:08:43.880 That's one of their posts coming. 00:08:43.880 --> 00:08:44.760 That's cool. 00:08:44.760 --> 00:08:45.580 Yeah. 00:08:45.580 --> 00:08:50.140 How they maintain a hybrid Python 2 and 3 syntax and what tools help them do that. 00:08:50.140 --> 00:08:51.000 Another post. 00:08:51.000 --> 00:08:57.100 And then it's sort of a war stories, the very best bugs and stories from their Python 3 migration. 00:08:57.100 --> 00:09:01.860 So I think we have three topics picked for the next couple of Python bytes. 00:09:01.860 --> 00:09:02.360 Yeah. 00:09:02.360 --> 00:09:03.800 If they come out in time. 00:09:03.800 --> 00:09:04.120 Yeah. 00:09:04.120 --> 00:09:04.380 Sure. 00:09:04.380 --> 00:09:04.740 Yeah. 00:09:04.740 --> 00:09:05.460 For sure. 00:09:05.460 --> 00:09:08.540 Well, maybe they'll even do a presentation about this at PyCon. 00:09:08.540 --> 00:09:08.880 Yeah. 00:09:08.880 --> 00:09:09.520 Let's hope. 00:09:09.520 --> 00:09:09.960 Let's hope. 00:09:09.960 --> 00:09:11.000 Are you speaking of PyCon? 00:09:11.000 --> 00:09:11.840 Are you going to submit something? 00:09:11.840 --> 00:09:12.640 I probably am. 00:09:12.640 --> 00:09:12.960 Yeah. 00:09:12.960 --> 00:09:13.400 Yeah. 00:09:13.400 --> 00:09:15.100 I haven't yet, but there's time. 00:09:15.100 --> 00:09:15.380 Sorry. 00:09:15.380 --> 00:09:17.980 I'm going to submit something and I'll just put your name on it. 00:09:17.980 --> 00:09:18.540 That'll help. 00:09:18.540 --> 00:09:20.160 Yeah. 00:09:20.160 --> 00:09:24.480 If anybody else wants to do that too, just submit something and put my name on it and I'll just, you 00:09:24.480 --> 00:09:25.820 know, I'll wing it once I get there. 00:09:26.500 --> 00:09:27.980 Well, ours might be a joint one. 00:09:27.980 --> 00:09:29.420 Oh, that makes more sense. 00:09:29.420 --> 00:09:29.660 Yeah. 00:09:29.660 --> 00:09:30.780 Right. 00:09:30.780 --> 00:09:33.140 But where would we get the resources? 00:09:33.140 --> 00:09:35.180 You lined it up for me. 00:09:35.180 --> 00:09:35.520 Thanks. 00:09:35.520 --> 00:09:43.000 So I wanted to talk about some resources for PyCon and it's not just, these are targeted at PyCon, 00:09:43.000 --> 00:09:46.740 but it really is really any conference, technical conference, I think. 00:09:46.740 --> 00:09:50.200 And a lot of the regional Python conferences have similar things. 00:09:50.680 --> 00:09:52.380 So we're putting a bunch of links in the show notes. 00:09:52.380 --> 00:09:54.460 We've got, they have a nice speaker page. 00:09:54.460 --> 00:09:58.100 That's a kind of a top levels, what it's like to speak there and stuff. 00:09:58.100 --> 00:10:03.960 Actually last year being my first time talking at PyCon, I think that I would encourage really 00:10:03.960 --> 00:10:07.340 anybody to try it because it's a fun experience. 00:10:07.600 --> 00:10:09.200 So take a look at the speaking page. 00:10:09.200 --> 00:10:11.020 And then there's a proposal tips. 00:10:11.160 --> 00:10:15.600 So the first thing you got to do is you submit a proposal and that can be nerve wracking, 00:10:15.600 --> 00:10:17.000 but it really shouldn't be. 00:10:17.000 --> 00:10:19.840 So there's a few resources I'd like to poke people to. 00:10:19.840 --> 00:10:26.180 There's a talk proposal resource page on the PyCon 2019 site. 00:10:26.380 --> 00:10:31.200 And in there, there's also some links to some external articles and stuff. 00:10:31.200 --> 00:10:37.800 And then including some people who have shared past proposals, whether, and even failed ones 00:10:37.800 --> 00:10:38.960 and why they think they failed. 00:10:38.960 --> 00:10:43.860 And then Marietta, I don't know her last name, but she's the core developer. 00:10:43.860 --> 00:10:49.480 And she recently published her set of proposals, the ones that have been accepted. 00:10:49.480 --> 00:10:51.120 And I really like them. 00:10:51.120 --> 00:10:52.660 Actually, I took, look, look through those. 00:10:52.740 --> 00:10:57.680 And some of these are really nice, clean examples and make me think that maybe it doesn't have 00:10:57.680 --> 00:10:59.240 to be as complicated as I thought it was. 00:10:59.240 --> 00:11:00.760 So there's those. 00:11:00.760 --> 00:11:01.380 It's nice. 00:11:01.380 --> 00:11:02.540 Yeah, that's really helpful. 00:11:02.540 --> 00:11:06.180 And, you know, like you said, this is helpful to however you want to get started. 00:11:06.180 --> 00:11:09.060 And you don't have to get started at the top level PyCon. 00:11:09.060 --> 00:11:10.580 You could always do something local. 00:11:10.580 --> 00:11:11.360 Yeah. 00:11:11.360 --> 00:11:17.040 And then one of the things I wanted to bring up also is before attending PyCon, I didn't 00:11:17.040 --> 00:11:18.560 know what poster session was. 00:11:18.560 --> 00:11:21.300 I'd seen it a lot, but I didn't really know what it was. 00:11:21.300 --> 00:11:22.620 Or I'd seen it mentioned. 00:11:22.620 --> 00:11:26.000 And a poster session is, don't dismiss this. 00:11:26.000 --> 00:11:27.280 This is a pretty cool thing. 00:11:27.280 --> 00:11:29.760 The PyBytes guys did a poster. 00:11:29.760 --> 00:11:37.040 And what happens is the, in the expo area where all the, like where we were and a lot of the 00:11:37.040 --> 00:11:40.100 companies are, that's really cool, but it isn't on Sunday. 00:11:40.100 --> 00:11:42.120 Those people get out of there. 00:11:42.200 --> 00:11:47.080 And on Sunday, that area is, there's, you know, there's a job fair thing going on, but 00:11:47.080 --> 00:11:52.020 there's also these poster sessions where people have these little tight, these areas and they 00:11:52.020 --> 00:11:57.440 get a few feet of backspace and they get their poster put up and a little table for them. 00:11:57.440 --> 00:12:01.460 And so the people that are there to talk about it, if you have like a project or something 00:12:01.460 --> 00:12:06.080 you want to talk about, that's a good, a good way to get your feet wet and not, you don't 00:12:06.080 --> 00:12:09.900 actually have to present a talk, but you can talk with people about whatever you're passionate 00:12:09.900 --> 00:12:10.220 about. 00:12:10.220 --> 00:12:10.440 Yeah. 00:12:10.440 --> 00:12:12.920 And you can meet some pretty interesting people that way as well. 00:12:12.920 --> 00:12:19.160 And you also give a link, a shout out to Jason Wadier's blog post. 00:12:19.160 --> 00:12:23.360 You don't need to be a pro at Python to crack the code of PyCon, which is great. 00:12:23.460 --> 00:12:29.020 And that's a really good article about how somebody new to Python went to PyCon and still 00:12:29.020 --> 00:12:32.400 got a lot out of it, even though they weren't an expert. 00:12:32.400 --> 00:12:37.220 One of the things he mentions is that the expo hall, everybody there is trying to sell you 00:12:37.220 --> 00:12:37.500 something. 00:12:37.500 --> 00:12:42.500 I just wanted to say that we're not, we hang out there and we just want to talk with people 00:12:42.500 --> 00:12:44.620 and be there so that people can come up and say, Hey. 00:12:44.620 --> 00:12:46.140 Yeah, that's right. 00:12:46.140 --> 00:12:47.760 It's a great place for us to meet people. 00:12:47.760 --> 00:12:48.220 Yeah. 00:12:48.220 --> 00:12:50.680 We typically lose our voice by the end of the second day. 00:12:50.680 --> 00:12:51.240 Yeah. 00:12:51.240 --> 00:12:52.360 It was a ton of fun. 00:12:52.360 --> 00:12:52.820 Yeah. 00:12:52.900 --> 00:12:53.680 It's great. 00:12:53.680 --> 00:12:54.300 Yeah. 00:12:54.300 --> 00:13:01.180 So one of the reasons that we get to go there is because of people support our show and sponsor 00:13:01.180 --> 00:13:01.640 our show, right? 00:13:01.640 --> 00:13:02.400 Like DigitalOcean. 00:13:02.400 --> 00:13:07.000 And I just want to call out a cool feature that I saw them recently talking about. 00:13:07.000 --> 00:13:10.100 And I think people might find actually super useful. 00:13:10.100 --> 00:13:15.320 So when you create, normally you create a virtual machine or some form of infrastructure as a service 00:13:15.320 --> 00:13:18.060 in the cloud, you get like a little dropdown, like, well, what do you want? 00:13:18.060 --> 00:13:18.400 Ubuntu? 00:13:18.400 --> 00:13:22.800 You want, you maybe have it pre-configured for this type of service. 00:13:22.840 --> 00:13:22.900 Sure. 00:13:22.900 --> 00:13:27.680 But with DigitalOcean, they have this thing called bring your custom image to DigitalOcean. 00:13:27.680 --> 00:13:33.940 So you can spin up a virtual machine and get it exactly the way you like it to run perfectly 00:13:33.940 --> 00:13:36.620 set up on your system with your company. 00:13:36.620 --> 00:13:40.640 And then you can just upload that and say, now when I create a new thing on DigitalOcean, 00:13:40.640 --> 00:13:41.520 use that. 00:13:41.520 --> 00:13:42.160 Oh, wow. 00:13:42.160 --> 00:13:42.520 Isn't that cool? 00:13:42.520 --> 00:13:42.820 Yeah. 00:13:42.820 --> 00:13:46.920 So all you got to do is make the image, upload it, and then you can just log in and say, you 00:13:46.920 --> 00:13:49.920 know, I'd like to choose from my custom image and hit start and off it goes. 00:13:49.920 --> 00:13:51.320 So that's, that's pretty cool. 00:13:51.440 --> 00:13:54.340 There are a few simple restrictions on what has to be installed. 00:13:54.340 --> 00:13:58.160 So like they can manage the virtual machine from the outside, but you know, it doesn't 00:13:58.160 --> 00:13:59.240 seem very restrictive to me. 00:13:59.240 --> 00:14:01.120 Anyway, it looks like a great thing. 00:14:01.120 --> 00:14:03.760 You can check it out on their blog, but if you want to get started and get the credit, 00:14:03.760 --> 00:14:05.880 Python by set of M slash DigitalOcean. 00:14:05.880 --> 00:14:06.500 Nice. 00:14:06.500 --> 00:14:06.820 Yep. 00:14:07.040 --> 00:14:09.640 This may be a little bit repetitive, but Brian, have we talked about GUIs? 00:14:09.640 --> 00:14:11.820 Yeah. 00:14:11.820 --> 00:14:13.160 Yeah, we have. 00:14:13.160 --> 00:14:18.280 Actually, this one I want to share with you because I think it's actually super awesome. 00:14:18.280 --> 00:14:24.140 I think we started this whole path long ago when I said, I really just would like, what 00:14:24.140 --> 00:14:24.600 did I call it? 00:14:24.600 --> 00:14:25.500 Like proton. 00:14:25.500 --> 00:14:26.260 I called it proton. 00:14:26.260 --> 00:14:29.080 I said, I want electron JS for Python. 00:14:29.080 --> 00:14:31.240 I said, we should call it proton as well because of the P. 00:14:32.240 --> 00:14:38.720 Someone has come up with a great way to use electron, which is electron JS. 00:14:38.720 --> 00:14:44.960 It's like a Chrome and node type thing that stuff like GitHub's Atom editor, Visual Studio 00:14:44.960 --> 00:14:47.160 Code, Slack, all those things are built upon. 00:14:47.160 --> 00:14:49.680 Those are nice looking systems, right? 00:14:49.680 --> 00:14:53.000 You write HTML, you can use cool JavaScript stuff on the front end. 00:14:53.000 --> 00:14:56.160 And then, but on the back end, you got to do node and JavaScript. 00:14:56.160 --> 00:14:56.820 Yeah. 00:14:56.820 --> 00:14:57.780 I don't want to do that. 00:14:57.780 --> 00:14:58.960 Well, there's things you miss out on. 00:14:58.960 --> 00:15:01.920 Like what if you want to do something with machine learning? 00:15:02.200 --> 00:15:06.160 Like JavaScript doesn't have good machine learning tools to run locally, but if you had Python, 00:15:06.160 --> 00:15:08.940 you could use like GPU accelerated local stuff. 00:15:08.940 --> 00:15:09.560 That would be awesome. 00:15:09.560 --> 00:15:15.080 So it's not called proton, but I will point you at something called electron Python. 00:15:15.080 --> 00:15:15.860 Okay. 00:15:15.860 --> 00:15:18.120 It's basically the same thing without the name. 00:15:18.120 --> 00:15:21.580 So what it is, is it's someone has taken electron. 00:15:21.580 --> 00:15:24.780 Well, it's not even a new project in that sense. 00:15:24.780 --> 00:15:27.340 It's more of a way of using two different projects. 00:15:27.340 --> 00:15:30.580 So take electron JS and take Python. 00:15:30.900 --> 00:15:39.580 And on Python, there's a thing called zero RPC, which is like a raw sockets communication layer instead of HTTP. 00:15:39.580 --> 00:15:40.660 Okay. 00:15:40.660 --> 00:15:44.940 So this really simple local communication layer, use that as a server. 00:15:44.940 --> 00:15:50.320 And then use electron to just show your app with your JavaScript and HTML. 00:15:50.320 --> 00:15:58.760 And instead of talking through electron to node, you talk through electron, just more directly over to your Python code. 00:15:58.760 --> 00:15:59.840 So it's awesome. 00:15:59.840 --> 00:16:04.420 You get like exactly the same thing that you're building, say, Visual Studio Code with. 00:16:04.540 --> 00:16:08.100 You could do that, but have Python as the implementation on the backend. 00:16:08.100 --> 00:16:10.640 And if you need to pip install anything, you do it. 00:16:10.640 --> 00:16:12.500 It gives you like native access. 00:16:12.500 --> 00:16:17.280 So native menus, notifications, automatically update your app, all that kind of stuff. 00:16:17.280 --> 00:16:17.840 It's pretty awesome. 00:16:17.840 --> 00:16:18.520 That is cool. 00:16:18.520 --> 00:16:19.300 Yeah. 00:16:19.300 --> 00:16:19.780 That's really cool. 00:16:19.780 --> 00:16:19.940 Right. 00:16:19.940 --> 00:16:24.220 The question becomes though, still like, how do I get that to somebody? 00:16:24.220 --> 00:16:25.000 Right. 00:16:25.080 --> 00:16:25.260 Great. 00:16:25.260 --> 00:16:38.060 So I have this, this, Reeb Goldbergian contraption that I've created of like, Chrome, a JavaScript node and this Python code, which then also depends upon Python, everything you pip installed, right? 00:16:38.060 --> 00:16:39.420 Like deployment can be a challenge. 00:16:39.420 --> 00:16:50.360 So one of our listeners, Andy Boca sent us a really nice message and wrote a super informative blog post of building a deployable Python electron app. 00:16:50.360 --> 00:16:59.420 Takes you through all the steps of how he packaged up Python, his dependencies, how he created it for macOS and windows, all sorts of stuff. 00:16:59.420 --> 00:17:00.160 Yeah. 00:17:00.160 --> 00:17:01.320 That's fun. 00:17:01.320 --> 00:17:02.780 Actually, that's pretty cool. 00:17:02.780 --> 00:17:06.260 But with the code available, so you can try this out and follow along. 00:17:06.260 --> 00:17:07.300 Yeah. 00:17:07.300 --> 00:17:08.860 It's got the code and all sorts of stuff. 00:17:08.860 --> 00:17:11.100 So it's a pretty good working example. 00:17:11.100 --> 00:17:13.780 If you would like to try to create this and use this. 00:17:13.780 --> 00:17:17.160 And if people do create an app with this, please, you know, put a comment on the show notes. 00:17:17.160 --> 00:17:18.940 We'd love to see it or shoot us a message somehow. 00:17:18.940 --> 00:17:19.020 Yeah. 00:17:19.020 --> 00:17:19.380 Yeah. 00:17:19.380 --> 00:17:23.280 There's a lot of projects I want to try to do with something like this. 00:17:23.280 --> 00:17:24.620 So yeah. 00:17:24.620 --> 00:17:24.980 Neat. 00:17:24.980 --> 00:17:25.240 Yeah. 00:17:25.240 --> 00:17:26.460 So I'll leave you with one final thing. 00:17:26.460 --> 00:17:26.780 Like right. 00:17:26.780 --> 00:17:31.920 He goes through this long process of here's how you run this script and then that script and then bundle this together. 00:17:31.920 --> 00:17:37.620 You know, use PyInstaller and then use npm package or something to like suck in the PyInstaller. 00:17:37.620 --> 00:17:39.140 And there's like a lot of stuff going on. 00:17:39.660 --> 00:17:49.360 So he ends the deployment post saying, and somebody please wrap Electron Python into an IDE so that in the future, all we have to do is click a build button like we could 20 years ago. 00:17:49.360 --> 00:17:52.060 Yeah. 00:17:52.060 --> 00:17:52.220 Yeah. 00:17:52.220 --> 00:17:52.540 Nice. 00:17:52.540 --> 00:17:52.980 Yeah. 00:17:52.980 --> 00:17:53.400 Yeah. 00:17:53.400 --> 00:17:53.500 Yeah. 00:17:53.500 --> 00:18:02.420 So I guess it's doable now, but it's still a question of, is this really easier than using like QT or something like that? 00:18:02.420 --> 00:18:02.920 No. 00:18:03.060 --> 00:18:18.620 Well, he talks a lot about that and he says, look, if your choice is to use QT or say WX Python or TK Enter and all of those, maybe with slight exception of QT, there's really like one or two people who are working on it part time. 00:18:18.620 --> 00:18:25.540 And when you use Electron using Chrome and all the JavaScript front end frameworks, you might want to select, right? 00:18:25.540 --> 00:18:26.200 Vue JS. 00:18:26.200 --> 00:18:32.140 And you have Google and all the web developers in the world basically pushing that UI platform forward. 00:18:32.140 --> 00:18:33.240 Okay. 00:18:33.240 --> 00:18:34.680 So, you know, there's that. 00:18:34.680 --> 00:18:40.100 So that's, I mean, that was the argument of the, of, of what the two guys who are building this. 00:18:40.100 --> 00:18:43.980 You can either take that as a good argument or not, but that's what they were saying. 00:18:43.980 --> 00:18:44.360 Yeah. 00:18:44.360 --> 00:18:49.040 And now that it's doable, it'll get easier as time goes on and people add to it. 00:18:49.040 --> 00:18:49.280 So. 00:18:49.280 --> 00:18:50.000 All right. 00:18:50.000 --> 00:18:51.860 Come on, PyCharm folks. 00:18:51.860 --> 00:18:52.840 Give us that build button. 00:18:52.840 --> 00:18:55.020 Give us the build button. 00:18:55.340 --> 00:18:56.380 Give us the build button. 00:18:56.380 --> 00:18:58.240 We don't want to know the internals. 00:18:58.240 --> 00:18:58.700 Come on. 00:18:58.700 --> 00:18:59.260 All right. 00:18:59.260 --> 00:19:02.800 So probably enough on that, but that's a, that's actually one of the more promising ones. 00:19:02.800 --> 00:19:05.360 And I'm still, I might give it the nickname Proton. 00:19:05.360 --> 00:19:06.660 I don't know. 00:19:06.660 --> 00:19:07.040 Yeah. 00:19:07.040 --> 00:19:09.600 We should just tell them you can use that if you want. 00:19:09.600 --> 00:19:10.400 Yep. 00:19:10.400 --> 00:19:11.040 They can have it. 00:19:11.040 --> 00:19:11.700 Awesome. 00:19:11.700 --> 00:19:12.060 All right. 00:19:12.060 --> 00:19:13.320 So what's our next one? 00:19:13.320 --> 00:19:15.580 I just wanted to give a shout out to Pluggy. 00:19:15.580 --> 00:19:18.960 If anybody doesn't know that I kind of am a fan of pytest. 00:19:18.960 --> 00:19:19.820 Really? 00:19:19.820 --> 00:19:20.660 Yeah. 00:19:20.660 --> 00:19:23.080 And part of pytest. 00:19:23.080 --> 00:19:26.580 So one of the things that pytest, pytest actually grew out of the Py project. 00:19:26.580 --> 00:19:28.320 Another offshoot is Pluggy. 00:19:28.320 --> 00:19:31.760 So there's a ton of pytest plugins that you can add on. 00:19:31.760 --> 00:19:33.400 And I use, I use quite a few of them. 00:19:33.400 --> 00:19:37.780 And the way these plugins work is, is through this plugin system. 00:19:37.980 --> 00:19:40.940 And it's a, it's a plugin management and hook system. 00:19:40.940 --> 00:19:42.500 There's often a problem. 00:19:42.500 --> 00:19:47.360 If you've got an application that has a lot of possible customizations for other people to do, 00:19:47.360 --> 00:19:53.960 but how, you know, you want to be able to provide plugin or hook capabilities, but you don't want to, 00:19:53.960 --> 00:19:55.980 you know, expose too much internals. 00:19:55.980 --> 00:20:04.840 And you also want to like isolate this API, this interface so that you know that you can do refactoring and rewriting stuff and you're not going to break plugins. 00:20:05.480 --> 00:20:06.960 And plugins, an option. 00:20:06.960 --> 00:20:09.380 And it's, I think it's a really good, solid option. 00:20:09.380 --> 00:20:12.920 I have noticed that a few other projects have used this. 00:20:12.920 --> 00:20:17.560 The, I don't have a list of those, but it's a, I don't think we've covered it before. 00:20:17.560 --> 00:20:20.340 And if we have my apologies, but it's kind of neat. 00:20:20.340 --> 00:20:20.820 I don't think so. 00:20:21.080 --> 00:20:26.640 And my little side project of cards, a lot of people said, well, if we're doing like task management, 00:20:26.640 --> 00:20:28.520 there's going to be extra little things. 00:20:28.520 --> 00:20:30.460 People want maybe a different list of things. 00:20:30.460 --> 00:20:38.140 You maybe not an owner, but you maybe need priority and maybe time estimates should be in points versus hours or things like that. 00:20:38.140 --> 00:20:39.800 A plugin system might be good. 00:20:39.800 --> 00:20:45.300 So I'm actually thinking about trying to put pluggy into this little, little side project of mine. 00:20:45.300 --> 00:20:45.560 So. 00:20:45.560 --> 00:20:46.660 Oh yeah, that's really cool. 00:20:46.660 --> 00:20:47.340 Yeah. 00:20:47.340 --> 00:20:50.000 This is used by pytest, by Tox, by DevPy. 00:20:50.180 --> 00:20:52.540 So certainly it's getting some real world testing. 00:20:52.540 --> 00:20:53.220 That's great. 00:20:53.220 --> 00:21:01.220 It's, you know, I like these plugins as an idea of saying, I would like to let people change how this works without just letting them actually change the project. 00:21:01.220 --> 00:21:01.620 Yeah. 00:21:01.620 --> 00:21:01.960 Yeah. 00:21:01.960 --> 00:21:02.240 That's cool. 00:21:02.240 --> 00:21:03.500 All right. 00:21:03.500 --> 00:21:04.840 Are you ready for something scary? 00:21:04.840 --> 00:21:06.140 Like actually truly scary? 00:21:06.140 --> 00:21:09.900 No, but let's talk about it anyway. 00:21:09.900 --> 00:21:10.700 All right. 00:21:10.700 --> 00:21:12.980 This was said over by Eduardo or Jenna. 00:21:12.980 --> 00:21:14.800 This is on Bloomberg. 00:21:14.800 --> 00:21:17.840 So on, Bloomberg.com. 00:21:17.840 --> 00:21:19.920 So it gives it's Bloomberg business week. 00:21:20.000 --> 00:21:24.780 It's a pretty serious article and it's, it's pretty deep reporting for something that has happened. 00:21:24.780 --> 00:21:31.480 And it's called the big hack, how China used a tiny chip to infiltrate U S companies and other companies. 00:21:31.480 --> 00:21:37.820 But they're thinking they were aiming them actually at U S companies and defense contractors and stuff like that. 00:21:37.820 --> 00:21:38.760 Oh, creepy. 00:21:38.940 --> 00:21:39.700 So tell me more. 00:21:39.700 --> 00:21:40.020 All right. 00:21:40.020 --> 00:21:49.420 So first of all, when they say a tiny chip, I don't know, I don't know what you guys are visualizing, but if you hold up, say a U S. 00:21:50.420 --> 00:21:59.540 Penny or like a penny or like a euro cent and you look at the lettering on there, the chip was the size of one of the letters. 00:21:59.900 --> 00:22:04.300 Like, so where it says the year that penny was printed, it's like the size of like the two. 00:22:05.260 --> 00:22:10.280 And they, they decorated as like, a different type of component that goes onto the chip. 00:22:10.620 --> 00:22:13.240 So this is, it's really a long article. 00:22:13.240 --> 00:22:19.900 Like I said, quite deep reporting and says, this was an attack by Chinese spies that reached almost 30 U S companies. 00:22:19.900 --> 00:22:23.240 How they know that it was 30 and not 37 or something is actually really interesting. 00:22:23.620 --> 00:22:28.760 including Amazon and Apple by compromising America's technology supply chain. 00:22:28.760 --> 00:22:43.700 So what happened was they found out that there was some spies in the Chinese government that threatened the subcontractor of the subcontractor of a company that made motherboards for many data center servers. 00:22:43.700 --> 00:22:45.120 Yeah. 00:22:45.120 --> 00:22:47.280 And they said, well, you have a couple of choices. 00:22:47.280 --> 00:22:54.620 One, we can bribe you to install these little tiny chips, or we can threaten you with inspections of your factory. 00:22:54.620 --> 00:22:57.060 If you don't install these chips and keep it quiet. 00:22:57.060 --> 00:23:02.460 And pretty much they found out that some of these subcontractors were like, well, we want to keep our business. 00:23:02.460 --> 00:23:03.540 So chips go in. 00:23:03.540 --> 00:23:04.260 Jeez. 00:23:04.260 --> 00:23:04.820 Yeah. 00:23:04.820 --> 00:23:13.240 And so this all started when Amazon went to acquire actually a Portland based company called elemental technologies, which basically helped with like streaming and video compression. 00:23:13.240 --> 00:23:13.960 Yeah. 00:23:13.960 --> 00:23:19.620 And as part of the purchase process, I said, well, let's do some due diligence on you. 00:23:19.620 --> 00:23:24.160 And they actually sent off the server hardware that they were using off to some other company. 00:23:24.160 --> 00:23:25.520 I think it was in Canada or somewhere. 00:23:25.520 --> 00:23:29.760 And they said there was a nested on the servers, motherboards. 00:23:29.760 --> 00:23:33.280 The testers found a microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice. 00:23:33.280 --> 00:23:36.020 That wasn't part of the original motherboards design. 00:23:36.020 --> 00:23:37.560 Like, I don't even know how they found that. 00:23:37.560 --> 00:23:37.800 Right. 00:23:37.800 --> 00:23:38.700 Like that's insane. 00:23:39.640 --> 00:23:50.440 And so then they found out that these motherboards were used by the Department of Defense and CIA drones and Navy warships and Apple and Amazon and all sorts of places. 00:23:50.440 --> 00:23:52.320 And they're like, whoa, what's going on here? 00:23:52.860 --> 00:23:56.320 So they did a bunch of like a spy on spy stuff. 00:23:56.320 --> 00:23:58.600 And they found out kind of like what I told you. 00:23:58.600 --> 00:24:10.560 And they realized that these chips were basically opening back doors in the network of all of these servers, which would then go download bigger bits of code would actually take them over and you could just log into them. 00:24:11.160 --> 00:24:14.100 But they were interacting with these other servers somewhere on the internet. 00:24:14.100 --> 00:24:19.160 So they hacked those servers and they figured out that 30 companies' machines were interacting with that server. 00:24:19.160 --> 00:24:20.720 And that's how the number is 30. 00:24:20.720 --> 00:24:21.200 Wow. 00:24:21.200 --> 00:24:21.700 Okay. 00:24:21.700 --> 00:24:25.660 Anyway, the whole supply side chain thing is pretty scary. 00:24:25.660 --> 00:24:28.380 But this is not technically a software topic. 00:24:28.380 --> 00:24:35.200 But, you know, I think it's something that we in the technology industry need to just be aware of because this is pretty crazy. 00:24:35.200 --> 00:24:35.780 Right. 00:24:35.780 --> 00:24:38.360 And there's no software that will tell you whether or not this is a problem. 00:24:38.360 --> 00:24:38.580 Right. 00:24:38.580 --> 00:24:40.420 Because this is at the chip level. 00:24:40.420 --> 00:24:40.800 Yeah. 00:24:40.800 --> 00:24:42.040 Geez. 00:24:42.040 --> 00:24:43.980 Anyway, there, let's leave it with that positive note. 00:24:43.980 --> 00:24:47.900 Have a nice day, everyone. 00:24:47.900 --> 00:24:49.600 Have a good day. 00:24:49.600 --> 00:25:00.180 Apparently, the 30 companies who had their servers interacting back with the hacker controller, command and control servers have been notified silently. 00:25:00.180 --> 00:25:00.640 Yeah. 00:25:00.640 --> 00:25:01.180 Yeah. 00:25:01.180 --> 00:25:04.580 But anyway, there's a bunch of inside reporting and stuff. 00:25:04.580 --> 00:25:05.500 It's quite interesting. 00:25:05.500 --> 00:25:06.200 So check that out. 00:25:06.200 --> 00:25:08.200 Well, that's it for our official items. 00:25:08.200 --> 00:25:09.340 Anything else you want to share, Brian? 00:25:09.460 --> 00:25:11.360 No, I just want to rave about your new course. 00:25:11.360 --> 00:25:12.320 Oh, thank you. 00:25:12.320 --> 00:25:14.900 So the new course is going really well. 00:25:14.900 --> 00:25:21.600 So I, you know, the async course that talks about asyncio, async and await, multiprocessing, all that stuff. 00:25:22.080 --> 00:25:23.080 It needed to exist. 00:25:23.080 --> 00:25:23.180 It needed to exist. 00:25:23.180 --> 00:25:24.260 And I'm so happy I built it. 00:25:24.260 --> 00:25:24.540 Yeah. 00:25:24.540 --> 00:25:35.620 So what I wanted to bring up is I know async is hot because of a lot of people thinking about the new async stuff that came into the more recent Python 3s. 00:25:36.040 --> 00:25:37.540 But it's not just that. 00:25:37.540 --> 00:25:45.020 So one of the things I like about the course is you do talk about the new asyncio and aiohttp. 00:25:45.020 --> 00:25:45.840 Yeah, those. 00:25:45.840 --> 00:25:48.180 But you also, it isn't just that. 00:25:48.180 --> 00:25:54.940 It's also things like if you are concerned about that, you're probably concerned about things like I just want to make stuff run faster. 00:25:55.680 --> 00:26:04.180 And so there's other options to like multi-threading and multi-processing and when and how to use different ones and kind of how to decide that. 00:26:04.180 --> 00:26:09.400 And then even if you want to make it faster, there's things like I think, do you cover Cython then? 00:26:09.400 --> 00:26:10.340 I do cover Cython. 00:26:10.340 --> 00:26:10.820 Yeah. 00:26:10.820 --> 00:26:14.860 So just it's not just the more recent things. 00:26:14.860 --> 00:26:17.480 It's a big full picture and it's not even that long. 00:26:17.480 --> 00:26:19.160 It's just like five hours or something. 00:26:19.160 --> 00:26:20.340 Yeah, it is. 00:26:20.400 --> 00:26:21.440 Yeah, thank you so much for that. 00:26:21.440 --> 00:26:22.760 That's really nice of you to say so. 00:26:22.760 --> 00:26:23.160 Good job. 00:26:23.160 --> 00:26:23.400 Yeah. 00:26:23.400 --> 00:26:24.100 Thank you very much. 00:26:24.100 --> 00:26:24.960 Happy to do it. 00:26:24.960 --> 00:26:25.840 All right. 00:26:25.840 --> 00:26:29.540 And happy to meet up with you and talk about the news as always. 00:26:29.540 --> 00:26:30.340 Yeah, thanks. 00:26:30.340 --> 00:26:31.200 Talk to you later. 00:26:31.200 --> 00:26:31.460 You bet. 00:26:31.460 --> 00:26:31.720 Bye. 00:26:31.720 --> 00:26:31.920 Bye. 00:26:31.920 --> 00:26:35.540 Thank you for listening to Python Bytes. 00:26:35.540 --> 00:26:38.120 Follow the show on Twitter via at Python Bytes. 00:26:38.120 --> 00:26:41.000 That's Python Bytes as in B-Y-T-E-S. 00:26:41.000 --> 00:26:44.440 And get the full show notes at pythonbytes.fm. 00:26:44.440 --> 00:26:48.760 If you have a news item you want featured, just visit pythonbytes.fm and send it our way. 00:26:48.900 --> 00:26:51.480 We're always on the lookout for sharing something cool. 00:26:51.480 --> 00:26:54.860 On behalf of myself and Brian Okken, this is Michael Kennedy. 00:26:54.860 --> 00:26:58.480 Thank you for listening and sharing this podcast with your friends and colleagues.