Preamble This is a cross-over episode from our new show The Machine Learning Podcast, the show about going from idea to production with machine learning. Summary The majority of machine learning projects that you read about or work on are built around batch processes. The model is trained, and then validated, and then deployed, with each step being a discrete and isolated task. Unfortunately, the real world is rarely static, leading to concept drift and model failures. River is a framework...

Preamble This is a cross-over episode from our new show The Machine Learning Podcast, the show about going from idea to production with machine learning. Summary Deep learning is a revolutionary category of machine learning that accelerates our ability to build powerful inference models. Along with that power comes a great deal of complexity in determining what neural architectures are best suited to a given task, engineering features, scaling computation, etc. Predibase is building on the...

Preamble This is a cross-over episode from our new show The Machine Learning Podcast, the show about going from idea to production with machine learning. Summary Machine learning has the potential to transform industries and revolutionize business capabilities, but only if the models are reliable and robust. Because of the fundamental probabilistic nature of machine learning techniques it can be challenging to test and validate the generated models. The team at Deepchecks understands the...

Preamble This is a cross-over episode from our new show The Machine Learning Podcast, the show about going from idea to production with machine learning. Summary Building an ML model is getting easier than ever, but it is still a challenge to get that model in front of the people that you built it for. Baseten is a platform that helps you quickly generate a full stack application powered by your model. You can easily create a web interface and APIs powered by the model you created, or a...

Summary Starting a new project is always exciting and full of possibility, until you have to set up all of the repetitive boilerplate. Fortunately there are useful project templates that eliminate that drudgery. PyScaffold goes above and beyond simple template repositories, and gives you a toolkit for different application types that are packed with best practices to make your life easier. In this episode Florian Wilhelm shares the story behind PyScaffold, how the templates are designed to...

Summary Application configuration is a deceptively complex problem. Everyone who is building a project that gets used more than once will end up needing to add configuration to control aspects of behavior or manage connections to other systems and services. At first glance it seems simple, but can quickly become unwieldy. Bruno Rocha created Dynaconf in an effort to provide a simple interface with powerful capabilities for managing settings across environments with a set of strong opinions....

Summary Software is eating the world, but that code has to have hardware to execute the instructions. Most people, and many software engineers, don’t have a proper understanding of how that hardware functions. Charles Petzold wrote the book "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" to make this a less opaque subject. In this episode he discusses what motivated him to revise that work in the second edition and the additional details that he packed in to explore the...

Summary The generation, distribution, and consumption of energy is one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure for the modern world. With the rise of renewable energy there is an accompanying need for systems that can respond in real-time to the availability and demand for electricity. FlexMeasures is an open source energy management system that is designed to integrate a variety of inputs intelligently allocate energy resources to reduce waste in your home or grid. In this episode...

Summary Your ability to build and maintain a software project is tempered by the strength of the team that you are working with. If you are in a position of leadership, then you are responsible for the growth and maintenance of that team. In this episode Jigar Desai, currently the SVP of engineering at Sisu Data, shares his experience as an engineering leader over the past several years and the useful insights he has gained into how to build effective engineering teams. Announcements Hello...

Summary Working on hardware projects often has significant friction involved when compared to pure software. Brian Pugh enjoys tinkering with microcontrollers, but his "weekend projects" often took longer than a weekend to complete, so he created Belay. In this episode he explains how Belay simplifies the interactions involved in developing for MicroPython boards and how you can use it to speed up your own experimentation. Announcements Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast...

Summary Static typing versus dynamic typing is one of the oldest debates in software development. In recent years a number of dynamic languages have worked toward a middle ground by adding support for type hints. Python’s type annotations have given rise to an ecosystem of tools that use that type information to validate the correctness of programs and help identify potential bugs. At Instagram they created the Pyre project with a focus on speed to allow for scaling to huge Python projects....

Summary Every software project is subject to a series of decisions and tradeoffs. One of the first decisions to make is which programming language to use. For companies where their product is software, this is a decision that can have significant impact on their overall success. In this episode Sean Knapp discusses the languages that his team at Ascend use for building a service that powers complex and business critical data workflows. He also explains his motivation to standardize on Python...

Summary Writing code is only one piece of creating good software. Code reviews are an important step in the process of building applications that are maintainable and sustainable. In this episode On Freund shares his thoughts on the myriad purposes that code reviews serve, as well as exploring some of the patterns and anti-patterns that grow up around a seemingly simple process. Announcements Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python’s role in data and science. When...

Summary Quality assurance in the software industry has become a shared responsibility in most organizations. Given the rapid pace of development and delivery it can be challenging to ensure that your application is still working the way it’s supposed to with each release. In this episode Jonathon Wright discusses the role of quality assurance in modern software teams and how automation can help. Announcements Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python’s role in data and...

Summary The goal of every software team is to get their code into production without breaking anything. This requires establishing a repeatable process that doesn’t introduce unnecessary roadblocks and friction. In this episode Ronak Rahman discusses the challenges that development teams encounter when trying to build and maintain velocity in their work, the role that access to infrastructure plays in that process, and how to build automation and guardrails for everyone to take part in the...

Summary Every startup begins with an idea, but that won’t get you very far without testing the feasibility of that idea. A common practice is to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that addresses the problem that you are trying to solve and working with early customers as they engage with that MVP. In this episode Tony Pavlovych shares his thoughts on Python’s strengths when building and launching that MVP and some of the potential pitfalls that businesses can run into on that...

Summary Application architectures have been in a constant state of evolution as new infrastructure capabilities are introduced. Virtualization, cloud, containers, mobile, and now web assembly have each introduced new options for how to build and deploy software. Recognizing the transformative potential of web assembly, Matt Butcher and his team at Fermyon are investing in tooling and services to improve the developer experience. In this episode he explains the opportunity that web assembly...

Summary As your code scales beyond a trivial level of complexity and sophistication it becomes difficult or impossible to know everything that it is doing. The flow of logic and data through your software and which parts are taking the most time are impossible to understand without help from your tools. VizTracer is the tool that you will turn to when you need to know all of the execution paths that are being exercised and which of those paths are the most expensive. In this episode Tian Gao...

Summary Analysis of streaming data in real time has long been the domain of big data frameworks, predominantly written in Java. In order to take advantage of those capabilities from Python requires using client libraries that suffer from impedance mis-matches that make the work harder than necessary. Bytewax is a new open source platform for writing stream processing applications in pure Python that don’t have to be translated into foreign idioms. In this episode Bytewax founder Zander...

Summary Building a fully functional web application has been growing in complexity along with the growing popularity of javascript UI frameworks such as React, Vue, Angular, etc. Users have grown to expect interactive experiences with dynamic page updates, which leads to duplicated business logic and complex API contracts between the server-side application and the Javascript front-end. To reduce the friction involved in writing and maintaining a full application Sam Willis created Tetra, a...

Virtually everything that you interact with on a daily basis and many other things that make modern life possible were designed and modeled in software called CAD or Computer-Aided Design. These programs are advanced suites with graphical editing environments tailored to domain experts in areas such as mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, architecture, etc. While the UI-driven workflow is more accessible, it isn't scalable which opens the door to code-driven workflows. In this...

Building any software project is going to require relying on dependencies that you and your team didn't write or maintain, and many of those will have dependencies of their own. This has led to a wide variety of potential and actual issues ranging from developer ergonomics to application security. In order to provide a higher degree of confidence in the optimal combinations of direct and transitive dependencies a team at Red Hat started Project Thoth. In this episode Fridolín Pokorný explains...

Most developers have encountered code completion systems and rely on them as part of their daily work. They allow you to stay in the flow of programming, but have you ever stopped to think about how they work? In this episode Meredydd Luff takes us behind the scenes to dig into the mechanics of code completion engines and how you can customize them to fit your particular use case.

Russell Keith-Magee is an accomplished engineer and a fixture of the Python community. His work on the Beeware suite of projects is one of the most ambitious undertakings in the ecosystem and unfailingly forward-looking. With his recent transition to working for Anaconda he is now able to dedicate his full focus to the effort. In this episode he reflects on the journey that he has taken so far, how Beeware is helping to address some of the threats to Python's long term viability, and how he...