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Brian #1: Futurize and Auto-Futurize


Staged automatic conversion from Python2 to Python3 with futurize from python-future.org

pip install future

Stages:

1: safe fixes:

exception syntax, print function, object base class, iterator syntax, key checking in dictionaries, and more

2: Python 3 style code with wrappers for Python 2

more risky items to change
separating text from bytes, quite a few more

very modular and you can be more aggressive and more conservative with flags.

Do that, but between each step, run tests, and only continue if they pass, with auto-futurize from Timothy Hopper.

a shell script that uses git to save staged changes and tox to test the code.



Michael #2: Tech blog writing live stream


via Anthony Shaw
Live stream on "technical blog writing"
Talking about how I put articles together, research, timing and other things about layouts and narratives.
Covers “Modifying the Python language in 6 minutes”, deep article
Listicals, “5 Easy Coding Projects to Do with Kids”
A little insight into what is popular.
Question article: Why is Python Slow?
Tourists guide to the CPython source code


Brian #3: Try out walrus operator in Python 3.8


Alexander Hultnér
The walrus operator is the assignment expression that is coming in thanks to PEP 572.


# From: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0572/#syntax-and-semantics
# Handle a matched regex
if (match := pattern.search(data)) is not None:
# Do something with match

# A loop that can't be trivially rewritten using 2-arg iter()
while chunk := file.read(8192):
process(chunk)

# Reuse a value that's expensive to compute
[y := f(x), y**2, y**3]

# Share a subexpression between a comprehension filter clause and its output
filtered_data = [y for x in data if (y := f(x)) is not None]



This article walks through trying this out with the 3.8 alpha’s now available.
Using pyenv and brew to install 3.8, but you can also just download it and try it out.

3.8.0a1: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-380a1/
3.8.0a2: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-380a2/

Ends with a demonstration of the walrus operator working in a (I think) very likely use case, grabbing a value from a dict if the key exists


for entry in sample_data:
if title := entry.get("title"):
print(f'Found title: "{title}"')



That code won’t fail if the title key doesn’t exist.


Michael #4: bullet : Beautiful Python Prompts Made Simple


Have you ever wanted a dropdown select box for your CLI? Bullet!
Lots of design options
Also

Password “boxes”
Yes/No
Numbers

Looking for contributors, especially Windows support.


Brian #5: Hosting private pip packages using Azure Artifacts


Interesting idea to utilize artifacts as a private place to store built packages to pip install elsewhere.
Walkthrough is assuming you are working with a data pipeline.
You can package some of the work in earlier stages for use in later stages by packaging them and making them available as artifacts.
Includes a basic tutorial on setuptools packaging and building an sdist and a wheel.
Need to use CI in the Azure DevOps tool and use that to build the package and save the artifact
Now in a later stage where you want to install the package, there are some configs needed to get the pip credentials right, included in the article.
Very fun article/hack to beat Azure into a use model that maybe it wasn’t designed for.
Could be useful for non data pipeline usage, I’m sure.
Speaking of Azure, we brought up Anthony Shaw’s pytest-azurepipelines pytest plugin last week. Well, it is now part of the recommended Python template from Azure. Very cool.


Michael #6: Async/await for wxPython


via Andy Bulka
Remember asyncio and PyQt from last week?
Similar project called wxasync which does the same thing for wxPython!
He’s written a medium article about it https://medium.com/@abulka/async-await-for-wxpython-c78c667e0872 with links to that project, and share some real life usage s