Test & Code

Matt Harrison, author of many Python books, is putting together a course, Effective Book Authoring, to help other people write and publish books.  As part of this course, he's including interviews with people who have already written books, including me. This is that interview. We discuss: Why I wrote "Python Testing with pytest" Self publishing vs working with a publisher The writing, editing, an...

Wearable technology is not just smart consumer devices like watches and activity trackers.  Wearable tech also includes one off projects by designers, makers, and hackers and there are more and more people producing tutorials on how to get started. Wearable tech is also a great way to get both kids and adults excited about coding, electronics, and in general, engineering skills.  Sophy Wong is a d...

All test suites start fast. But as you grow your set of tests, each test adds a little bit of time to the suite.   What can you do about it to keep test suites fast?   Some things, like parallelization, are applicable to many domains.   What about, for instance, Django applications?  Well, Adam Johnson has thought about it a lot, and is here to tell us how we can speed up our Django test suites. ...

Within software projects, there are lots of metrics we could measure. But which ones really matter. Instead of a list, Benjamin Harding shares with us a way of thinking about business outcomes that can help us with every day decision making.  We talk about: Business outcomes vs vanity metrics As a developer, how do you keep business outcomes in mind Thinking about customer value all the time Commu...

Hackathons have been spreading around the world; many at university campuses. Major League Hacking, MLH, has been encouraging and helping hackathons. Hacking can be thought of as tinkering. Taking things apart and putting them back together as an interesting experience. There's always been some of this as part of software culture. The people at Major League Hacking have taken this to a whole new l...

Using mock objects during testing in Python. Anna-Lena joins the podcast to teach us about mocks and using unittest.mock objects during testing.  We discuss: the different styles of using mocks pros and cons of mocks dependency injection adapter pattern mock hell magical universe and much more Special Guest: Anna-Lena Popkes. Links: Personal webpage of Anna-Lena Popkes Magical Universe — Awesome P...

Some people avoid writing tests. Some drudge through it painfully.  There is a better way.  In this episode, I'm going to share some advice from Luke Plant on how to "Test Smarter, Not Harder" . Links: Test smarter, not harder - lukeplant.me.uk — The original article by Luke

virtualenv supports six shells: bash, csh, fish, xonsh, cmd, posh. Each handles prompts slightly differently. Although the virtualenv custom prompt behavior should be the same across shells, Brian Skinn noticed inconsistencies. He set out to fix those inconsistencies. That was the start of an adventure in open source collaboration, shell prompt internals, difficult test problems, and continuous in...

I asked people on twitter to fill in "How do I test _____?" to find out what people want to know how to test.  Lots of responses. David Lord agreed to answer them with me.  In the process, we come up with lots of great general advice on how to test just about anything. Specific Questions people asked: What makes a good test? How do you test web app performance? How do you test cookie cutter templa...

Software tests should be order independent. That means you should be able to run them in any order or run them in isolation and get the same result. However, system state often gets in the way and order dependence can creep into a test suite.  One way to fight against order dependence is to randomize test order, and with pytest, we recommend the plugin pytest-randomly to do that for you. The devel...

Many people have been working from home now that are not used to working from home.  Or at least are working from home more than they ever did before. That's definitely true for me.  Even though I've been working from home since March, I wanted some tips from people who have been doing it longer. Julian Sequeira, of PyBites fame, has been working from home for about a year.  Reuven Lerner, an amaz...

Researches and others using data science and software need to follow solid software engineering practices. This is a message that Joel Grus has been promoting for some time. Joel joins the show this week to talk about data science, software engineering, and even Fizz Buzz. Topics include: Software Engineering practices and data science Difficulties with Jupyter notebooks Code reviews on experiment...

pytest 6 is out. Specifically, 6.0.1, as of July 31.  And there's lots to be excited about.  Anthony Sottile joins the show to discuss features, improvements, documentation updates and more. Full release notes / changelog Some of what we talk about: How to update (at least, how I do it)  Run your test suites with 5.4.3 or whatever the last version you were using Update to 6 Run again. Same output?...

pip is the package installer for Python.  Often, when you run pip, especially the first time in a new virtual environment, you will see something like: WARNING: You are using pip version 20.1.1; however, version 20.2 is available.  You should consider upgrading via the 'python -m pip install --upgrade pip' command. And you should. Because 20.2 has a new dependency resolver. Get in the habit, until...

Lots of Python projects are starting to use GitHub Actions for Continous Integration & Deployment (CI/CD), as well as other workflows. Tania Allard, a Senior Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft, joins the show to answer some of my questions regarding setting up a Python project to use Actions. Some of the topics covered: How to get started with GitHub Actions for a Python project? What are w...

A great resume is key to landing a great software job.  There's no surprise there.  But so many people make mistakes on their resume that can very easily be fixed. Randall Kanna is on the show today to help us understand how to improve our resumes, and in turn, help us have better careers. Special Guest: Randall Kanna. Links: The Standout Developer — link includes discount

Len Wanger works on industrial 3D printers. And I was pleased to find out that  there's a bunch of Python in those printers as well.  In this episode we talk about: 3D printers What are the different types of 3D printers? Where are 3D printed industrial parts being used? Why use one type of additive manufacturing over another? Python in 3D printing hardware. What are Finite State Machines, FSMs? B...

FastAPI is a modern, fast (high-performance), web framework for building APIs with Python based on standard Python type hints.  Typer is a library for building CLI applications, also based on Python type hints.  Type hints and many other details are intended to make it easier to develop, test, and debug applications using FastAPI and Typer. The person behind FastAPI and Typer is Sebastián Ramírez....

There's stuff going on in Python packaging and pyproject.toml. Brett and I talk about some upcoming work on Python packaging, such as: editable installs the need for standardization configuration of other tools in pyproject.toml And then get off on tangents and talk about: why it's good to have packages like pip, toml, setuptools, wheel, etc not part of the standard library should we remove some s...

Code Coverage or Test Coverage is a way to measure what lines of code and branches in your code that are utilized during testing.   Coverage tools are an important part of software engineering.  But there's also lots of different opinions about using it.  Should you try for 100% coverage?  What code can and should you exclude?  What about targets? I've been asked many times what I think about code...

The Python extension for VS Code is most downloaded extension for VS Code.   Brett Cannon is the manager for the distributed development team of the Python extension for VS Code. In this episode, Brett and I discuss the Python extension and VS Code, including: pytest support virtual environment support how settings work, including user and workspace settings multi root projects testing Python in V...

pytest plugins are an amazing way to supercharge your test suites, leveraging great solutions from people solving test problems all over the world. In this episode Michael and I discuss 15 favorite plugins that you should know about. We also discuss fixtures and plugins and other testing tools that work great with pytest tox GitHub Actions Coverage.py Selenium + splinter with pytest-splinter Hypot...

One of the great things about attending in person coding conferences, such as PyCon, is the hallway track, where you can catch up with people you haven't seen for possibly a year, or maybe even the first time you've met in person.  Nina is starting something like the hallway track, online, on twitch, and it's already going, so check out the first episode of Python Tea . Interesting coincidence is...

"The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers." That's a lot of responsibility, and to that end, the PSF Board Directors help out quite a bit.  If you want to be a part of the board, you can. There's an election coming up righ...

Technical debt has to be dealt with on a regular basis to have a healthy product and development team. The impacts of technical debt include emotional drain on engineers and slowing down development and can adversely affect your hiring ability and retention. But really, what is technical debt? Can we measure it? How do we reduce it, and when? James Smith, the CEO of Bugsnag, joins the show to talk...