0:00

Hello and welcome to Python Bytes where we

0:02

deliver Python news and headlines directly

0:04

to your earbuds. This is episode 352 recorded September 12th, 2023. I'm

0:10

Michael Kennedy. And I'm Brian Ocken. And

0:12

this episode is sponsored by us, supported

0:15

by us, support the podcast

0:18

by choosing our courses. Uh,

0:21

listening to our podcasts, including

0:23

the new one by Brian, Python people and

0:26

the Patreon supporters and find us on fostedon.org.

0:29

Brian me

0:29

and the show links in the show

0:32

notes and also show notes

0:34

have how to attend the live session if

0:36

you want. Yes. Brian, when you

0:38

got to start our day here, I feel

0:41

like it's the start of school. So I think,

0:43

uh, I feel like a helicopter parent. No,

0:45

that's right. You got your homework done. Was

0:48

anyone mean to you? Can I help you out, sweetie? So,

0:51

um, this, uh, the first topic is called heliclockter.

0:55

Um, and it is, it is, uh, like,

0:57

apparently that's a pun on the helicopter parenting,

0:59

maybe. I don't know. Um,

1:02

so, uh, like helicopter, but

1:05

clock get it kind of a heliclock.

1:08

So this was submitted by Peter Nielsen.

1:10

I think he was involved in this, but, uh,

1:13

the idea is, um, is it's

1:15

like, it's like date times, but

1:18

they're a little bit better. So apparently one

1:20

of the frustrations that this group had

1:22

was, um, with date, normal date times, and

1:24

they looked into other things is having,

1:27

being able to just have a date time where you can just enter

1:29

like the

1:29

time, but have it be

1:32

like

1:33

aware of what time zone it's in.

1:35

So it's, um, the, the, the big thing about

1:37

this is, is a subclass of date time

1:40

with, uh, with some extra features. So you've got

1:42

a date time. TZ, which is a,

1:45

uh, time zone aware, uh, date

1:47

time. And then you've got a local one,

1:49

which ensures that the time zone is

1:51

local time. And then a UTC. So

1:54

there are some other, other, uh,

1:56

solutions out there that deal with you.

1:58

Just assume UTC.

1:59

plus zero, but that's often

2:02

not convenient. And I guess one of the things they

2:04

had was they wanted to be able to have daytime

2:07

items as objects and then be able to

2:09

sort them, but have them keep, like

2:11

maintain what time zone they were created in

2:13

and stuff, which is kind of an interesting

2:16

thing. So they've got, it

2:19

looks just like working with time zones. So it looks

2:22

pretty easy to work with if you've ever

2:24

worked with time zones. They do have some other cool

2:26

features like statically

2:28

type checkable and pedantic

2:30

integration, which is kind of neat. Anyway,

2:34

they've got also an article about

2:37

why they created it. Time

2:39

flies when you're having zones, nice. So

2:44

it's a pretty interesting discussion going through

2:46

why they chose the solution

2:48

they did of creating their own and

2:51

everything. And being able to use it with MyPy

2:53

also is kind of cool. Yeah,

2:56

neat time zone. Shout out to Arrow and Pendulum

2:58

as well, or some of the other well-known ones, yeah. Yeah,

3:01

even a daytime UTC they found, but

3:03

it's UTC zero. And

3:06

then they even talked about why they, like how they

3:08

designed it and why. So their first

3:10

thing was just create a completely new type,

3:13

but then they came up

3:15

with some problems with that. So they came

3:17

up with sub-classing. So then these

3:20

new types are types of

3:22

daytime also, so you can use other things to

3:24

go with them. So I think that's a cool solution. I'm

3:27

not usually a fan of sub-classing, but

3:29

I think the sub-classing in this case makes a

3:31

lot of sense. Anyway, what

3:34

you got for us? That looks good.

3:36

I think it sounds so easy to be working

3:38

with time, but it's always so tricky.

3:41

Yeah, I have something, keep you with

3:43

the same color scheme here, a

3:46

new release for Wagtail. And I don't

3:48

believe we've talked about Wagtail before. It's

3:51

possible. I did

3:53

get a chance to use our search today, and

3:56

just reminded how nicely

3:58

that goes, I guess. at least

4:00

mention it somewhere. But Wagtail is a

4:04

CMS, the leading open source Python

4:06

CMS built

4:09

on Django, but you don't necessarily have to know

4:11

Django. It's kind of like WordPress in

4:13

the sense that you could just go through

4:15

the setup steps and run WordPress

4:17

and not even worry about the fact it's written

4:20

in PHP. So Wagtail

4:22

is a little bit like that, but just pip install

4:24

Wagtail to get going. And it's

4:26

got some really cool features. I haven't really explored

4:29

it too much, but it's got this really cool visual designer

4:31

for people to build out web pages and

4:33

stuff. Isn't that cool? So you can like hit

4:35

a little plus, you get like a nice

4:38

wizzy wig. I'm gonna insert a heading or insert

4:40

a table or like a image

4:42

gallery with these images. I have a cool

4:45

tree structure so you can organize your

4:47

content and because it's a Django, you can

4:49

extend it doing Django things, which

4:52

is pretty sweet and has a bunch

4:54

of, you can make little snippets that you can use inside

4:56

your pages, so that's pretty neat. It

4:59

even has a library for managing your images.

5:01

So pretty cool stuff. And the

5:04

news item today is an article by

5:06

Megan Voss. Come over to the dark side

5:09

with Wagtail 5. So Wagtail 5.0

5:11

is a new release here with

5:14

a bunch of cool things. So

5:16

Dark Mode, if you want your website, which

5:18

is backed by Wagtail, to have Dark

5:20

Mode. Well, Dark Mode is a thing. It's

5:22

pretty excellent. I'm a big fan of Dark

5:25

Mode. It has SVG

5:27

image support in addition, scalable

5:29

vector graphics in addition to just JPGs

5:31

and stuff. It has an accessibility,

5:33

an enhanced accessibility checker. That's pretty

5:35

cool. Like if you're creating content and it's hard for

5:38

people who have to use screen readers or something, it can

5:40

tell you that you're not doing that. Like missing

5:43

paragraphs is heading. Misusing

5:45

paragraphs is headings. Use proper tags.

5:47

Incorrect heading hierarchy. Avoid skipping levels.

5:50

Oh wow. And things like that, right? But

5:52

yeah, certainly my handwritten stuff

5:55

that's only, you know, if I remember that that's

5:57

how it's supposed to go, right? So pretty sweet.

5:59

What's wrong with that? five h1s on one page. No,

6:02

I know. I really have a

6:04

lot to say here, so it's all h1s. It

6:07

also has, what is the, if you want

6:09

to delete, like

6:11

say you have an image or something, it's

6:13

in your gallery and you're like, ah, not gonna use this

6:15

after all, hit delete. It keeps track

6:18

of if it's used in any other pages, so you don't

6:20

accidentally delete something that's

6:22

being used in some part of the site you didn't know about

6:24

that someone else created. That's pretty awesome. More

6:27

snippets, more validation, and

6:29

they threw away a bunch of old code so

6:31

they can work better, which may

6:33

even have a blog post on addressing

6:36

technical debt, so a few breaking changes,

6:38

not too many, but check it out. Anyway,

6:40

Wagtail looks pretty awesome, right? I think I may

6:42

have talked about it a long time ago, but anyway, not

6:45

the 5.0 release, because that's quite recent. Yeah,

6:48

I think it's pretty cool that that's

6:50

there, and I do have plans

6:52

to play with it at some point, but I've had plans to

6:54

play with it for a while. Indeed.

6:57

Kim, out in the audience says, I know several

6:59

one-person technical businesses that really like Wagtail

7:02

for their sites, easy to use for technical,

7:04

competent users, but doesn't require much of their

7:06

time to maintain. Yeah, that seems great. Yeah, nice.

7:10

Over to you. Well, I

7:13

guess I go away from Python a little bit,

7:16

but we use it all the time, so I

7:18

wanna talk about Git. So

7:21

I don't think I use any other revision

7:24

control systems anymore other than

7:26

Git. No CVS? No, no

7:28

WinCVS, any of that good stuff? Perforce?

7:32

Subversion. Actually, I touch

7:34

on subversion once in a while, but- I

7:36

still have kind of good feeling towards subversion. The

7:38

other ones make me a little queasy. Anyway,

7:42

the thing that I often wanna

7:44

know is just like the stuff that happened

7:46

recently on a file or something,

7:48

or just on a Git repository. RCS,

7:51

Mike Felder, oh, FieldDeebler, sorry.

7:54

Nice. RCS, wow. Takes

7:57

me back. One

8:00

of the things is the get log. So looking

8:02

at what's happened recently, but the get

8:05

log output is not something

8:07

I like to do. Actually using get

8:09

log is one of the reasons why I often pop

8:12

up like a visual

8:14

tool to look at my get repository

8:17

because it's gross. But I

8:19

forgot, and I knew that you could

8:21

customize it, but I kind of forgot how to,

8:24

so I haven't been. But now I

8:26

have because of this article. So there's an article

8:29

called get log customization from Justin

8:31

Joyce. And so the default is

8:33

something like that, which we're showing. It's got

8:36

a really long hash number and

8:38

a bunch of information, but it's

8:40

hard to find the information you need. One

8:42

of the things that

8:45

Justin points out is that you

8:47

can do just something really easy by

8:49

passing in one line. They just the

8:52

flag, the two

8:54

dashes and one line, all one word

8:56

will make it pretty nice,

8:59

actually. It just does a short

9:01

hash and you can kind of see what's going on a little

9:04

bit better. But it goes a lot further.

9:07

And I'm going to hop down to this really cool customization.

9:09

One of the things is using

9:11

graph. Graph is great. Dash

9:14

graph so that you can see kind

9:16

of it does like kind of a visual representation

9:19

of the different one

9:21

of those. The branches and

9:23

the merges. That's it. I forget

9:25

branches and branch or fork. And

9:27

ASCII art for the win there. Yeah. ASCII

9:30

art. But then you can do like color and stuff.

9:32

So there's

9:35

the graph does color also if you

9:37

have that on your on everything. But it

9:40

talks about how it also talks

9:42

about how the one line is actually

9:44

a like a combination

9:47

of pretty one line and abbreviate

9:49

commit, which is kind of cool. And

9:51

then what I really love

9:53

is this the thing that he like comes up with at

9:56

the end. So the I didn't know that

9:58

you could put aliases in the. get config

10:00

file. So or at least I did

10:03

once and I forgot about it. But this is

10:05

a pretty cool long alias. He's

10:07

got LG instead of log. So

10:10

save a character of typing right there. But

10:12

it defaults to, so it's an alias

10:14

for log with a graph with 10.

10:17

So default to the last 10 commits. And

10:20

then this long format thing that

10:22

is kind of ugly to look at, but what you

10:25

get is he talks about what it all is,

10:27

but what you get is, um, uh,

10:30

the brand, the graph, but you also

10:32

get, uh, somebody's name highlighted

10:35

of who did it. And then also how

10:37

long ago. So was it 19 hours ago or 24 hours

10:39

ago or two days, three days, uh,

10:43

really cool. Uh, exactly what I

10:45

need usually when I'm looking at a get log.

10:47

So I love it. This actually inspires

10:49

me to maybe play with this as well. And I

10:51

usually use source tree. I really like

10:53

source tree, but you know, sometimes you're

10:56

already in the terminal and just, you know,

10:58

yeah, and so all I did it, what I did is I just

11:00

like opened up my home directory, get

11:02

config and added this alias. And now

11:05

I just use get LG. Um, and

11:07

then I can forget all of this. The other

11:10

ones, I need things. I'm like, well, what if it says

11:12

by default, you can put the default, whatever you

11:14

want for this alias, but like 10 lines,

11:17

what if I want to see like 20 lines or 30 lines? Well,

11:19

if you say get LG, even though it

11:21

has the dash 10 built into it and pass

11:24

in a like a dash 20 or dash 30, that

11:26

the second one overrides it. Um, so

11:29

that's clever works just fine.

11:31

So nice. So,

11:34

so thank you Justin Joyce for writing this

11:36

up. Nice job, Justin. That's

11:38

pretty awesome. All right. I saw that

11:40

David Lord was the one listed

11:42

there in the example. Yeah. Let's

11:45

keep, let's keep going. That theme. Okay. So over

11:47

to, historically from

11:49

the flask side of things. So you

11:52

want to talk about flask. I want to talk about Jinja.

11:55

So Jinja is the templating

11:57

language that is the default for so many

12:00

frameworks. It's not best, I don't

12:02

think. Come on, Chameleon. So

12:05

much better. But it doesn't

12:07

matter. If everyone's using Jinja,

12:09

that's what people are using, right? It's

12:11

built into all the frameworks. You've got to jump through hoops to

12:14

use Chameleon with, say,

12:16

fast API. I created a library to

12:18

do that kind of stuff. But this is about Jinja. Its origins

12:21

come from Flask, originally created by

12:24

Armin Roaniker, no longer the

12:26

maintainer. David Lord and folks over

12:28

at Palettes is. But this new

12:30

project I want to give a shout out to does come

12:32

from Armin and it's called Mini

12:35

Jinja. Like Jinja,

12:37

but smaller. So Mini

12:39

Jinja is a powerful but minimal dependency

12:42

template engine for Rust that's compatible

12:45

with Jinja and Jinja too. So if you've got

12:47

a Rust project and you want to have those

12:49

templates, you could use this and you'd be like, okay,

12:51

I might go well. Python podcast. So

12:53

yeah, Rust is popular, but it's

12:56

comparable if you've got a Python app. It's

12:59

basically not 100% identical, but

13:01

pretty similar, right? The

13:03

other thing though, that's kind of interesting is

13:05

it does works with Python

13:08

through a project called Mini

13:10

Jinja-Py. And that

13:13

allows you to use the Rust

13:15

runtime back template engine on

13:19

whatever thing it is that you're working with. All right,

13:21

Flask, fast API, whatever. Right.

13:24

So you might want to use this instead

13:26

when the full set of Jinja 2 features

13:28

is not required and you want to have the same

13:30

experience across Python or Rust. There's

13:33

places where you can get a slightly better

13:35

performance sometimes than Jinja.

13:37

It was created using maturing

13:40

and Py03, which is pretty

13:42

cool, like the Rust Python bindings

13:45

and yeah, it just shows you how to set up and whatnot.

13:48

So if you're out there doing the web things,

13:51

maybe have a quick look at

13:53

Mini Jinja if somehow that's relevant

13:55

to you. Continuing the Rustification

13:57

of Python. Indeed. You know, it's

13:59

been a around for a long time, over 30 years. So

14:02

surely some rust is starting to develop. I

14:04

wouldn't have expected to come on so quickly all

14:06

at once like that, but there you go. Yeah,

14:09

nice. That's it for all of our items,

14:11

I would say. Okay. And I've

14:14

got some extras, but I know you do too,

14:16

so maybe you go first. Okay, well, I was

14:18

up, we

14:20

were just talking at the beginning of this before

14:24

we went on air, that I was having some audio

14:26

trouble last night, but I was getting the

14:28

PyTest Primary Power course ready and

14:31

launched last night. So chapter six, got

14:33

done recording that yesterday morning and

14:36

in the evening finished editing the audio. So

14:39

the first course in a series, PyTest

14:42

Primary Power, and to sell, so what

14:44

does it cover? It covers test functions, fixtures,

14:47

built-in fixtures, parameterization markers,

14:49

and it's really the set of things I think

14:51

that you have to know to be able to be

14:53

using PyTest effectively. You could just

14:56

take this first course and I think run with it for

14:58

quite a long time. So to celebrate

15:00

getting it done and back to school, I know

15:02

everybody's with kids, their

15:05

kids are probably started last week or the week before.

15:08

It might sound like it's for school, but now the kids are

15:10

out of the house, you actually have time and

15:12

energy to study things again. That's

15:14

my house anyway. Yeah, yeah. So

15:17

I'm offering a deal for it, so 49 bucks for

15:21

the first course and if you wanna do the bundle,

15:24

$99, and the bundle's kinda fun because

15:26

I've already had some, we've got a lot of channels

15:29

to get feedback. I had some feedback last

15:31

night and this morning saying, hey, I'm

15:33

trying this on Python 3.8 and

15:36

it doesn't work, but it does now. So

15:38

this morning I did the, it

15:41

was like the From Future import annotations I

15:43

had to do to make the annotations

15:46

from 3.10 be compatible to Python,

15:49

way back to Python 3.7. So I

15:51

tested it on 3.7 this morning. So everything

15:53

should be working. So anyway, pretty

15:56

excited about that. Excellent, yeah, congratulations,

15:58

that's a big step. If you see something. like this,

16:00

you're in the right place. So thanks. How

16:03

about you? The testing code logo,

16:05

enroll in the course for 49 bucks. Awesome. Keeping

16:08

with the course theme a little bit, I have three

16:12

new courses coming out at Talk Python Training.

16:15

We have a new HTMX

16:17

plus Django course, which is going to be excellent.

16:19

A new language based course

16:22

without more detail on that. And one

16:24

or two data science courses coming in

16:27

quite soon. And since it's a bunch of a bunch

16:29

of things, all of them not quite released

16:32

yet. Just point people at Talk Python

16:35

Training. Talk Python dot com slash get notified.

16:38

And there, if you're not already in the mailing list, put your

16:40

name and email in here and

16:43

you'll get to hear about them when or keep us

16:45

in the podcast. I'm sure I'll talk about it then as well. I

16:48

just want to give a shout out to Cloudflare

16:50

Turnstile. I've been going through and classifying

16:53

trucks, cars, crosswalks,

16:57

stoplights. Holy moly. What

16:59

a dreadful, unnecessary

17:02

thing. So way back in three

17:04

or four on October

17:09

2022, I talked about Turnstile, which is a privacy

17:11

friendly, user friendly,

17:14

privacy, preserving, preserving, alternative

17:16

to reCAPTCHA and all those things. And

17:19

it just sits down here. And while we're waiting,

17:21

you know how like sometimes if you are slow, filling

17:23

out a form, it'll say your

17:26

selection of taxis has expired and you

17:28

got to do it again. This one

17:30

automatically I saw it while I was waiting for you to talk

17:34

about your new course and bundle. That thing

17:36

just did a little flicker and regenerated its

17:38

validation with no user input just in

17:41

the background. Tell you. So

17:43

how does it know you're not a robot? You know, it

17:45

runs some JavaScript and it also

17:47

I think, you know,

17:49

I don't remember all the details. It runs through

17:51

a bunch of other heuristics that like they

17:54

know from, I think from your IP

17:56

address and talking to, because, you know, Cloudflare

17:59

like runs. something like 25% of

18:01

the internet. So they can tell if you're going to a bunch

18:03

of different sites and things. And it kind of uses

18:05

that background information. I think, I think

18:08

anyway, I have not even had to

18:10

find a taxi to be able to submit that, but

18:12

it's a, it's made it so that you

18:15

don't have a bunch of automated stuff coming in. Exactly.

18:17

People used to be hammering on it too. And all

18:20

sorts of bad stuff. That's not good. So,

18:24

uh, yeah, I had to add it for like the login

18:26

page, um, and for

18:28

the, the registration page, a bunch

18:30

of bots were signing up. I'm like, I don't understand why they're

18:32

signing up because it's a free account and you

18:35

don't really get anything for free. So I couldn't understand

18:37

why they're all, but hundreds of them were signing

18:39

up. Okay. I got to do something. And then, uh,

18:41

this is a, an improvement over reCAPTCHA. All

18:44

right. PiBay. PiBay is coming

18:46

up October 8th. I will

18:49

be there speaking about Python

18:51

type hints and how you can

18:54

superpower your apps, something like five

18:56

amazing ways and tools you can use with your apps.

18:58

I believe is what my topic is roughly

19:01

supposed to be, but I will be there. And,

19:03

uh, people can, they happen to be

19:06

in the San Francisco arrow area. I want to

19:08

be there. They can check it out. They give me a

19:10

coupon as a friend of speaker.

19:13

If you use that friend of speaker, no spaces, you

19:15

get 20% off regular tickets. So that's

19:17

always fun. Nice. Yeah. Always a fun

19:19

trip or road trip down to San Francisco.

19:22

And let's see following up on your

19:24

doc strings. We've got some really nice follow up here,

19:26

Brian. Rhett Turnbull says, uh, with

19:29

regard to the doc strings article, Brian

19:31

covered, uh, last episode, the

19:33

Google format allows for

19:36

a raises section. Remember

19:38

I said, Oh, it'd be awesome if you could say actually what

19:40

errors could happen. Yeah. That's really cool. And

19:42

Rhett uses Google doc string format for projects

19:45

type hints, descriptive variable names, MP

19:47

docs and MK docs strings get

19:50

pretty doctor free and VS code will pull

19:52

doc strings so you can see them in the editor and co-pilot

19:54

practically writes the doc streams for you, which

19:57

is excellent. And, uh,

19:59

one second. attribution, John Hagan sent

20:02

over something same pretty similar. Remember

20:04

we said, look, you don't necessarily need to include the type

20:07

in the docstring. If there's a type hint, and

20:10

sure enough, you don't have to. Oh, cool. You

20:12

can just give it a description, which is cool. It also

20:14

points out the syntax for how you use the

20:16

raises. So you say raises, and you give it

20:18

a list of exception types,

20:20

and then the description of when the scenario

20:23

is when that might happen. So for example, raises, invalid

20:26

factorial error if n is less

20:28

than zero. This is the time that that happens.

20:31

Oh, cool. Isn't that cool? Yeah. Yeah. And

20:33

finally, John also points out that

20:35

PyCharm has the integration

20:37

for Google docstrings

20:40

somewhere in here. Yeah. For

20:43

Google doc format and how to set that up. So

20:46

it'll automatically autocomplete

20:48

and render Google docstrings when you say,

20:51

give me the quick help, control Q, and

20:53

it'll like just pop that up as a rendered sort

20:55

of thing there. So a lot of follow up on the

20:57

docstrings. Awesome. Cool. Yeah.

21:00

And that's all I got for my extras. How about

21:02

a joke? What do you think? Yeah. Ready? I've

21:05

got your joke, and then I want to do a dad joke

21:07

also after that. Awesome. So this

21:09

one is a lesson in optimization. Careful

21:12

what you measure. Careful what you ask for, right? So

21:15

there's this picture of two tennis

21:17

ball containers. You know those tubes that are vacuum

21:19

sealed? Yeah. One of them is not

21:22

at all optimized. It stores only

21:24

three tennis balls. The

21:26

one to the right says, look, if

21:28

you cut the tennis balls in half, you can store

21:31

six tennis balls in this container.

21:34

Way more efficient use. Yeah.

21:36

Yeah. I mean, your tennis game might suck, but... That's

21:40

awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So there

21:42

you have it. Yeah. Okay. So

21:44

over to you to close it out. I've got a joke

21:46

that I was reminded of the other day with... I

21:50

shared with my kid. It's a whole dad joke. So

21:53

have you seen birds fly in a bee formation

21:55

before? Sure. Have

21:57

you ever noticed that sometimes that one side is a lot

21:59

longer? longer than the other or it's longer than the other. Yeah.

22:02

Do you know why that is? There's more birds on that. It's

22:04

optimized. Amazing. Anyway,

22:08

it's terrible. I love it.

22:11

I love it. Perfect

22:13

dad joke. All right. Well, perfect episode

22:16

as well. Thanks for being here. Thank you.

22:19

Thanks everyone for listening. Yeah.