#261 Please re-enable spacebar heating

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About the show

Sponsored by us:

• Check out the courses over at Talk Python
• And Brian’s book too!

Special guest: Dr. Chelle Gentemann

Michael #1: rClone

• via Mark Pender
• Not much Python but useful for Python people :)
• Rclone is a command line program to manage files on cloud storage.
• Over 40 cloud storage products support rclone including S3 object stores
• Rclone has powerful cloud equivalents to the unix commands rsync, cp, mv, mount, ls, ncdu, tree, rm, and cat.

Brian #2: check-wheel-contents

• Suggested by several listeners, thank you.
• “Getting the right files into your wheel is tricky, and sometimes we mess up and publish a wheel containing __pycache__ directories or tests/”
• usage: check-wheel-contents [[HTML_REMOVED]] [HTML_REMOVED]
• ex:

(venv) $ pwd /Users/okken/projects/cards (venv) $ check-wheel-contents dist dist/cards-1.0.0-py3-none-any.whl: OK

• Checks

- W001 - Wheel contains .pyc/.pyo files - W002 - Wheel contains duplicate files - W003 - Wheel contains non-module at library toplevel - W004 - Module is not located at importable path - W005 - Wheel contains common toplevel name in library - W006 - __init__.py at top level of library - W007 - Wheel library is empty - W008 - Wheel is empty - W009 - Wheel contains multiple toplevel library entries - W010 - Toplevel library directory contains no Python modules - W101 - Wheel library is missing files in package tree - W102 - Wheel library contains files not in package tree - W201 - Wheel library is missing specified toplevel entry - W202 - Wheel library has undeclared toplevel entry

• Readme has good description of each check, including common causes and solutions.

Chelle #3: xarray

• Where can I find climate and weather data?
• Binary to netCDF to Zarr… data is all its gory-ness
• Data formats are critical for data providers but should be invisible to users
• What is Xarray
• An example reading climate data and making some maps

Michael #4: JetBrains Remote Development

• If you can SSH to it, that can be your dev machine
• Keep sensitive code and connections on a dedicated machine
• Reproducible environments for the team
• Spin up per-configured environments (venvs, services, etc)
• Treat your dev machine like a temp git branch checkout for testing PRs, etc
• They did bury the lead with Fleet in here too

Brian #5: The XY Problem

• This topic is important because many of us, including listeners, are
  • novices in some topics and ask questions, sometimes without giving enough context.
  • experts in some topics and answer questions of others.
• The XY Problem
  • “… You are trying to solve problem X, and you think solution Y would work, but instead of asking about X when you run into trouble, you ask about Y.” - From a Stack Exchange Answer
• Example from xyproblem.info [HTML_REMOVED] How can I echo the last three characters in a filename? [HTML_REMOVED] If they're in a variable: echo ${foo: -3} [HTML_REMOVED] Why 3 characters? What do you REALLY want? [HTML_REMOVED] Do you want the extension? [HTML_REMOVED] Yes. [HTML_REMOVED] There's no guarantee that every filename will have a three-letter extension, [HTML_REMOVED] so blindly grabbing three characters does not solve the problem. [HTML_REMOVED] echo ${foo##*.}
• Reason why it’s common and almost unavoidable:
  • Almost all design processes for software
    • I can achieve A if I do B and C.
    • I can achieve B if I do D and E.
    • And I can achieve C if I do F and G.
    • … I can achieve X if I do Y.
• More important questions than “What is the XY Problem?”:
  • Is it possible to avoid? - not really
  • Is it possible to mitigate when asking questions? - yes
  • When answering questions where you expect XY might be an issue, how do you pull out information while providing information and be respectful to the asker?
• One great response included
  • Asking Questions where you risk falling into XY
    • State your problem
    • State what you are trying to achieve
    • State how it fits into your wider design
  • Giving Answers to XY problems
    1. Answer the question (answer Y)
    2. Discuss the attempted solution (ask questions about context)
       • “Just curious. Are you trying to do (possible X)? If so, Y might not be appropriate because …”
       • “What is the answer to Y going to be used for?”
    3. Solve X
• Also interesting reading
  • Einstellung effect - The Einstellung effect is the negative effect of previous experience when solving new problems.

Chelle #6: kerchunk - Making data access fast and invisible

• S3 is pretty slow, especially when you have LOTS of files
• We can speed it up by creating json files that just collect info from files and act as a reference
• Then we can collate the references into MEGAJSON and just access lots of data at once
• Make it easy to get data!

Extras

Michael:

• Xojo - like modern VB6?
• 10 Reasons You'll Love PyCharm Even More in 2021 webcast
• Users revolt as Microsoft bolts a short-term financing app onto Edge

Chelle:

• Why we need python & FOSS to solve the climate crisis

Joke: Spacebar Heating