PyDev of the Week: Adrienne Tacke

PyDevOfTheWeek, Python

This week we welcome Adrienne Tacke (@AdrienneTacke) as our PyDev of the Week! Adrienne is the author of Coding for Kids: Python: Learn to Code with 50 Awesome Games and Activities and her book came out earlier this year. You can see what Adrienne is up to on Instagram or via her website. Let’s take some time to get to know her better!

Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc):

I’m a software engineer in Las Vegas and have a degree in Management Information Systems from UNLV. I’ve worked in the education and healthcare industries and now focus on building awesome things in the fintech space. I love learning new languages (spoken and programming), eating every dessert imaginable, traveling the world with my husband, and finding ways to encourage more young girls and women to try out a career as a software engineer. Continue reading PyDev of the Week: Adrienne Tacke →

How to Extract Build Info from Jenkins with Python

Python

I work with continuous integration software as a part of my job. I use both Hudson and Jenkins in my role and occasionally need to interact with them programmatically. There are two Python packages you can use for this task:

The Python Jenkins package will work with both Hudson and Jenkins which JenkinsAPI only works with Jenkins. I usually use Python Jenkins because of this, although I have recently started looking to see which one works better with artifacts and I discovered that JenkinsAPI is actually better for that sort of thing. So you will need to evaluate both of these packages depending on what you need to do. Continue reading How to Extract Build Info from Jenkins with Python →

PyDev of the Week: Tania Allard

PyDevOfTheWeek, Python

This week we welcome Tania Allard (@ixek) as our PyDev of the Week! Tania is a developer advocate at Microsoft. She is also a speaker at multiple conferences. If you’d like to learn more about her, you should check out her blog. She also has some of her projects up on Github for you to peruse. Let’s take a few moments to get to know Tania!

Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc):

I am originally from Mexico but have lived in the USA and in the UK for the last 8 years.

I have a bachelor’s in Mechatronic engineering and have also always been fascinated by technology and I can class myself as a lifelong learner. As such I got a PhD from the University of Manchester in Data science applied to Materials science, during which I discovered and fell in love with Python. Since completing my PhD I have worked as a research software engineer, research engineer, data engineer, and more recently could advocate.

Apart from tech I love Olympic weightlifting, so I spend quite a good amount of time in the gym every week and I am already looking forward for this year’s competition season!

I also love craft beer and recently joined the women in beer scene in Manchester, UK where I live. Continue reading PyDev of the Week: Tania Allard →

An Intro to StaticBox and StaticBoxSizers

GUI Toolkits, Python, wxPython,

There are many widgets that are included with the wxPython GUI toolkit. One of them is a fairly handy widget called wx.StaticBox. This widget accepts a string and then will draw a box with the string in the upper left-hand corned of the box. However this only works when you use it in conjunction with wx.StaticBoxSizer.

Here is an example of what one might look like:

Simple wx.StaticBox

Now let’s go ahead and write the code you would use to create the example above: Continue reading An Intro to StaticBox and StaticBoxSizers →

Creating GUI Applications with wxPython Now Available

Books, Python, wxPython, ,

My latest book, Creating GUI Applications with wxPython is now available for purchase.

Cover art for Creating GUI Applications with wxPython

Creating GUI Applications with wxPython is a book that will teach you how to use wxPython to create applications by actually creating several mini-programs. I have found that while learning how the various widgets work in wxPython is valuable, it is even better to learn by creating a simple application that does something useful.

In this book, you will be creating the following applications:

  • A simple image viewer
  • A database viewer
  • A database editor
  • Calculator
  • An Archiving application (tar)
  • PDF Merging application
  • XML Editor
  • File search utility
  • Simple FTP application
  • NASA Image downloader

As you learn how to create these applications, you will also learn how wxPython works. You will go over how wxPython’s event system works, how to use threads in wxPython, make use of sizers and much, much more!

The eBook version is on sale on Leanpub for $14.99 until May 15th. You can also purchase the book on Gumroad, or get the paperback or Kindle version on Amazon.

PyDev of the Week: Joel Grus

PyDevOfTheWeek, Python

This week we welcome Joel Grus (@joelgrus) as our PyDev of the Week! Joel is the author of Data Science From Scratch: First Principles with Python from O’Reilly. You can catch up with Joel on his website or on Github. Let’s take some time to get to know Joel better!

Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc):

In school I studied math and economics. I started my career doing quantitative finance (options pricing, financial risk, and stuff like that). I got very, very good at Excel, and I learned a tiny amount of SQL. But I kind of hated working in finance (and also I got laid off), so I joined an online travel startup as a “data analyst” doing BI stuff (lots of spreadsheets, lots of SQL, some very light scripting). That startup got acquired by Microsoft, who at the time had basically no idea what to do with my more-than-a-financial-analyst-less-than-a-software-engineer skillset. (Nor did I, really.)

Then in 2011 I saw that the winds were blowing toward “data science”, so I sort of BS-ed my way into a data scientist job at a tiny startup. I took a bunch of Coursera courses to fill in gaps in my knowledge, and then I learned to write (ugly) production code and discovered I really enjoyed building software. Through doing well in coding competitions I had the opportunity to interview for a software engineer job at Google, so I spent 6 really hectic weeks cramming computer science and then somehow passed the interview. I spent a couple of years at Google, and then I found I missed doing data and ML stuff, and so now I’m at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, where I build deep learning tools for NLP researchers. My current job is right at the intersection of deep learning and Python library design, which is a pretty great match for my interests.

I don’t really have time for hobbies 😢. I have an 8-year-old daughter, and I spend a lot of my free time with her, and then I keep agreeing and/or volunteering to write things and give talks and make livecoding videos, which takes up most of the rest. And then I have a podcast and a Twitter to stay on top of. I have long-term hobby goals of (1) learning jazz piano and (2) writing a novel, but I’m not really making much progress on either. Continue reading PyDev of the Week: Joel Grus →

Books on Sale for PyCon 2019

Books, Python, Python 3,

In honor of PyCon 2019 that is starting this week, I am putting three of my books on sale. You can get any of the following books for $9.99 through May 6th by clicking on the links:

Python 201 is a fun book for those of you who would be interested in learning intermediate and advanced topics in Python.

My ReportLab book covers how to create PDFs using Python and ReportLab. It also covers many other topics related to PDFs, such as splitting, merging and overlaying PDFs to name a few.

Finally my Jupyter Notebook 101 book is a good way for you to learn about the Jupyter Notebook and many of its capabilities.

PyDev of the Week: Neil Muller

PyDevOfTheWeek, Python

This week we welcome Neil Muller as our PyDev of the Week! Neil is an organizer for Cape Town Python User Group and PyCon ZA. He also speaks at conferences! You can learn more about his open source projects over on Github. Let’s take a few moments to get to know Neil better!

Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc):

I’m an Applied Mathematician with interests in image processing and numerical computation, currently living and working in the Cape Town area, South Africa. I followed an interest in facial recognition into a PhD from the University of Stellenbosch, and that led to working on a variety of image processing and numerical modelling problems at iThemba LABS.

These days I split my working time between iThemba LABS and Praelexis, a machine learning company (mainly using Python) in Stellenbosch.

In my spare time, I am obsessed with board and card games, especially Vampire: The Eternal Struggle. Continue reading PyDev of the Week: Neil Muller →

PyDev of the Week: Dane Hillard

PyDevOfTheWeek, Python

This week we welcome Dane Hillard (@easyaspython) as our PyDev of the Week! Dane is the author Practices of the Python Pro, an upcoming book from Manning. He is also a blogger and web developer. Let’s take some time to get to know Dane!

Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc):

I’m a creative type, so many of my interests are in art and music. I’ve been a competitive ballroom dancer, and I’m a published musician and photographer. I’m proud of those accomplishments, but I’m driven to do most of this stuff for personal fulfillment more than anything! I enjoy sharing and discussing what I learn with others, too. When I have some time my next project is to start exploring foodways, which is this idea of exploring food and its cultural impact through written history. I’ve loved cooking (and food in general) for a long time and I want to get to know its origins better, which I think is something this generation is demanding more from industries as a whole. Should be fun! Continue reading PyDev of the Week: Dane Hillard →

Mozilla Announces Pyodide – Python in the Browser

Python

Mozilla announced a new project called Pyodide earlier this week. The aim of Pyodide is to bring Python’s scientific stack into the browser.

The Pyodide project will give you a full, standard Python interpreter that runs in your browser and also give you access to the browsers Web APIs. Currently, Pyodide does not support threading or networking sockets. Python is also quite a bit slower to run in the browser, although it is usable for interactive exploration.

The article mentions other projects, such as Brython and Skulpt. These projects are rewrites of Python’s interpreter in Javascript. Their disadvantage to Pyodide is that they cannot use Python extensions that were written in C, such as Numpy or Pandas. Pyodide overcomes this issue.

Anyway, this sounds like a really interesting project. I always thought the demos I used to see of Python running in Silverlight in the browser were cool. That project is basically dead at this point, but Pyodide sounds like a really interesting new hack at getting Python into the browser. Hopefully it will go somewhere.