PyDev of the Week: Martin Uribe

PyDevOfTheWeek, Python

This week we welcome Martin Uribe (@clamytoe) as our PyDev of the Week! Martin helps out at PyBites. You can find him on PyBite’s Slack channel answering lots of Python related questions. You can also find out what Martin is up to via his Github or LinkedIn profiles. Let’s take a few moments to get to know Martin better!

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

I’m 46 and happily married with 8 kids. Born and raised in South Central L.A. I joined the California National Guard while I was still in high school. I went to Basic Training between my 11th and 12th grades; came back and graduated with honors and was gone within the month for Advanced Initial Training where they taught me how to fix helicopter radios. After a couple of years I decided to enlisted full-time in the regular Army and did a stint for another 8 years in Automated Logistics and got an honorable discharge as a Sergeant in 2001.

Before getting out, I got in a semester of full-time college as part of a re-enlistment bonus. I loved it and I hit the books pretty hard. I was so pumped to learn that I pushed myself to continue to grow when I went back to work. As a result, I was able to get my MCSE, MCP+I and A+ certifications which allowed me to get into the role that I still hold as a Senior Field Engineer for Fidelity. I’m contracted out to one of our many customers, PNC Bank, at their Dallas lockbox location. The title has changed over the years but it entails a lot of hardware and software support. In case you don’t know, a lockbox is where everyone’s checks go for processing when they make a payment over snail mail. Everything gets imaged front and back and entered into the bank’s system and the banks customers can access their documents through a secure proxy connection immediately. The money transfers are made the next day once the checks have cleared. At the end of the month, the banks customers images are placed on encrypted CD’s or DVD’s and mailed out to them.

To blow some steam I like to play Minecraft with my kids, edit movies, play Beat Saber, take online courses, and do some Python coding. Continue reading PyDev of the Week: Martin Uribe →

PyDev of the Week: Vuyisile Ndlovu

PyDevOfTheWeek, Python

This week we welcome Vuyisile Ndlovu (@terrameijar) as our PyDev of the Week! Vuyisile is a contributor to Real Python and a Python blogger on his own website. He is also active in the Python community in Africa. You can find out more about Vuyisile on his website or by checking out his Github profile. Let’s take some time to get to know him better!

VuyisileNdlovu

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

I’m a developer from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. I have always been fascinated by computers so after I completed High School, I enrolled for an I.T Diploma program at a local community college that had programming as part of the curriculum. Unfortunately, my situation changed and I couldn’t graduate in the end. I switched to teaching myself computer science topics and programming through online courses and books.

When I’m not working on code, I like to work on woodworking projects in the backyard and taking my dogs for regular walks. Doing this allows me to take a break from tech, be creative in different ways and also get some exercise. Continue reading PyDev of the Week: Vuyisile Ndlovu →

PyDev of the Week: Joannah Nanjekye

PyDevOfTheWeek, Python

This week we welcome Joannah Nanjekye (@Captain_Joannah) as our PyDev of the Week! Joannah is a core developer of the Python programming language. She is also the author of Python 2 and 3 Compatibility. You can find out more about Joannah on here website. Let’s take a few moments to get to know her better!

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

I am Joannah Nanjekye, I live in Canada, Fredericton but I am originally from Uganda in East Africa. I am a CS grad and doing research related to Python in one of the Python IBM labs at UNB. I went to University in Uganda and Kenya where I studied Software Engineering at Makerere University and Aeronautical Engineering at Kenya Aeronautical College respectively. I am also the Author of Python 2 and 3 compatibility, a book published by Apress. I do not have any serious hobbies but I love flying aircraft. Very expensive hobby heh!! Continue reading PyDev of the Week: Joannah Nanjekye →

The Demos for PySimpleGUI

GUI Toolkits, Python,

The PySimpleGUI project has a lot of interesting demos included with their project that you can use to learn how to use PySimpleGUI. The demos cover all the basic widgets as far as I can tell and they also cover the recommended design patterns for the package. In addition, there are a couple of games and other tiny applications too, such as a version of Pong and the Snake game.

In this article, you will see a small sampling of the demos from the project that will give you some idea of what you can do with PySimpleGUI.

Seeing the Available Widgets

PySimpleGUI has a nice little demo called Demo_All_Widgets.py that demonstrates almost all the widgets that PySimpleGUI supports currently. PySimpleGUI has wrapped all of Tkinter’s core widgets, but not the ttk widgets.

This is what the demo looks like when you run it:

All PySimple GUI Widgets

Let’s take a quick look at the code for this demo: Continue reading The Demos for PySimpleGUI →

PyDev of the Week: David Fischer

PyDevOfTheWeek, Python

This week we welcome David Fischer (@djfische) as our PyDev of the Week! David is an organizer of the San Diego Python user’s group. He also works for Read the Docs. You can see what David has been up to on his website or check out what he’s been up to on Github. Let’s take a few moments to get to know David better!

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

I am one of the organizers of the San Diego Python meetup and I’ve been doing that since early 2012, but my hobbies nowadays mostly involve spending time with my 3 year old daughter. I also really enjoy games of all kinds from in-person board and card games to computer games and my daughter is just about the right age to start introducing this stuff.

I have a bachelor’s degree in applied math and despite the name that involved a lot of programming. Mostly I learned Java in college which outside of some Android development I’ve barely used since.

For work, I previously worked at Qualcomm, Amazon, and a beer-tech related startup (how San Diego!). I currently work on Read the Docs. I’ve had the opportunity to work on lots of different things from web apps, mobile apps, technical sales/marketing, scalability, security, and privacy. I don’t want to rule out working for big companies, but the small company life seems like a better fit for me.

Perhaps this comes out of some of my security and privacy work, but I try not to participate much on social media. I was surprised to be contacted to do this interview because I think of myself as having a pretty low profile in the Python community outside of San Diego. I’m happy to do it, though. Continue reading PyDev of the Week: David Fischer →

Netflix Releases Polynote – A Polyglot Jupyter Notebook Variant

Python, ,

Netflix announced that they are releasing a new piece of open source software that they are calling Polynote. Polynote is an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook that includes first-class Scala support, Python and SQL. Looking at the website, it appears to be built on top of Jupyter Notebook.

Their top goals for the project are reproducibility and visibility. You can read the full announcement with examples on Medium.

This looks like an interesting project and I am curious to see how it impacts Project Jupyter. My personal hope is that Netflix’s work will be useful to the Python community and perhaps enhance Jupyter Notebook and JupyterLab.

I like that it this notebook allows each cell to run a different language out of the box. You can do that with Jupyter Notebook, but doing so is a bit clunky and nowhere near as user-friendly as using a drop-down control like the one that Polynote is using.

It is also interesting that Polynote stores its configuration and dependencies in the notebook’s code itself.

Polynote also supports robust data visualization using Vega and Matplotlib.

Check out Polynote here.

A Brief Intro to PySimpleGUI

Cross-Platform, GUI Toolkits, Python

Creating graphical user interfaces (GUI) can be difficult. There are many different Python GUI toolkits to choose from. The top three that you are likely to see mentioned the most often are Tkinter, wxPython and PyQt (or PySide2). However there is a newer toolkit called PySimpleGUI that aims to make creating GUIs easier.

The way that PySimpleGUI gets its power is by being an abstraction layer on top of Tkinter, wxPython and PyQt. You can kind of think of PySimpleGUI as a wrapper. The developers behind PySimpleGUI have also recently added a 4th wrapper around Remi, which is a “GUI library for Python applications which transpiles an application’s interface into HTML to be rendered in a web browser”.

One of PySimpleGUI’s claims to fame is that you don’t need to use classes to create your user interfaces. This is an interesting way of doing things, but may turn off some users of the library.

Installing PySimpleGUI

Installing PySimpleGUI is a snap if you know how to use pip. Here’s the command you should run:

pip install pysimplegui

Note that this will install PySimpleGUI to your system Python. You may want to install it to a Virtual Python environment instead. You can use Python’s venv module to do that. Check it out!

Continue reading A Brief Intro to PySimpleGUI →

PyDev of the Week: Sophy Wong

PyDevOfTheWeek, Python

This week we welcome Sophy Wong (@sophywong) as our PyDev of the Week! Sophy is a maker who uses Circuit Python for creating wearables. She is also a writer and speaker at Maker events. You can see some of her creations on her Youtube Channel or her website. Let’s take a few moments to get to know her better!

Sophy's LED Manicure

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

I am a designer and maker currently working mostly with wearable electronics projects. My background is in graphic design, and I have also worked in fashion and costumes on my way to wearable electronics. I like to explore the different ways people interact with technology, and much of my work is inspired by sci-fi and pop culture. My projects often combine technology, like microcontrollers and 3D printing, with hand crafts like sculpting, painting, and sewing. Continue reading PyDev of the Week: Sophy Wong →

PyDev of the Week: Elana Hashman

PyDevOfTheWeek, Python

This week we welcome Elana Hashman (@ehashdn) as our PyDev of the Week! Elana is a director of the Open Source Initiative and a fellow of the Python Software Foundation. She is also the Clojure Packaging Team lead and a Java Packaging Team member. You can see some of her work over on Github. You can also learn more about Elana on her website. Let’s take a few moments to get to know her better!

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

I love to bake and cook, so my Twitter feed tends to be full of various bread pictures or whatever dish I’ve whipped up over the weekend. When I was a kid, I was completely hooked on the cooking channel—my favourite shows were “Iron Chef” and “Good Eats”—and I thought I’d become a chef when I grew up. That’s my back up plan if I ever drop out of tech!

I’m Canadian, and I attended the University of Waterloo in Ontario to study mathematics, majoring in Combinatorics & Optimization with a Computer Science minor. The University of Waterloo is famous for its co-operative study program, where students take an extra year to finish their degrees and forfeit their summers off to complete 5-6 paid co-op work terms. To give my schedule a bit more flexibility, I actually dropped out of the co-op program, but prior to graduating I completed 4 co-op terms, a Google Summer of Code internship, some consulting, and even became an open source maintainer. I learned how to admin servers for the Computer Science Club, and a group of my friends and I revived the Amateur Radio Club after it had been inactive for a decade.

Amateur (or “ham”) radio got me into playing with electronics, so I learned how to solder and now I occasionally build cool things like the PiDP-11 kit. And now that I can solder a PCB, I want to see if I can solder silver, so I’m signing up to take some jewellery-making classes this fall. I also take care of a bunch of wonderful, mostly low-maintenance houseplants. One day I hope to have a full-sized backyard for growing vegetables and setting up radio antennas! Continue reading PyDev of the Week: Elana Hashman →

Thousands of Scientific Papers May be Invalid Due to Misunderstanding Python

Python

It was recently discovered that several thousand scientific articles could be invalid in their conclusions because scientists did not understand that Python’s glob.glob() does not return sorted results.

This is being reported on by Vice, Slashdot and there’s an interesting discussion going on over on Reddit as well.

Some are reporting this as a glitch in Python, but glob has never guaranteed that is results were returned sorted. As always, I would recommend reading the documentation closely to fully understand what your code does. It would also be a good idea if you can write tests around your code. Python includes a unittest module which makes this easier.