#139 f"Yes!" for the f-strings

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Special guest: Ines Montani

Brian #1: Simplify Your Python Developer Environment

• Contributed by Nils de Bruin
• “Three tools (pyenv, pipx, pipenv) make for smooth, isolated, reproducible Python developer and production environments.”
• The tools:
  • pyenv - install and manage multiple Python versions and flavors
  • pipx - install a Python application with it’s own virtual environment for use globally
  • pipenv - managing virtual environments, dependencies, on a per project basis
• Brian note: I’m not sold on any of these yet, but honestly haven’t given them a fair shake either, but also didn’t really know how to try them all out. This is a really good write up to get started.

Ines #2: New fast.ai course: A Code-First Introduction to Natural Language Processing

• fast.ai is a really popular, free course for deep learning by Rachel Thomas and Jeremy Howard
• Also comes with a Python library and lots of notebooks
• Some influential research developed alongside the course, e.g. ULMFiT (popular algorithm for NLP tasks like text classification)
• New course on Natural Language Processing:
  • Practical introduction to NLP covering both modern neural network approaches and traditional techniques
  • Highlights:
    • NLP background: topic modeling and linear models
    • Rule-based approaches and real-world problem solving
    • Focus on ethics – videos on bias and disinformation

Michael #3: Cloning the human voice

• In 5 minutes, with Python
• via Brenden
• Clone a voice in 5 seconds to generate arbitrary speech in real-time
• An implementation of Transfer Learning from Speaker Verification to Multispeaker Text-To-Speech Synthesis (SV2TTS) with a vocoder that works in real-time.
• Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-O_hYhToKoA
• Also: Fake voices 'help cyber-crooks steal cash’

Brian #4: Ab(using) pyproject.toml and stuffing pytest.ini and mypy.ini content into it

• Contributed by Andrew Spittlemeister
• My first reaction is horror, but this is kinda my thought process with this one
  • toml is not ini (but they look close)
  • neither pytest nor mypy support storing configuration in pyproject.toml
  • they both do support using setup.cfg (but flit and poetry projects don’t use that file, or try not to)
  • they both support passing in the config file as a command line argument
  • you can be careful and write a pyproject.toml file that is both toml and ini compliant
  • drat, this is a reasonable idea, if not a little wacky
  • no guarantee that it will keep working
• one thing to note: use quotes for stuff you normally wouldn’t need to in ini file.

Example ini:

    [pytest]
    addopts = -ra -v

if stuffed in pyproject.toml

    [pytest]
    addopts = "-ra -v"

to run:

    > mypy --config-file pyproject.toml module_name
    > pytest -c pyproject.toml

Ines #5: *Polyaxon*

• A platform for reproducing and managing the whole life cycle of machine learning and deep learning applications.
• We talked to lots of research groups and everyone works with just their GPU on desktop. Super slow – you need to wait for results, schedule next job etc.
• Polyaxon is a free open source library built on Kubernetes. Really easy to set up, especially on Google Kubernetes Engine.
• Especially good for hyper-parameter search, where you might not need GPU experiments if you can run lots of experiments in parallel
• Release v0.5 just came today. Big improvements:
  • Plugins system
  • Local runs, for much easier debugging
  • New workflow engine for chaining things together and run experiments with lots of steps

Michael #6: Flynt for f-strings

• A tool to automatically convert old string literal formatting to f-strings
• F-Strings: Not only are they more readable, more concise, and less prone to error than other ways of formatting, but they are also faster!
• Converted over 500 lines / expressions in Talk Python Training and Python Bytes.
• Get started with a pipx install: pipx install flynt
• Then point it at
  • A file: flynt somefile.py
  • A directory (recursively): flynt ./
• Converts code like this: print(``"``Greetings {}, you have found {:,} items!``"``.format(name, count))
• To code like this: print(f"Greetings {name}, you have found {count:,} items!")
• Beware of the digit grouping bug.
• Good project to jumping in and contributing to open source

Extras:

• Thanks to André Jaenisch for pointing the existence of ReDoS attacks and a good video explaining them.

Michael:

• Python httptoolkit
• Python Magic’s name via David Martínez
• Flying Fractals (video and code)
• Python 3.7.4 is out

Ines:

• Explosion (?)
• spaCy IRL 2019
  • our very first conference held on July 6 in Berlin
  • many amazing speakers from research, applied NLP and the community
  • all talks were recorded and will be up on our YouTube channel very soon
• FastAPI core developer Sebastián Ramírez is joining our team
  • FastAPI was presented by Brian in episode 123 of this podcast
  • we’re big fans and have been switching all our APIs over to FastAPI
  • we’ll keep supporting the project and will definitely give Sebastián enough time to keep working on it

Joke:

• A programmer walks into a bar and orders 1.38 root beers. The bartender informs her it's a root beer float. She says 'Make it a double!’
• What do you call a developer without a side project?
  • Well rested.