Python Bytes - #349 Djangonauts: Ready for Takeoff!

Episode Date: August 22, 2023

Topics covered in this episode: Omnivore app Djangonaut.space Server-side hot reload Python in Excel Extras Joke See the full show notes for this episode on the website at pythonbytes.fm/349

Hello and welcome to Python Bytes, where we deliver Python news and headlines directly to your earbuds. This is episode 349, recorded August 21st, 2023, and I am Brian Ocken. And I'm Michael Kennedy. And we have a lot of exciting stuff to cover this week, but before we do, I'd like to thank our Patreon supporters and ourselves for keeping this thing going, even without sponsors. But if you or your company would like to sponsor Python Bytes,

just talk to us. So anyway, Michael, do you want to kick us off with the first story? Let's kick it off. Let's kick it off with some open source that's not exactly Python. But when I talked about this on Mastodon, you know what, Mastodon hasn't even changed its name this week. So that's pretty cool. I talked about it on Mastodon.

There seemed to be quite a bit of excitement and interest in this. So I figured, you know what? Let's make this a topic for Python Bytes because there's two cool open source things. So surely you've heard of Instapaper. That's the OG. I want to read something later without ads, without distractions. You know, a lot of times it's not even ads. It's just like, wow, the fonts are so small on this website or the layout is so bad, you know? Yeah. I kind of forgot about Instapaper,

but yeah. Yeah. Instapaper was the OG, right? Yeah. And then Pocket is probably the most well-known version of that. And, you know, Pocket's kind of cool. It was either, I believe it was acquired by, not created by Mozilla. But, you know, supporting Pocket kind of supports Mozilla, which kind of supports Firefox, which is good. But Google mostly supports Firefox, so there's that. So Pocket's pretty good. But there's this new project, Iowa let's say new to Michael called

omnivore and is the free open source read it later app for serious readers okay okay so this thing is super super nice the integrations with at least I've only tested it on iOS but the integration with iOS are incredible so it's really easy to go from something like Reader, right? Reader, which I've talked about before in the RSS world, but you know, you pick your RSS reader of choice, go through your articles, you hit share and boom, it just goes straight into Omnivore, which is pretty cool. And then it has a really nice way to like categorize, tag, all that kind of stuff, and then read it.

So Brett Cannon, when I posted this, asked, well, how do you find it compared to Pocket and other stuff? Does it strip out too many things? Henning jumped in and said, oh, this is way better. It seems to err a little bit on the side in leaving potentially a little bit too much stuff in, but at the same time not removing quotes or code sections or things like that. So really, really nice. It's a, it's distraction free, privacy focused, open source. You can even self-host it if you'd like. So for some reason you want, you're like, I'm going to read stuff and I want to make sure that it's completely private. Then you can set it up and run it on

your own. Oh, that's, that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Right. Yeah. And one other thing that's quite neat about it, let me kind of pull through here a bit. So one of the things you can do, I don't know if it even shows it, but it obviously syncs where you, you've read. So you can go down and like, if you've read 23% into an article, like a long, you know, 30 minute read time article, and you switch to another device or to the web it'll say you know here's how far you are resume from there the other thing it does is it has text-to-speech which you know that's it sounds like a robots reading to you sometime but they have a like a high-end text-to-speech option where there's not very many voices to choose from but it sounds almost like a person reading the articles you know what and so that is

that super nice. And it'll show you, you can have it like highlight the words as you, as it's reading along and so if you, you got an article to read, but really also got the yard to mow, you know, seriously put it in the background and just go, it's actually, actually super, super neat. And what else? I think that's probably it. There's you can, you can take highlights and stuff, as you would expect.

But it's really good for when you've got to do a lot of research on a project. I think it's really good for us, honestly. We read a lot of articles, and you want to take notes, highlight a section, add a note about why that's relevant and stuff. So when we go back to one of these long articles and we're like, hey, I want to tell Brian about it or vice versa, you're like, what was the part of this that actually started? Here it is. You just bump through it. So really, really neat. Um, and then it said, you can also sync it with other stuff, like

your second brain things. I'm like, wait, what is it talking about? It says you can connect it to things like log sec. Log sec is another open source thing. That's kind of like notion, but running i think runs locally um anyway so here's something else that i discovered uh along the way that's also pretty excellent so you can do like whiteboards with like youtube videos that connect over to different parts and like these sort of it's kind of funky but i haven't used that much but omnivore strong recommendation for this people

should definitely definitely check it out oh that's pretty cool i would also i was thinking of funky but i haven't used that much but omnivore strong recommendation for this people should definitely definitely check it out well that's pretty cool i would also i was thinking about that text-to-speech thing i would have loved that when i was in college and i had to read a bunch of jokes gosh i know and i'm on the bus or something it would have been great so yeah or you know you're in a car but you at least for me i can't really read in the car i can read a little bit but then i'm like you know just one wrong turn or one bump and And I'm like, you know what? Kind of woozy. I don't want to read in the car anymore, but this you could totally do. I'm, I'm, I'm a big fan. I've started reading a lot more in the last week since I've been playing with this. Nice. Okay, cool. Yeah. And Pat, Pat on

the audience points out that edge, the browser has good, uh, voices when you use read aloud. So pretty cool. What's that? I think it's some kind of browser. Okay. Just kidding. You know, it's Chromium. If you say the word browser and it's not Firefox, it's really just Chromium. Yeah, isn't, isn't Vivaldi based on Chromium?

If Vivaldi is, Brave is, they all are, yeah. Well, Firefox isn't, is it? Or is it? No, but Firefox is the standout. It's the holdout. Which, which is like the main reason I love them so what I kind of is is Google like supporting him so that they don't look like a monopoly just to make sure they're pretty strong theory isn't it I'm not saying that but I said that anyway I

think 80 to 90 percent of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google, which I think also leads to a little bit of perverse incentives, right? Like Firefox would be better if it could be more assertive in ad blocking and more assertive in privacy. I know it kind of has it, but not really like it could go way more in like Vivaldi or Brave does, except it's almost entirely single customer is an ad company. So yeah, how much? Yeah, it's, it much, yeah, it's a little weird kind of a setup, but it does keep Firefox alive, so there's that.

Over to you, what's next? Well, I'd like to talk about Django a little bit and actually people learning about Django. So I learned about this place called DjangoNOT.space. It's where contributors launch. So kind of a fun, kind of a fun drop or homepage. But I mean, if you click on anything, you go to go to just like a docs thing. But so the that's all right. The Django not program is kind of neat. It's a program to help people learn Django,

like really dig into it. So it says this program places an emphasis on group learning, sustainability and longevity. Django knots are members of the community wish to level up their current Django code contributions and potentially take on leadership roles in Django in the future so this is pretty cool it's a self-paced semi-structured learning environment with group

mentoring and it's in three month chunks so and they have like different cohorts and then there's like doc there's like different documentation on if you want to be a Django not if you want to be a navigator which is people leading other Django knots, and then a captain and stuff like that. And this is actually just kind of a neat, I'd love to talk to somebody that has been involved in this, or maybe it's new, I'm not sure it's a it doesn't look like it's been around for much for very long. So I'm not sure if they already have cohorts gone through or not. But I'd love to hear more about how it's going. And because it's kind of a model for an open source project, seems neat, of the people that kind of want to get more involved

but really don't know what to do or how to get further, maybe like having a guided thing. That's awesome. So the other thing, one of the things I think that's really cool about this is the small group setting. So this is said cohorts are no more than four jangonauts per one navigator and no more than eight jangonauts in a group so you might have like two navigators per group which is kind of neat uh three months and then one of the

things that they have access to a private discord server um and then programs receive support from captains so i'm not i haven't dug in too much. I'm not sure what a captain does. They help Oh, the captains help organize the program and reduce the admin burden of navigators. Neat. One of the goals here is, of course, to do peer mentoring and to get people leveled up a lot. But one of the things that I think is really cool here is even if you if you think you sign on, I can't find where it's in the docs right here, but somewhere it said, basically, you sign up, you think you're going to do it, but life happens and you need to not work

on it so much. Do that. I mean, that's more important. So I love the humanity in there of saying, you know know personal health is always above things like this so it's neat django does community like no other way web framework right yeah i mean seriously this is a fantastic idea yeah i think it's pretty cool the the uh the the welcome summary welcome in summary for the django uh is pretty cool um Oh, here it is. The program will have a focus on sustainability and longevity.

Remember that while we want you to be successful, your health and happiness comes above all else. I just love it. It seems like a cool program. Yeah, that's cool. This is great. So comment from the chat. Kids today have it so easy this makes open source contributions look like a cruise um i think that we just need to we need to make it

easier for the next generation to come in and help take over so i think it's great yeah i used to have to do my pull requests uphill both ways i used to have to mail zip files to people. Exactly. Anyway. Get all sneaker net. So, all right. Yeah, this is a great thing for people to sign up to. And I guess presumably you just go there,

it tells you how to sign up and register to possibly be part of it. Yeah, so let's see. If I click sign up, it, oh yeah, it takes me to a sign-up form you fill out your oh you can even sign up as a navigator or captain if you want to help out yeah that's cool or an other um i want to try to sign up as a cheerleader you can't label me man you can't label me i'm just gonna be here other but you have to label yourself if you if you pick other you have to pick something. So yeah. Yeah.

All right. Well, Michael, I want to. This is on to another one here. This one is from me, actually. Something I created this week. I want to give a shout out to, because I think it's just going to help people a ton. Okay.

And it's going to lead over to maybe some more Django stuff. And then later we'll come back to a Google form. Let's start with this. So I'll set the stage. So if you're working on a website, especially the web design aspect of a website, what you often do is you'll go over to your CSS file, you'll make some changes, you'll have to reload your page, right? You go over to the browser, Control or Command R or F5, whatever your system does. You reload it.

You'll look at it. Okay, great. Maybe sometimes you need it on mobile. So you'll have like a, one of those device, you know, sort of device sized changers for your browser, or you could open up a real, you know, real iPhone or an iPhone simulator pointed at it. Maybe you have both of those side by sides. You've got to refresh one, refresh the other,

go back to your CSS. Now you go over to your HTML, you add some classes, go back, see how it looks, refresh it, right? What would be cool is if you could just have on a second monitor or on a large monitor off to the side, your browser, and as you type, when you hit save, regardless whether you're editing CSS, JavaScript, HTML, whatever,

the page just refreshes and shows you the new view. That'd be awesome, right? Yeah. So I created a JavaScript script that you include only in development time. So don't forget that. You put it on top of your page. It does exactly that. So you can have an iOS simulator running. You can have, you know, like Brave, let's say running over there. Then you're over to the side, you work on your editor. And as you hit save any file you want, right. HTML templates, whether it's a CSS, JavaScript, just reloads, even images. Cool. Without touching it.

Isn't that cool? Okay. So I've got, I've got my editor set up to just save all the time. So it's going to save junk. Does it just like, what happens if I've got junk saved? Well, so if you're typing in the HTML, it'll probably go a little bit wonky. Okay. Right.

If it's Python though, it depends on what you want to do. So for me, what I found is that I'm not needing it to reload almost constantly when I'm doing logic of the website. Like sometimes I want it to, but not all the time. Whereas when I'm actually messing with the CSS and I'm actually messing with. Yeah. Then you want it to do it all the time. Then you want to do all the time.

Right. So the way it works, if you don't take any action is it will reload if the contents of the page change. So if you don't restart your Python web setup even as you type yeah it's not going to yeah presumably you wouldn't have it set up because like every keystroke would restart it and that would be like pretty annoying yeah um well that's what i was worried about too yeah yeah yeah so um there's a few other projects like alex uh first of all i just want to give alex revere a shout out for helping

me sort of modernize the script. Hey, that's cool. You want me to like a more modern version of it? I'm like, yes, please. My JavaScript is not that good. And then Adam Chains pointed out that he created Django browser reload, which does something somewhat like this for Django, where it looks and it says, you know, if my Django code has changed and the server's been restarted,

then reloaded. He says it does static files, although I don't know that it's necessarily passing through enough information to really reliably do that. You know, like for caching, it might still load a stale version of something. But anyway, if you're doing this as like a web hook thing, so you install something inside of your website on the server and then the script and those like coordinate, right. And I specifically decided I don't want that. Like this would work on node. This would work on pyramid.

The example I'm playing with now is fast API, tailwind, all those things. So like, it doesn't matter what's on the server, right? And so that's a trade-off because it's a little bit more chatty checking back with a server, but not, I find that just I include a script, this happens. I don't include the script. It doesn't, there's no difference. That's nice to me. So yeah, like I said, you just include a script and make sure that you don't do it in production.

It checks by default every second, but you can change that to whatever. You can open up your dev console and toggle it on and off. So like, I need you to not mess with it because I'm going to set a break point. And if you keep requesting this page over and over, you're going to make me crazy and screw up the debugging session. So it works even indirectly. So like I'm doing Tailwind. So I edit a source CSS file. Tailwind watches that, builds a new CSS file. That CSS file is included in the HTML. The HTML is smart enough to put a little like version hash identifier on the CSS. Anytime it changes, that triggers a change in HTML, which reloads.

So like same thing for images, same things for JavaScript. So anytime there's like a static resource change, as long as you do something like this, it'll pick it up. So if you're doing web development, especially while you're doing the design side, you know, consider grabbing this little script. I don't know how big it is. It's small. It is, let's go pull it up.

I don't know how many lines it is. Probably it's like two and a half pages. One of those pages is comments. So that's no big deal. So you can just throw it in there and try it if you like. It's really nice. It even works over the network if you can get to the server with ngrok or something like that.

Oh, yeah. Cool. Yeah. It works outside of Python as well, but built for Python. It's working on FastAPI when I built it. Nice. All right. Over to you. What's next? Well, we just this is hot off the presses at least for us um uh my matthew feichert had let us know this morning just this morning hey seems like

uh the day has finally come for excel users to rejoice and use python in excel so what is he talking about there's an announcement from anaconda that uh python and excel next level data analysis for all so what does this look like um it says you can write python code directly in a microsoft excel grid no python install required so i don't know much about this haven't played with it but it looks fun it like uh all you need is equal pi equal like py oh there's a little video cool so you just say pi and then you can just type in some code um i don't know how much coding i want to do right in a python or in a excel uh cell i guess but but i don't know it sounds kind of neat um even in it says you can use matplotlib and seaborn and stuff like this. So I'm not sure how this works.

Is it just built into Excel now? I don't know. Anyway, I'm excited about it. I guess I should have researched it a little bit more before talking about it, but neat. Yeah, people can check it out. I don't know. I have heard rumors of Python coming to Excel, and this looks like it's coming from Anaconda. Yeah.

So I'm not sure if this is the same thing or if this is something different. Yeah. It says, experience the power of Python and Excel for yourself. Windows users can sign up here. So that's a... Click on that.

Where does that take you? A Microsoft thing. Yeah, there you go. I'm interested. So it's part of the 365 Insider program right now to use this feature. So kind of neat. Oh, neat.

A little insert. Wow. Start using Python. Start using Python formula. Insert the formula. Yeah, I got to do some more research on this before I can say for sure. But, you know, if we can save the world from doing VBA,

let's do it. But I think as far as getting this right, I think it's pretty cool to have Anaconda and Microsoft working together to make this work. I think those are the right partners to look into this. So, yeah. Anyway, I wonder if I, I don't think I'm part of this beta channel thing,

so I don't think I can try it this beta channel thing, so I don't think I can try it, but yeah, I'd like to anyway. So that's, I, I'm not part of the beta program either. I'm not that excited about office, but I'm excited that this is in here. This is really cool. Yeah. I am having to use, do more and more spreadsheets as, as as my management the sort of things increase so does excel uh it's just part of it anyway yeah yeah there's also some other companies and

projects out there that have in a google doc like hosted spreadsheets that are purely python based i talked to i can't remember the name i don't want to talk to so many companies at the startup bro i don't want to misrepresent them i would say you know cross one over with the other but that looked really really cool as well um and it was only python so i don't know there's a lot of a lot of stuff happening around this right now and it's it's pretty exciting yeah uh i guess just a step in the right direction so So that's good. It was like five years ago, this was the single biggest user voice, single most upvoted user voice thing in the Microsoft request for features and ideas.

And it just got no reply. Like they just ignored it. There was crickets below it, right? And so it's interesting that it, you know, finally got some traction. Yeah traction yeah yeah i think it's pretty cool so maybe we'll see uh if anybody out there is uh is has played with it or knows anything let me know be great yeah or uh throw a comment at the bottom of youtube live stream oh yeah that's good for folks yeah All right. Well, those are our items. Do you have any extras for us?

I have two things that are extra. Let's talk about them. PyCon Sweden, the call for proposals is out and it will be in 78 days, 12 hours, 29 minutes, 16 seconds on November 9th and 10th. Okay.

Don't know if I can attend online or in person. It looks like it will be at the Hilton Södusen. So I'm guessing that that's not online. So people can check that out there. It sounds like it'd be pretty awesome. I was near Sweden. I would go to. I would too.

Yeah. But it's quite the flight from here. Never been to Sweden. All right. Anything else? No, neither have I. I have been to Norway, been to Amsterdam, but not there. And one more thing.

So I'm looking to do a talk Python episode around mobile apps and Python. And this got started as a listener's like, Hey, I'd really love to hear about how you built in, you know, how was Python serving as the backend for your Flutter redesign for your mobile apps, right? Cause it's all Python APIs, but it's something else on the front end. They're like, how did you decide to not use something Python for the front end? Or how did you decide on what you used? And a couple other people had some thoughts as well. So I think it might be really fun to do an episode where people who have created or work with you know either they're the back-end dev or the front-end dev or across the board created mobile apps that are actual apps in the app store not just like oh i tried this framework but if you have an app in the app store

and it has python involved deeply in some way, right? Maybe the APIs are in Python or there's some other way in which Python is involved. Maybe you're somehow embedding Python into the app or even, you know, maybe it's a Kivy app or something like that. If you're interested in being on TalkPython in a panel to kind of talk about like, you know, what are what are people doing with Python and mobile these days? Right. I think that would be a lot of fun. Like, uh, I I'd love to have you on that show. So the link for this is in the podcast, Plutter show notes. I will not read it out, but it says beyond TalkPython around mobile apps. Uh, the link is tremendously long. So go click that in the show notes or the episode page and just, you know, give us your name, what's your app about, like how, how it's building and like maybe a couple

of the really short things. So I'd love to put it together an episode like that, but it's really hard to like know who to invite because it's not entirely obvious looking in from the outside, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So call, it's kind of a call for proposals to talk Python, I suppose. And the second appearance of a Google form, but blazes flat. Yeah. Flat is pretty excellent. What is I had the flat folks on talk Python and, um, what is basically a Python wrapper around flutter. You don't know that they have, uh, app store support yet. Um they do. Is Flutter the past tense of Flutter? I am fluttering. I did Flutter.

Yes, exactly. It has something about PyCon 2024 on there. But anyway, Flutter is really interesting. I did talk to, I can't remember the guy's name, over on TalkPython, but I remember it was

not quite ready for the app stores, but that was a while ago. So if it's made it further on, sure, Flat would be an awesome part of that discussion. Neat. I think I might check it out. I can't wait. Yeah. Can't wait.

Yeah. Thanks. Okay. So I have. You, extras? I have. I've just, I've been so busy lately because I'm working on this PyTest course. And I find, we announced it last week, but I finally like yesterday morning or something,

I finally put it up on my blog PyTest. So Python test.com courses, you can finally find it. You can also find the one that I have up on talk Python training. There's a link to that. And it's still a great course. Some but some people ask me, was that like different? It is different, but it's, it's a, the talk Python training one is like a, um, is a, is a good like starter one to like, just get, get you going on PyTest. Uh,

and it's still awesome. Um, and it's not outdated or anything. Uh, the new one is just, uh, is like the full book, but I'm, I'm, I'm really trying to keep every, it's not just the full book. It's a whole bunch of extra stuff too, but it's not, I just wanted to mention it's up on python test.com slash courses now. So you don't have to find the link because it links to, it's a teachable site. So it links to that one. But the, because I hadn't really announced it really everywhere. I've extended the last, last week we said there was a 20% discount.

I've extended that 20% discount till the end of the month. So it'll be in the show notes. It's just Python bytes, all one word, and it's 20% discount. So and a whole bunch of people have signed up so far, or enough to make me believe it's a good idea to do this. And I really appreciate the support and the encouragement. I'm really having fun with the fixtures chapter because fixtures are a thing that is hard to get your head around. And I'm really putting a lot of extra effort, putting some drawings in and stuff. So it's going good. I guess that's my extra so far is just this is going well.

Yeah, great. Glad to hear it. It's exciting to see people interacting with the stuff you build. I remember when I did a Kickstarter for the first course that I did, I had an early access aspect to it and it was fun. Yeah, and I think I'm going to try to do, I'm not going to promise this, but I'm going to try to do some open hours or office hours things associated with this also. I just don't have any time this week, so I'm not sure when I'll try to fit that in. But yeah, it'll be good. All right.

Yeah, cool. How about something funny? How about two somethings funny? Yeah. Do you want to start with mine or yours? Yours. Okay. Somebody, I can't remember where I saw this,

but I just think it's hilarious. I was looking for password, secure password generators, and I've got one on my phone, but I wanted one like a web accessible one that I could just look up. Kenny Logins. It's KennyLog-In.com. And it's a password generator based on Kenny Logins songs.

Something about the highway to the danger zone and all those things. So you can pick. Oh, the danger zone is weak. Oh, no. The danger zone is weak. Yeah, because it's a danger zone so you can just click which how secure you want it and then you hit generate and then it generates uh so head up like a king i don't know with some symbols in there it's a pretty secure password for a weak one okay watching the rocks in the river run

uh nowhere to hide no way to hide and. And then, okay, so all right. I'm all right is all right, like security. And I guess they're just a little bit longer. Anyway, and then strong passwords. This is it. There we go. Yeah, those are. But there's like mixed capitalizations and stuff.

These would be harder. That's actually a really good password. That's a totally valid one. These are all pretty good. I thought it was really funny to have a themed password generator it's awesome it's me in the f-14 with maverick in the sky back there leaving a on trail with a password and i don't know if it's a generational thing but i can't even hear the the phrase danger zone without it playing in my head i know i know it's pretty good stuff all

right okay what do you got sticking with the theme here the password game do you want to play it sure at neil.fun slash password dash game says choose a password okay i like the letter a i typically go that so it's got to be um these five characters so there we go then it says all right cool you passed a couple of things that's include a number because i type five a a a or wait a five five five five it says it must include an uppercase a it must include a special character bang what else would you put your digits must add 25 so i gotta put another five in there it could go at the end though it doesn't have to be in order include it must include yeah so may it must include a sponsor in here so pepsi one of their sponsors

right so it shows their sponsors you got to use it whatever roman numerals should multiply to five this is all additive under the rules roman numerals in your uh let's see what is five in a roman numeral do you know uh v right right yeah v and then v i i oh come on that's uh it's five times seven whatever i can't do roman numeral multiplicative math so i'm done i can't create an account apparently but uh here we are roman let's look it up roman 35 it has to multiply it has to be two numbers that multiply numbers in your password should multiply to multiply. It has to be two numbers that multiply. Roman numbers in your password should multiply to 35. So like seven and it's like seven and five, right?

Yeah. That's what I thought. I thought I did V I I and V or is that maybe like, I can't get rid of the M. Oh yeah. It says there's a problem with the M cause that's may I got to do a lower case. There we go.

Thank you, Pat. Right? No, thank you, Mike. So I had may capitalized cause it's a formal noun, but it was being treated as a real noun. Must include this captcha.

Okay. It doesn't recapture. You got to type it. Yeah. Let's keep going. Y, four N, six M. But now my digits don't add up anymore. And there were digits.

There were digits in the captcha. Okay. I must include today's word elation. Okay. I'm completely out. I'm done. I'm out. I'm out.

This is good. Yeah. Nice. Well, I personally just use a proper password manager and let it guess. Yeah. Or let it come up with one. Yeah. Or Kenny Loggins.

Kenny Loggins. It's always there for you. Oh, look at. Talk to me, Goose. Talk me goose talk to me come on oh look at the bottom uh look at all the old computers and stuff at the bottom we got a commodore oh i love it it's got like an atari 2600 yeah anyway joystick well this was a great episode uh nice funny passwords at the end thanks a lot again and uh yeah we'll talk next week