Python Weekly (Issue 594 March 30 2023)

Python Weekly - Issue 594

Python Weekly

Welcome to issue 594 of Python Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

From Our Sponsor 

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Articles, Tutorials and Talks

It can be tricky when different packages in Python don't play nice. The solution to this problem is to create an isolated, virtual environment. In this video, I’ll show you how to set up a virtual environment with poetry, a package manager for Python that simplifies dependency management and project packaging.

So, you're doing some async stuff, repeatedly, hundreds of thousands of times. How do you *not* do it all at once? Hint: asyncio.Semaphore is not the best way, despite what Stack Overflow may tell you.

Introducing Dolly, a breakthrough in LLM from Databricks. Learn how Databricks open sourced the model and all its training code, enabling organizations to re-create Dolly at a minimal cost.

A second Jason joins this episode of Programming Throwdown! Jason McDonald – Python evangelist, author, and more – talks to Patrick and Jason about his experience with the programming language, how his disability helped and hindered his software career, and where its strengths and weaknesses lie. 

An Interactive Framework for Behavioral Evaluation of Machine Learning.

Python's any and all functions are very helpful, but often overlooked. You can combine any and all with generator expressions to check whether all (or any) items within a list match a specific condition.

How do you speed up Python string parsing and formatting? We’ll consider Cython, mypyc, Rust, and PyPy.

An in-depth analysis of syntax, readability, and performance.

We know what you’re thinking — testing in production is one of the cardinal sins of software development. However, at Lyft we have come to realize that load testing in production is a powerful tool to prepare systems for unexpected bursty traffic and peak events. We’ll explore why Lyft needed a custom performance testing framework that worked in production, how we built a cross-functional solution, and how we’ve continued to improve this testing platform since its launch in 2016.

I always thought of 1+N as a thing that you just keep in your head, catch on code reviews or via performance regressions. This worked well for a long time, however, the less control we have over our SQL queries the more likely it will sneak through those guards.

The pytest-compare package provides a useful tool for testing complex data structures, such as Pandas data frames, and enables you to write custom comparison methods to suit your specific testing needs. By using pytest-compare, you can simplify your testing process, reduce errors, and save time by automating comparison tasks that would otherwise be tedious or impossible to do manually.

It’s been great to leverage a fast, memory-safe, and versatile programming language like Rust in our Python, Rust and Node.js code-bases. Here we’ve collected our insights so that others can benefit from our experience.

Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

A batteries-included library for building AI-powered software.

The ChatGPT Retrieval Plugin lets you easily search and find personal or work documents by asking questions in everyday language.

A web interface for chatting with Alpaca through llama.cpp. Fully dockerized, with an easy to use API.

A command line utility to help you organise and quickly run frequently used commands.

Build and control your own LLMs.

An implementation of a Reflexion agent for SOTA Human-Eval Python results.

Untitled Goose Tool is a robust and flexible hunt and incident response tool that adds novel authentication and data gathering methods in order to run a full investigation against a customer’s Azure Active Directory (AzureAD), Azure, and M365 environments.

Text2Room generates textured 3D meshes from a given text prompt using 2D text-to-image models.

Open-source music player for local audio files, built with both visual coolness and functionality in mind.

Reference implementation of the Transformer architecture optimized for Apple Neural Engine (ANE).

A library for audio and music analysis, feature extraction.

Experimental library for scraping websites using OpenAI's GPT API.

An open-source framework for training large multimodal models.

The Developer Experience Upgrade for Python Mocking.

A search (cmd+k) modal, for the Django admin UI, that searches your entire site.

Upcoming Events and Webinars

There will be following talks

  • ArcticDB Adventures

  • The journey of building a public-facing and low-maintenance Wordle Solver

There will be a talk, Building Recommendation Systems in Python.

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