High Resolution Tour Podcasts

Preamble This is a cross-over episode from our new show The Machine Learning Podcast, the show about going from idea to production with machine learning. Summary The majority of machine learning projects that you read about or work on are built around batch processes. The model is trained, and then validated, and then deployed, with each step being…

Preamble This is a cross-over episode from our new show The Machine Learning Podcast, the show about going from idea to production with machine learning. Summary Deep learning is a revolutionary category of machine learning that accelerates our ability to build powerful inference models. Along with that power comes a great deal of complexity in det…

Preamble This is a cross-over episode from our new show The Machine Learning Podcast, the show about going from idea to production with machine learning. Summary Machine learning has the potential to transform industries and revolutionize business capabilities, but only if the models are reliable and robust. Because of the fundamental probabilistic…

Preamble This is a cross-over episode from our new show The Machine Learning Podcast, the show about going from idea to production with machine learning. Summary Building an ML model is getting easier than ever, but it is still a challenge to get that model in front of the people that you built it for. Baseten is a platform that helps you quickly g…

Summary Starting a new project is always exciting and full of possibility, until you have to set up all of the repetitive boilerplate. Fortunately there are useful project templates that eliminate that drudgery. PyScaffold goes above and beyond simple template repositories, and gives you a toolkit for different application types that are packed wit…

Summary Application configuration is a deceptively complex problem. Everyone who is building a project that gets used more than once will end up needing to add configuration to control aspects of behavior or manage connections to other systems and services. At first glance it seems simple, but can quickly become unwieldy. Bruno Rocha created Dynaco…

Summary Software is eating the world, but that code has to have hardware to execute the instructions. Most people, and many software engineers, don’t have a proper understanding of how that hardware functions. Charles Petzold wrote the book "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" to make this a less opaque subject. In this epi…

Summary The generation, distribution, and consumption of energy is one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure for the modern world. With the rise of renewable energy there is an accompanying need for systems that can respond in real-time to the availability and demand for electricity. FlexMeasures is an open source energy management system t…

Summary Your ability to build and maintain a software project is tempered by the strength of the team that you are working with. If you are in a position of leadership, then you are responsible for the growth and maintenance of that team. In this episode Jigar Desai, currently the SVP of engineering at Sisu Data, shares his experience as an enginee…

Summary Working on hardware projects often has significant friction involved when compared to pure software. Brian Pugh enjoys tinkering with microcontrollers, but his "weekend projects" often took longer than a weekend to complete, so he created Belay. In this episode he explains how Belay simplifies the interactions involved in developing for Mic…

Summary Static typing versus dynamic typing is one of the oldest debates in software development. In recent years a number of dynamic languages have worked toward a middle ground by adding support for type hints. Python’s type annotations have given rise to an ecosystem of tools that use that type information to validate the correctness of programs…

Summary Every software project is subject to a series of decisions and tradeoffs. One of the first decisions to make is which programming language to use. For companies where their product is software, this is a decision that can have significant impact on their overall success. In this episode Sean Knapp discusses the languages that his team at As…

Summary Writing code is only one piece of creating good software. Code reviews are an important step in the process of building applications that are maintainable and sustainable. In this episode On Freund shares his thoughts on the myriad purposes that code reviews serve, as well as exploring some of the patterns and anti-patterns that grow up aro…

Summary Quality assurance in the software industry has become a shared responsibility in most organizations. Given the rapid pace of development and delivery it can be challenging to ensure that your application is still working the way it’s supposed to with each release. In this episode Jonathon Wright discusses the role of quality assurance in mo…

Summary The goal of every software team is to get their code into production without breaking anything. This requires establishing a repeatable process that doesn’t introduce unnecessary roadblocks and friction. In this episode Ronak Rahman discusses the challenges that development teams encounter when trying to build and maintain velocity in their…

Summary Every startup begins with an idea, but that won’t get you very far without testing the feasibility of that idea. A common practice is to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that addresses the problem that you are trying to solve and working with early customers as they engage with that MVP. In this episode Tony Pavlovych shares his thought…

Summary Application architectures have been in a constant state of evolution as new infrastructure capabilities are introduced. Virtualization, cloud, containers, mobile, and now web assembly have each introduced new options for how to build and deploy software. Recognizing the transformative potential of web assembly, Matt Butcher and his team at …

Summary As your code scales beyond a trivial level of complexity and sophistication it becomes difficult or impossible to know everything that it is doing. The flow of logic and data through your software and which parts are taking the most time are impossible to understand without help from your tools. VizTracer is the tool that you will turn to w…

Summary Analysis of streaming data in real time has long been the domain of big data frameworks, predominantly written in Java. In order to take advantage of those capabilities from Python requires using client libraries that suffer from impedance mis-matches that make the work harder than necessary. Bytewax is a new open source platform for writin…

Summary Building a fully functional web application has been growing in complexity along with the growing popularity of javascript UI frameworks such as React, Vue, Angular, etc. Users have grown to expect interactive experiences with dynamic page updates, which leads to duplicated business logic and complex API contracts between the server-side ap…

Summary Virtually everything that you interact with on a daily basis and many other things that make modern life possible were designed and modeled in software called CAD or Computer-Aided Design. These programs are advanced suites with graphical editing environments tailored to domain experts in areas such as mechanical engineering, electrical eng…

Summary Building any software project is going to require relying on dependencies that you and your team didn’t write or maintain, and many of those will have dependencies of their own. This has led to a wide variety of potential and actual issues ranging from developer ergonomics to application security. In order to provide a higher degree of conf…

Summary Most developers have encountered code completion systems and rely on them as part of their daily work. They allow you to stay in the flow of programming, but have you ever stopped to think about how they work? In this episode Meredydd Luff takes us behind the scenes to dig into the mechanics of code completion engines and how you can custom…

Summary Russell Keith-Magee is an accomplished engineer and a fixture of the Python community. His work on the Beeware suite of projects is one of the most ambitious undertakings in the ecosystem and unfailingly forward-looking. With his recent transition to working for Anaconda he is now able to dedicate his full focus to the effort. In this episo…

Summary Digital cameras and the widespread availability of smartphones has allowed us all to generate massive libraries of personal photographs. Unfortunately, now we are all left to our own devices of how to manage them. While cloud services such as iPhotos and Google Photos are convenient, they aren’t always affordable and they put your pictures …

Summary Investing effectively is largely a game of information access and analysis. This can involve a substantial amount of research and time spent on finding, validating, and acquiring different information sources. In order to reduce the barrier to entry and provide a powerful framework for amateur and professional investors alike Didier Rodrigu…

Summary The experimentation phase of building a machine learning model requires a lot of trial and error. One of the limiting factors of how many experiments you can try is the length of time required to train the model which can be on the order of days or weeks. To reduce the time required to test different iterations Rolando Garcia Sanchez create…

Summary Programmers love to automate tedious processes, including refactoring your code. In order to support the creation of code modifications for your Python projects Jimmy Lai created LibCST. It provides a richly typed and high level API for creating and manipulating concrete syntax trees of your source code. In this episode Jimmy Lai and Zsolt …

Summary Communication is a fundamental requirement for any program or application. As the friction involved in deploying code has gone down, the motivation for architecting your system as microservices goes up. This shifts the communication patterns in your software from function calls to network calls. In this episode Idit Levine explains how the …

Summary Cloud native architectures have been gaining prominence for the past few years due to the rising popularity of Kubernetes. This introduces new complications to development workflows due to the need to integrate with multiple services as you build new components for your production systems. In order to reduce the friction involved in develop…

Summary Science is founded on the collection and analysis of data. For disciplines that rely on data about the earth the ability to simulate and generate that data has been growing faster than the tools for analysis of that data can keep up with. In order to help scale that capacity for everyone working in geosciences the Pangeo project compiled a …

Summary A common piece of advice when starting anything new is to "begin with the end in mind". In order to help the engineers at Wayfair manage the complete lifecycle of their applications Joshua Woodward runs a team that provides tooling and assistance along every step of the journey. In this episode he shares some of the lessons and tactics that…

Summary Kubernetes is a framework that aims to simplify the work of running applications in production, but it forces you to adopt new patterns for debugging and resolving issues in your systems. Robusta is aimed at making that a more pleasant experience for developers and operators through pre-built automations, easy debugging, and a simple means …

Summary Building a machine learning application is inherently complex. Once it becomes necessary to scale the operation or training of the model, or introduce online re-training the process becomes even more challenging. In order to reduce the operational burden of AI developers Robert Nishihara helped to create the Ray framework that handles the d…

Summary As software projects grow and change it can become difficult to keep track of all of the logical flows. By visualizing the interconnections of function definitions, classes, and their invocations you can speed up the time to comprehension for newcomers to a project, or help yourself remember what you worked on last month. In this episode Sc…

Summary One of the most persistent challenges faced by organizations of all sizes is the recording and distribution of institutional knowledge. In technical teams this is exacerbated by the need to incorporate technical review feedback and manage access to data before publishing. When faced with this problem as an early data scientist at AirBnB, Ch…

Summary Software development is a complex undertaking due to the number of options available and choices to be made in every stage of the lifecycle. In order to make it more scaleable it is necessary to establish common practices and patterns and introduce strong opinions. One area that can have a huge impact on the productivity of the engineers en…

Summary It doesn’t matter how amazing your application is if you are unable to deliver it to your users. Frustrated with the rampant complexity involved in building and deploying software Vlad A. Ionescu created the Earthly tool to reduce the toil involved in creating repeatable software builds. In this episode he explains the complexities that are…

Summary The process of getting software delivered to an environment where users can interact with it requires many steps along the way. In some cases the journey can require a large number of interdependent workflows that need to be orchestrated across technical and organizational boundaries, making it difficult to know what the current status is. …

Summary When we are creating applications we spend a significant amount of effort on optimizing the experience of our end users to ensure that they are able to complete the tasks that the system is intended for. A similar effort that we should all consider is optimizing the developer experience for ourselves and other engineers who contribute to th…

Summary Pandas has grown to be a ubiquitous tool for working with data at every stage. It has become so well known that many people learn Python solely for the purpose of using Pandas. With all of this activity and the long history of the project it can be easy to find misleading or outdated information about how to use it. In this episode Matt Har…

Summary Developers hate wasting effort on manual processes when we can write code to do it instead. Cog is a tool to manage the work of automating the creation of text inside another file by executing arbitrary Python code. In this episode Ned Batchelder shares the story of why he created Cog in the first place, some of the interesting ways that he…

Summary Statistical regression models are a staple of predictive forecasts in a wide range of applications. In this episode Matthew Rudd explains the various types of regression models, when to use them, and his work on the book "Regression: A Friendly Guide" to help programmers add regression techniques to their toolbox. Announcements Hello and we…

Summary Every software project needs a tool for managing the repetitive tasks that are involved in building, running, and deploying the code. Frustrated with the limitations of tools like Make, Scons, and others Eduardo Schettino created doit to handle task automation in his own work and released it as open source. In this episode he shares the sto…

Summary Whether we like it or not, advertising is a common and effective way to make money on the internet. In order to support the work being done at Read The Docs they decided to include advertisements on the documentation sites they were hosting, but they didn’t want to alienate their users or collect unnecessary information. In this episode Dav…

Summary Podcasts are one of the few mediums in the internet era that are still distributed through an open ecosystem. This has a number of benefits, but it also brings the challenge of making it difficult to find the content that you are looking for. Frustrated by the inability to pick and choose single episodes across various shows for his listeni…

Summary Outer space holds a deep fascination for people of all ages, and the key principle in its exploration both near and far is orbital mechanics. Poliastro is a pure Python package for exploring and simulating orbit calculations. In this episode Juan Luis Cano Rodriguez shares the story behind the project, how you can use it to learn more about…

Summary Deep learning frameworks encourage you to focus on the structure of your model ahead of the data that you are working with. Ludwig is a tool that uses a data oriented approach to building and training deep learning models so that you can experiment faster based on the information that you actually have, rather than spending all of our time …

Summary A lot of time and energy goes into data analysis and machine learning projects to address various goals. Most of the effort is focused on the technical aspects and validating the results, but how much time do you spend on considering the experience of the people who are using the outputs of these projects? In this episode Benn Stancil explo…

Summary The true power of artificial intelligence is its ability to work collaboratively with humans. Nate Joens co-founded Structurely to create a conversational AI platform that augments human sales teams to help guide potential customers through the initial steps of the funnel. In this episode he discusses the technical and social considerations…