#261 Please re-enable spacebar heating

Watch the live stream: Watch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us: Check out the courses over at Talk Python And Brian’s book too! Special guest: Dr. Chelle Gentemann Michael #1: rClone via Mark Pender Not much Python but useful for Python people :) Rclone is a command line program to manage files on cloud storage. Over 40 cloud storage products support rclone including S3 object stores Rclone has powerful cloud equivalents to the unix commands rsync, cp, mv, mount, ls, ncdu, tree, rm, and cat. Brian #2: check-wheel-contents Suggested by several listeners, thank you. “Getting the right files into your wheel is tricky, and sometimes we mess up and publish a wheel containing __pycache__ directories or tests/” usage: check-wheel-contents [[HTML_REMOVED]] [HTML_REMOVED] ex: (venv) $ pwd /Users/okken/projects/cards (venv) $ check-wheel-contents dist dist/cards-1.0.0-py3-none-any.whl: OK Checks - W001 - Wheel contains .pyc/.pyo files - W002 - Wheel contains duplicate files - W003 - Wheel contains non-module at library toplevel - W004 - Module is not located at importable path - W005 - Wheel contains common toplevel name in library - W006 - __init__.py at top level of library - W007 - Wheel library is empty - W008 - Wheel is empty - W009 - Wheel contains multiple toplevel library entries - W010 - Toplevel library directory contains no Python modules - W101 - Wheel library is missing files in package tree - W102 - Wheel library contains files not in package tree - W201 - Wheel library is missing specified toplevel entry - W202 - Wheel library has undeclared toplevel entry Readme has good description of each check, including common causes and solutions. Chelle #3: xarray Where can I find climate and weather data? Binary to netCDF to Zarr… data is all its gory-ness Data formats are critical for data providers but should be invisible to users What is Xarray An example reading climate data and making some maps Michael #4: JetBrains Remote Development If you can SSH to it, that can be your dev machine Keep sensitive code and connections on a dedicated machine Reproducible environments for the team Spin up per-configured environments (venvs, services, etc) Treat your dev machine like a temp git branch checkout for testing PRs, etc They did bury the lead with Fleet in here too Brian #5: The XY Problem This topic is important because many of us, including listeners, are novices in some topics and ask questions, sometimes without giving enough context. experts in some topics and answer questions of others. The XY Problem “… You are trying to solve problem X, and you think solution Y would work, but instead of asking about X when you run into trouble, you ask about Y.” - From a Stack Exchange Answer Example from xyproblem.info [HTML_REMOVED] How can I echo the last three characters in a filename? [HTML_REMOVED] If they're in a variable: echo ${foo: -3} [HTML_REMOVED] Why 3 characters? What do you REALLY want? [HTML_REMOVED] Do you want the extension? [HTML_REMOVED] Yes. [HTML_REMOVED] There's no guarantee that every filename will have a three-letter extension, [HTML_REMOVED] so blindly grabbing three characters does not solve the problem. [HTML_REMOVED] echo ${foo##*.} Reason why it’s common and almost unavoidable: Almost all design processes for software I can achieve A if I do B and C. I can achieve B if I do D and E. And I can achieve C if I do F and G. … I can achieve X if I do Y. More important questions than “What is the XY Problem?”: Is it possible to avoid? - not really Is it possible to mitigate when asking questions? - yes When answering questions where you expect XY might be an issue, how do you pull out information while providing information and be respectful to the asker? One great response included Asking Questions where you risk falling into XY State your problem State what you are trying to achieve State how it fits into your wider design Giving Answers to XY problems Answer the question (answer Y) Discuss the attempted solution (ask questions about context) “Just curious. Are you trying to do (possible X)? If so, Y might not be appropriate because …” “What is the answer to Y going to be used for?” Solve X Also interesting reading Einstellung effect - The Einstellung effect is the negative effect of previous experience when solving new problems. Chelle #6: kerchunk - Making data access fast and invisible S3 is pretty slow, especially when you have LOTS of files We can speed it up by creating json files that just collect info from files and act as a reference Then we can collate the references into MEGAJSON and just access lots of data at once Make it easy to get data! Extras Michael: Xojo - like modern VB6? 10 Reasons You'll Love PyCharm Even More in 2021 webcast Users revolt as Microsoft bolts a short-term financing app onto Edge Chelle: Why we need python & FOSS to solve the climate crisis Joke: Spacebar Heating