ImportPython Newsletter Issue 78

Worthy Read

SQL Dashboards in a Flash

Web Service Efficiency at Instagram with Python

Instagram currently features the world’s largest deployment of the Django web framework, which is written entirely in Python. We initially chose to use Python because of its reputation for simplicity and practicality, which aligns well with our philosophy of “do the simple thing first.” But simplicity can come with a tradeoff: efficiency. Instagram has doubled in size over the last two years and recently crossed 500 million users 

Python wats

A "wat" is what I call a snippet of code that demonstrates a counterintuitive edge case of a programming language. (The name comes from this excellent talk by Gary Bernhardt.) If you're not familiar with the language, you might conclude that it's poorly designed when you see a wat. Often, more context about the language design will make the wat seem reasonable, or at least justified. 

Coconut - Simple, elegant, Pythonic functional programming.

Running a Python 3 REST application with Statsd and Consul support in Docker

Today, I’m going to go over setting up a very simple way to spin up a Python Falcon REST service that reports to Statsd as well as registering as a service with Consul along with setting up health checks. I’ve borrowed some ideas/code from several places and changed as needed. 

Pigar

Turn Python Errors into Awesome

Django 1.10 beta 1 released

As part of the Django 1.10 release process, today we've released Django 1.10 beta 1, a preview/testing package that represents the second stage in the 1.10 release cycle and an opportunity for you to try out the changes coming in Django 1.10. 

I missed pycon, what is your favorite talk that you recommend I watch ? - Reddit Discussion

Discussion on Reddit on Pycon talk recommendations. 

A high availability Django setup on the cheap - Roland van Laar

Roland build an educational website that needed to be high available on a tight budget. Nice write up on how to achieve it. 

BeginnersGuide/NonProgrammers - Python Wiki

If you've never programmed before, the tutorials on this page are recommended for you; they don't assume that you have previous experience. If you have programming experience, also check out the BeginnersGuide/Programmers page. This section is hosted on the Python website and is well curated and maintained. 

Curated list of 80 Python courses

Learn Python online – A curated list of courses on Python 

How To Serve Django Applications with Apache and mod_wsgi on Ubuntu 16.04 - DigitalOcean

In this guide, we will demonstrate how to install and configure Django in a Python virtual environment. We'll then set up Apache in front of our application so that it can handle client requests directly before passing requests that require application logic to the Django app. We will do this using the mod_wsgi Apache module that can communicate with Django over the WSGI interface specification. 

An Interview with Pythonista Katharine Jarmul

This interview with Pythonista Katharine Jarmul focuses on data work. A couple of events provide context. Katharine is presenting a talk titled "How Machine Learning Changed Sentiment Analysis, or I Hate You, Computer ????" at this year's Sentiment Analysis Symposium, July 12, 2016 in New York, following which she's offering a class, Learn Big Data Wrangling with Python, July 13-14, also in New York. 

Simple type checked objects in Python

Code snippet to check types.