Fridays Are For Learning, 2018-W21: PyCon US 2018 Part 2.

Fridays are for learning.¹ Another batch of videos from PyCon US 2018 (see the YouTube channel for more), for the week ending May 25, 2018.

Barry Warsaw, “Get Your Resources Faster With importlib.resources

An introduction to Python 3.7’s new importlib.resources, which incorporates some (tiny fraction) of pkg_resources into the standard library.

Alex Gaynor, “Learning from Failure: Post Mortems”

Failures happen. Make use of them.

VM Brasseur, “The Human Nature of Failure & Resiliency”

A self-described greatest hits of the history of research into failure (biased toward Western cultures). I think this talk is useful in conjunction with the last one, as Brasseur advocates for “pre-mortems” (i.e., answering the question “what went right, and why” compared to a post-mortem’s “what went wrong”) as a tool to identify latent errors.

Amanda Sopkin, “Randomness in Python: Creating Chaos in an Ordered Machine”

Three major take-aways to this talk: don’t use random (or numpy.random!) for things which actually need to be random (counterintuitive, arguably a failure in naming), use secrets if you must, but better to use cryptography if you need cryptographically-secure randomness.

Raymond Hettinger, “Dataclasses: The code generator to end all code generators”

For when you need something a bit better than a (named) tuple, but want to avoid the normal boilerplate of regular classes. See also: attrs.

Nina Zakharenko, “Elegant Solutions for Everyday Python Problems”

Aimed at intermediate developers, a quick overview of magic methods, “method magic,” generators, context managers, decorators, context decorators, and named tuples.

There are a few additional talks that I liked enough to devote full posts to; look for those soon!