Python Weekly No 207

Articles, Tutorials and Talks

Episode #23: 3D Printing with Python at Authentise
You've heard of the full-stack developer and full-stack Python, but this week Authentise is taking it to a new level with Python all the way from the cloud to the client to the printer. It's all about 3D printing with Python on episode 23 with Eli Ribble. You'll learn how Eli and his team are using Python to allow independent makers to sell their designs while retaining control over the IP and copyrights. Plus, you'll learn about the most common and the craziest thing that Eli has seen printed lately. 

How to Program Block Chain Explorers with Python and Bitcoin
A Step-by-Step Guide to Programming a Block Explorer for Reading Block and Transaction Data from Block Chain Structures.

An example machine learning notebook
This notebook goes over a basic Python data analysis pipeline from start to finish to show you what a typical data science workflow looks like.

Understanding LSTM Networks
People are achieving remarkable results with RNNs. Essentially all of these are achieved using LSTMs. They really work a lot better for most tasks! Written down as a set of equations, LSTMs look pretty intimidating. Hopefully, walking through them step by step in this essay will make them a bit more approachable.

Python, natural language processing and predicting funny 
Every year there is a big festival in Edinburgh called the fringe festival. I blogged about this a while ago, in that post I did a very basic bit of natural language processing aiming to try and identify what made things funny. In this post I'm going to push that a bit further by building a classification model that aims to predict if a joke is funny or not. There also an update to this post with some more data from this year's Edinburgh Fringe festival.

Querying Craigslist with Python
Learn how to make a simple query on Craigslist using some nifty python modules. You can take advantage of all the structure data that exists on webpages to collect interesting datasets.

A scalable on-line movie recommender using Spark and Flask
This Apache Spark tutorial will guide you step-by-step into how to use the MovieLens dataset to build a movie recommender using collaborative filtering with Spark's Alternating Least Saqures implementation. The tutorial is organised in two parts. The first one is about getting and parsing movies and ratings data into Spark RDDs. The second is about building and using the recommender and persisting it for later use in our on-line recommender system.

Python Dictionaries
One of the keys to becoming a better Python programmer is to have a solid grasp of Python's built-in data structures. Using the structured format below, today you'll learn what a dict is, when to use it, and see example code of all of its member functions. 

Podcast.__init__ Episode 21 - Jessica McKellar
We got the chance to talk to Jessica McKellar about her work in the Python community. She told us about her experience as a director for the PSF, working as the diversity outreach manager for PyCon, and being a champion for improving the on-boarding experience for new users of Python. We also discussed perceptions around the performance of Python and some of the work being done to improve concurrency, as well as her work with OpenHatch.

Why test? (PT003)
Why testing? I discuss business related, practical benefits of testing, personal reasons, and pragmatic day to day developer benefits. I also set up the conversation with listing my preferred project dev/test strategy. 

Office Dev Show - Episode 7 - Getting Started with Python
In this episode, Rich diZerega shows us how to get started building a Python app that hooks into the Office 365 Contacts APIs. Rich also demonstrates how to get an app manifest that can be used to create an Office add-in using the same Python code as connecting to the APIs, but within the context of the add-in.

Automatically Discover Website Connections Through Tracking Codes

Using python to find value picks in fantasy football

Adding Flow Control to Apache Pig using Python


Books

Kivy - Interactive Applications and Games in Python 
If you are a Python developer who wants to create exciting and dynamic UI/UX applications that are compatible with multiple platforms, then this is the book for you. No prior experience with Kivy is required, although you should be familiar with Python and have a fair understanding of software engineering concepts such as inheritance, classes, and instances.


Python Jobs of the Week

Full-stack developer at Beauhurst
Beauhurst is looking for a full-stack developer with a strong testing background to join our fast-growing team. We're a full-stack Python company composed of front/back end developers and data scientists and are looking for someone to help unify our various deployment and testing setups. 
   
Backend Web Engineer at Ambassador
Ambassador is looking for talented backend engineers who are interested in solving complex problems and shipping beautiful products as part of an ambitious, world-class engineering team. Ambassador engineers demand quality and efficiency and love taking on responsibility and freedom to make large impacts. 


Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

PyTables
PyTables is a package for managing hierarchical datasets and designed to efficiently and easily cope with extremely large amounts of data. PyTables is built on top of the HDF5 library, using the Python language and the NumPy package.

Theano-Lights
Theano-Lights is a research framework based on Theano providing implementation of several recent Deep learning models and a convenient training and test functionality. The models are not hidden and spread out behind layers of abstraction as in most deep learning platforms to enable transparency and flexiblity during learning and research.

Grab
Grab is a python web scraping framework. Grab provides tons of helpful methods to scrape web sites and to process the scraped content.

recipy
Effortless method to record provenance in Python.

python-periphery
A pure Python 2/3 library for peripheral I/O (GPIO, SPI, I2C, MMIO, Serial) in Linux.

Django JET

Modern template for Django admin interface with improved functionality.

postgresql-metrics
Tool that extracts and provides metrics on your PostgreSQL database.

vy
A vim-like in python made from scratch. Everything is very well minimalistic and modular. Vy is built on top of tkinter which is one of the most productive graphical toolkits. It permits vy to have such a great programming interface for plugins. It is pretty straightfoward to implement a plugin for vy.

Cliar
Cliar (pronounced as "clear") helps you create command-line interfaces with minimum code.

soccer-cli
Football scores for hackers. A command line interface for all the football scores.

hackers-grep
hackers-grep is a tool that enables you to search for strings in PE files. The tool is capable of searching strings, imports, exports, and public symbols (like woah) using regular expressions.

proof
proof is a Python library for creating optimized, repeatable and self-documenting data analysis pipelines.

wordsegment
WordSegment is an Apache2 licensed module for English word segmentation, written in pure-Python, and based on a trillion-word corpus. Based on code from the chapter "Natural Language Corpus Data" by Peter Norvig from the book "Beautiful Data" (Segaran and Hammerbacher, 2009). Data files are derived from the Google Web Trillion Word Corpus. It's implemented in pure-Python with 100% code coverage and complete documentation.


New Releases

PyPy 2.6.1 released
We have fixed many issues, updated stdlib to 2.7.10, cffi to version 1.3, extended support for the new vmprof statistical profiler for multiple threads, and increased functionality of numpy.