5 interesting things (29/12/2021)

7 PyTest Features and Plugins That Will Save You Tons of Time– I read many tutorials and posts about PyTest and this is the first time I run into those flags (features 1-5) which I find very useful. As always – if you can use your superpowers to read the documentation directly. 

https://betterprogramming.pub/7-pytest-features-and-plugins-that-will-save-you-tons-of-time-74808b9d4756

Patterns for Authorization in Microservices – I find this post interesting since I currently face a similar problem of setting authorization and authentication architecture in the product I work on that can have complex access patterns such as a user can access multiple resources on different access levels owned by different organizations.


https://www.osohq.com/post/microservices-authorization-patterns

Related bonus – https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/api-authentication-with-tokens


Database Indexing Anti-Patterns – I find this post slightly too high level. Yes, it state possible issues with indexing but a more effective post would be how to detect those anti-patterns on specific databases. E.g measure Mongo index usage on Mongo – https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/tutorial/measure-index-use/


This link is part of this post as a periodic reminder to think and take care of those topics before they become issues.
https://towardsdatascience.com/database-indexing-anti-patterns-dccb1b8ecef

How to safely think in systems. – “Effective systems thinking comes from the tension between model and reality, without a healthy balance you’ll always lose the plot.”. I’m not sure if this post should be in the parenting category or in the career \ professional \ management category. 
https://lethain.com/how-to-safely-think-in-systems/

How Improvised Stand-up Comedy Taught Me to Interview Better – “After all, questions in an interview are mostly a means for getting to know the candidate better, just as pulling words out of a hat is just the framework for a show.”. Great post that connects two domains that usually aren’t brought up together.

https://nogamann.medium.com/how-improvised-stand-up-comedy-taught-me-to-interview-better-9f0168be0726

Advertisement

We raised 12M$ seed funding

In the last year and 3 months, I work for Lynx.md. We develop a medical data science platform that bridges the gap between data owners and data consumers while taking care of de-identifications, privacy, and security aspects of sharing data.

10 days ago we announced that we raised a 12M$ seed funding and we are hiring – DevOps engineers, data engineers, data scientists, backend \ full-stack \ frontend developers, product managers. Our tech stack includes – Python mainly using FastAPI, Django, pandas, etc., AWS (but will soon add Azure too), Postgres, elastic search, Redis, Docker. Super interesting challenges with added value. Feel free to reach out if you want to learn more.


Read more about us – https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3924888,00.html

5 interesting things (1/12/21)

Tests aren’t enough: Case study after adding type hints to urllib3 – I read those posts as thrillers (and some of them are the same length :). This post describes the effort of adding type hints to urllib3 and what the maintainers’ team learned during this process. Super interesting.

https://sethmlarson.dev/blog/2021-10-18/tests-arent-enough-case-study-after-adding-types-to-urllib3

Why you shouldn’t invoke setup.py directly – post by Paul Ganssle, python core developer setuptool. TL;DR of the TL;DR in the post – “The setuptools team no longer wants to be in the business of providing a command-line interface and is actively working to become just a library for building packages”. See the table in the summary section for a quick how-to guide.

https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2021/10/setup-py-deprecated.html

Python pathlib Cookbook: 57+ Examples to Master It (2021) – I had a post about pathlib for a while in my drafts and now I can delete it since this guide is much more extensive. In short, pathlib is part of the Python standard library since Python 3.4 and it provides an abstraction for filesystem paths over different operating systems. If you still work with os for paths this is a good time to switch.

https://miguendes.me/python-pathlib

10 Tips For Using OKRs Effectively – I think a lot about OKRs for my team and moreover on personal OKRs and how to grow both the team and the product. I found this post (and the associated links) insightful.

https://rushabhdoshi.com/posts/2020-06-18-10-tips-for-making-okrs-effective/

How to Choose the Right Structure for Your Data Team – I started with those posts and soon enough read many more posts by y Bar Moses, Co-Founder, and CEO, Monte Carlo. Her posts have two dimensions that are relevant for me – team building (specifically around data-intensive products) and data engineering. If you find at least one of those topics interesting I believe you’ll enjoy her posts.

https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-choose-the-right-structure-for-your-data-team-be6c1b66a067
https://towardsdatascience.com/7-questions-to-ask-when-building-your-data-team-at-a-hypergrowth-company-dce0c0f343b4