Episode Details

What is error culture, and how do you avoid it within your organization? How do you navigate alert and notification fatigue? Hey, it’s episode #200! Real Python’s editor-in-chief, Dan Bader, joins us this week to celebrate. Christopher Trudeau also returns to bring another batch of PyCoder’s Weekly articles and projects.

We discuss an article series about error culture. We dig into false positives, hero culture, and the tendency to start ignoring alerts. We contrast our personal experiences and propose possible remedies. Dan describes configuring Real Python’s alert system.

We also share several other articles and projects from the Python community, including a news roundup, reading and writing WAV files in Python, moving beyond flat files toward SQLite and SQLAlchemy, getting help in Python, exploring four kinds of optimization, a framework for building web scrapers, and a project to simply subprocesses.

This week’s episode is brought to you by Sentry.

Topics:

• 00:00:00 – Introduction
• 00:02:42 – PyPI Hiring a Support Specialist
• 00:03:19 – PyPI Temporarily Halted New Users and Projects
• 00:04:14 – What we know about the xz Utils backdoor
• 00:05:38 – CPython, PyPI, and the backdoor of xz
• 00:07:18 – Episode 200 appreciation and the journey
• 00:09:18 – A visit from Dan
• 00:14:14 – Reading and Writing WAV Files in Python
• 00:19:56 – Sponsor: Sentry
• 00:21:03 – SQLite and SQLAlchemy in Python
• 00:27:36 – Getting Help (In Python)
• 00:32:49 – Laurence Tratt: Four Kinds of Optimization
• 00:40:54 – Video Course Spotlight
• 00:42:26 – Discussion: Error Culture
• 00:58:03 – botasaurus: The All in One Framework to Build Awesome Scrapers
• 01:01:04 – suby: Slightly Simplified Subprocesses
• 01:02:50 – Thanks and goodbye

News:

• PyPI Hiring a Support Specialist (Remote)
• PyPI Temporarily Halted New Users and Projects – To fend off a supply-chain attack, PyPI temporarily halted new users and projects for about 10 hours last week. This article discusses why, and the scourge of supply-chain attacks.
• What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world - Ars Technica
• CPython, PyPI, and many Python packages are not affected by the backdoor of xz - Core Development - Discussions on Python.org

Topics:

• Reading and Writing WAV Files in Python – In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to work with WAV audio files in Python using the standard-library wave module. Along the way, you’ll synthesize sounds from scratch, visualize waveforms in the time domain, animate real-time spectrograms, and apply special effects to widen the stereo field.

• Listen Now