📡 Python radar - September 2023

A personal selection of Python-related news and projects that caught my attention this month (note: leading emojis are mine).

🧠 Understanding Automatic Differentiation in 30 Lines of Python (vmartin.fr)
A very educational article in French (which is quite rare to note) about the pedagogical implementation of an algorithm that underpins many optimization techniques, informative with interesting Python code.

🤖 Making Large Language Models Work for You (simonwillison.net)
An excellent presentation (video and transcription) to understand the current state of "Large Language Models" (LLMs) and how it is now possible to make use of them.

🛠️ Writing a C Compiler in 500 Lines of Python (vgel.me)
Everything is in the title... I enjoy these seemingly trivial challenges that intersect technologies and push us out of our comfort zones.

🔍 Introducing flake8-logging (adamj.eu)
A new plugin for the code checking tool flake8 to ensure the correct usage of the standard module logging.

🔁 Switching to Hatch (web.archive.org)
The author explains why they switched from poetry to hatch for managing their Python projects. [EDIT 2025-01-20: broken link... replaced with an Internet Archive link.]

📊 How the Python Dataframe Interchange Protocol Makes Life Better (web.archive.org)
Various dataframe models coexist today in the Python ecosystem (pandas, polars, vaex, cuDF, dask, etc.), this protocol, already adopted by most players in the field, enables the conversion of dataframes from one format to another. [EDIT 2025-01-20: broken link as well... replaced with an Internet Archive link.]

☁️ Processing a 250 TB Dataset with Coiled, Dask, and Xarray (blog.coiled.io)
The title is enticing, but there's no magic here; coiled is a cloud company dedicated to Python, and the 250TB of data is already available as open data on AWS... however, the exercise is interesting, and the cost of the operation is apparently only $25!

📺 EuroPython 2023 (youtube.com)
The videos of the talks from the EuroPython 2023 conference are online.

🧩 mckinsey/vizro: Vizro is a toolkit for creating modular data visualization applications. (github.com)
A "low-code" overlay on Dash/Plotly for creating interactive dashboards through configuration.

🧾 Announcing Python in Excel (techcommunity.microsoft.com)
Write Python code directly in Excel cells, Microsoft has done it... but in the cloud... you need the cloud version of Excel, and the Python code runs in Azure... for everyone else, there's xlwings which works great (but still no Python in cells yet).