Import Python: ImportPython Issue 91 - asynq from quora, python packaging ecosystem and more

Hey guys, this is Ankur. Curator behind ImportPython. Will be attending PyconIndia. Happy to meet you all and discuss all things Python. Get your opinion on the newsletter, How to make it better ?. Ping me on ankur at outlook dot com or just reply to this email. I will respond back. See you there.

asynq is a library for asynchronous programming in Python with a focus on batching requests to external services. It also provides seamless interoperability with synchronous code, support for asynchronous context managers, and tools to make writing and testing asynchronous code easier. asynq was developed at Quora and is a core component of Quora's architecture. See the original blog post here.

Try Hired and get in front of 4,000+ companies with one application. No more pushy recruiters, no more dead end applications and mismatched companies, Hired puts the power in your hands.

There have been a few recent articles reflecting on the current status of the Python packaging ecosystem from an end user perspective, so it seems worthwhile for me to write-up my perspective as one of the lead architects for that ecosystem on how I characterise the overall problem space of software publication and distribution, where I think we are at the moment, and where I'd like to see us go in the future.

This team is responsible for supplying a variety of web apps built on a modern stack (mostly Celery, Django, nginx and Redis), but have almost no control over the infrastructure on which it runs, and boy, is some of that infrastructure old and stinky. We have no root access to these servers, most software configuration requires a ticket with a lead time of 48 hours plus, and the watchful eyes of a crusty old administrator and obtuse change management process. The machines are so old that many are still running on real hardware, and those that are VMs still run some ancient variety of Red Hat Linux, with, if we’re lucky, Python 2.4 installed.

The notebook functionality of Python provides a really amazing way of analyzing data and writing reports in one place. However in the standard configuration, the pdf export of the Python notebook is somewhat ugly and unpractical. In the following I will present my choices to create almost publication ready reports from within IPython/Jupyter notebook.

Paul Bailey, "A Guide to Bad Programming", at PyBay2016 was my fav talk amongst all. Check out the youtube channel.

I wrote a program to clean up scans of handwritten notes while simultaneously reducing file size. Some of my classes don’t have an assigned textbook. For these, I like to appoint weekly “student scribes” to share their lecture notes with the rest of the class, so that there’s some kind written resource for students to double-check their understanding of the material. The notes get posted to a course website as PDFs.

This tutorial will show you how to transform an image with different filters and techniques to deliver different outputs. These methods are still in use and part of a process known as Computer-To-Plate (CTP), used to create a direct output from an image file to a photographic film or plate (depending on the process). Note - It's a pretty good article that makes uses of Python 3, Pillow and is well written.

This is a Weekly Python Chat live video chat events. These events are hosted by Trey Hunner. This week Melanie Crutchfield and he are going to chat about things you'll wish you knew earlier when making your first website with Django. Much watch for newbies building websites in Django.

If you are looking to implement 2 Factor Authentication as part of your product and don't know where to start read this.

CLI for extracting streams from various websites to video player of your choosing

Generate new lyrics in the style of any artist using LSTMs and TensorFlow