Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

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The Government Huddle with Brian Chidester - 199: The One with the CivicPlus Market Expert

Brenden Elwood, Vice President of Market Research at CivicPlus and a City Councilor in North Bend, Washington joins the show to unpack the latest insights from CivicPlus’ nationwide resident research. We explore what drives citizen satisfaction and trust in local government, from proactive communication to transparent service delivery. We also discuss how accessibility and user experience directly shape public perception, and why digital inclusivity is more than just a compliance checkbox, it’s a cornerstone of good governance.

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The Stack Overflow Podcast - Interface is everything, and everything is an interface

Ryan talks with Wesley Yu, head of engineering at Metalab, about the evolution of interfaces in technology, the pressure that UI generated on the fly would put on your backend systems, and why AI is just the latest and fanciest in a long line of CRUD apps. 

Episode notes:

Metalab designs interfaces for top brands around the world, helping them design, build, and ship their products.

Connect with Wesley on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Congrats to Populist badge winner SiddAjmera, who won the badge for their answer to Angular FormControl check if required.

TRANSCRIPT

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S11 Bonus: Tucker Callaway, Mezmo

Tucker Calloway grew up in Alamo, California, in the Easy Bay Area. And has returned to that area to raise his family - 25-30 minutes outside of the San Francisco area. He studied computer science at Cal, but eventually moved into sales engineering - and then sales. But outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids - one in college, and one in the latter years of high school. There is lots of change going on his family's life right now, but Tucker finds time to do woodworking and build his own cabinets.

Ten years ago, a couple of co-founders built a solution to make log management easier for developers. Tucker joined that company in the past, and observed the dynamics of the industry and the company. They all decided that to take the business of the next level, they needed to change the physics of observability.

This is the creation story of Mezmo.

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Big Technology Podcast - AI Is Upending Law. Is That A Sign For The Rest Of Us? — With Melia Russell

Melia Russell is a senior correspondent at Business Insider. She joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss how AI services are already making inroads in the legal profession, helping lawyers dig through countless documents via natural language search and compression weeks long research processes into minutes. We discuss what's happening, how it's impacting legal jobs already, and why it's likely an early indication of what's to come for professional services more broadly. Hit play for a fascinating deep dive into one of the more advanced applications of AI today.

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S11 E28: Hojjat Jafarpour, DeltaStream

Hojjat Jafarpour lives with his family in California. He got his PhD in databases and data streaming, back when the landscape was different and data streaming wasn't "cool" yet. He was an early member at Confluent, but also spent time at Quantcast, Informatica, and NEC Labs. Outside of tech, he has a family with young kids. He enjoys traveling, and can't wait until the kids are old enough to take on big trips.

Hojjat joined Confluent in their early days. He was on a project that built out kSQL, which was a key cornerstone of Confluent. As these were the early days of stream processing, he started to think about ways to make it easier - to make this sort of tech available without all the infrastructure.

This is the creation story of DeltaStream.

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Python Bytes - #461 This episdoe has a typo

Topics covered in this episode:
Watch on YouTube

About the show

Sponsored by us! Support our work through:

Connect with the hosts

Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too.

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Michael #1: PEP 798: Unpacking in Comprehensions

  • After careful deliberation, the Python Steering Council is pleased to accept PEP 798 – Unpacking in Comprehensions.

  • Examples

    [*it for it in its]  # list with the concatenation of iterables in 'its'
{*it for it in its}  # set with the union of iterables in 'its'
{**d for d in dicts} # dict with the combination of dicts in 'dicts'
(*it for it in its)  # generator of the concatenation of iterables in 'its'

  • Also: The Steering Council is happy to unanimously accept “PEP 810, Explicit lazy imports”

Brian #2: Pandas 3.0.0rc0

  • Pandas 3.0.0 will be released soon, and we’re on Release candidate 0
  • Here’s What’s new in Pands 3.0.0
    • Dedicated string data type by default
      • Inferred by default for string data (instead of object dtype)
      • The str dtype can only hold strings (or missing values), in contrast to object dtype. (setitem with non string fails)
      • The missing value sentinel is always NaN (np.nan) and follows the same missing value semantics as the other default dtypes.
    • Copy-on-Write
      • The result of any indexing operation (subsetting a DataFrame or Series in any way, i.e. including accessing a DataFrame column as a Series) or any method returning a new DataFrame or Series, always behaves as if it were a copy in terms of user API.
      • As a consequence, if you want to modify an object (DataFrame or Series), the only way to do this is to directly modify that object itself.
    • pd.col syntax can now be used in DataFrame.assign() and DataFrame.loc()
      • You can now do this: df.assign(c = pd.col('a') + pd.col('b'))
    • New Deprecation Policy
    • Plus more
    • -

Michael #3: typos

Like codespell, typos checks for known misspellings instead of only allowing words from a dictionary. But typos has some extra features I really appreciate, like finding spelling mistakes inside snake_case or camelCase words. For example, if you have the line:

*connecton_string = "sqlite:///my.db"*

codespell won't find the misspelling, but typos will. It gave me the output:

*error: `connecton` should be `connection`, `connector`  
╭▸ ./main.py:1:1  │1 │ connecton_string = "sqlite:///my.db"  
╰╴━━━━━━━━━*

But the main advantage for me is that typos has an LSP that supports editor integrations like a VS Code extension. As far as I can tell, codespell doesn't support editor integration. (Note that the popular Code Spell Checker VS Code extension is an unrelated project that uses a traditional dictionary approach.)

For more on the differences between codespell and typos, here's a comparison table I found in the typos repo: https://github.com/crate-ci/typos/blob/master/docs/comparison.md

By the way, though it's not mentioned in the installation instructions, typos is published on PyPI and can be installed with uv tool install typos, for example. That said, I don't bother installing it, I just use the VS Code extension and run it as a pre-commit hook. (By the way, I'm using prek instead of pre-commit now; thanks for the tip on episode #448!) It looks like typos also publishes a GitHub action, though I haven't used it.

Brian #4: A couple testing topics

  • slowlify
    • suggested by Brian Skinn
    • Simulate slow, overloaded, or resource-constrained machines to reproduce CI failures and hunt flaky tests.
    • Requires Linux with cgroups v2
  • Why your mock breaks later
    • Ned Badthelder
    • Ned’s taught us before to “Mock where the object is used, not where it’s defined.”
    • To be more explicit, but probably more confusing to mock-newbies, “don’t mock things that get imported, mock the object in the file it got imported to.”
      • See? That’s probably worse. Anyway, read Ned’s post.
    • If my project myproduct has user.py that uses the system builtin open() and we want to patch it:
      • DONT DO THIS: @patch("builtins.open")
        • This patches open() for the whole system
      • DO THIS: @patch("myproduct.user.open")
        • This patches open() for just the user.py file, which is what we want
    • Apparently this issue is common and is mucking up using coverage.py

Extras

Brian:

Michael:

Joke: tabloid - A minimal programming language inspired by clickbait headlines

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The Stack Overflow Podcast - AI is a crystal ball into your codebase

Ryan is joined by Kayvon Beykpour, CEO and founder of Microscope, to dive into AI-powered code review’s potential for managing large codebases, the need for humans-in-the-loop for reviewing PRs so AI tools can efficiently and effectively debug, and how AI can increase visibility  through summarization at the abstract syntax tree level and high signal-to-noise ratio code reviews.

Episode notes:

Macroscope helps you understand your code through AI-powered code review, automated PR descriptions, and real-time status reports

Connect with Kayvon on Twitter and LinkedIn.

This week’s shoutout goes to user Jesper Grann Laursen for winning a Populist badge on their answer to Exclude Table during pg_restore. 

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - Developer Chats – Svyatoslav Babinets of Meta

Today, we are kicking off a new series, entitled Developer Chats - hearing from the large scale system builders themselves, sponsored by our friends at Beyond Tech. Beyond Tech is a top tier consulting company, specializing in creating portfolios for tech and science professionals seeking the UK Global Talent Visa.

In this episode, we are talking with Svyatoslav Babinets, Engineering Manager at Meta. Svyatoslav helps to illuminate teh approaches he takes when building larger scale systems, connecting millions of users, and motivating users and developers alike.

Questions

  • You’ve worked on everything from large-scale multiplayer worlds to social technologies that power digital presence — how did that journey shape the way you think about engineering today?
  • You’ve worked on systems that connect millions of users across different platforms and products. How do you design architecture that supports high development velocity in large teams while still delivering experiences that delight users?
  • In your experience, what helps large companies move faster without sacrificing quality? Can you share how approaches like Virtual mission squad enable cross-functional collaboration across different disciplines and tech stacks?
  • As systems and teams grow, platform solutions often become the glue that holds everything together. How do you approach designing and implementing platform architecture that supports autonomy while keeping the whole ecosystem consistent?
  • From your experience, where do culture and infrastructure intersect? What kinds of engineering decisions are really decisions about trust, not technology?
  • You’ve worked both in games and in metaverse projects. What do these worlds teach us about building systems that feel alive — where motion, identity, and emotion all need to synchronize?
  • Large-scale systems evolve constantly. How do you design for long-term adaptability — ensuring that architecture remains flexible and scalable as product and user demands grow?
  • Looking ahead, how do you see the future of human–digital interaction? What should the next generation of engineers focus on — performance, presence, or empathy?


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Big Technology Podcast - AI Device Wars Heat Up, RIP Metaverse?, Netflix Acquires Warner Brothers

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) AI Device Wars are here 2) Apple loses its head of user interface design 3) Meta's chances in the AI device wars 4) Apple's Ai device will only be as good as the assistant 5) OpenAI's AI device could work? 6) Amazon's Alexa+ is underrated 7) Google Glass returns? 8) Is the Metaverse dead? 9) Code red at OpenAI 10) Anthropic gains in enterprise AI adoption 11) Netflix to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery 12) Kalshi and CNN team up

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From Big Technology on Substack: The AI Device Wars Just Kicked Off In A Big Way https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/the-ai-device-wars-just-kicked-off

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S11 Bonus: Spriha Baruah Tucker, Buildkite

Spriha Baruah Tucker has spent time in a number of places - growing up in India, attending boarding school in Singapore, and now living in San Francisco. She spent many years at Google, before founding her own startup called Aviator. Outside of tech, she really likes music, having a soft spot in her heart for Bollywood, but really digging into the jazz world these days. She enjoys the guilty pleasure of trashy romance TV, and tends to travel to get the best food - her favorite being Nashville.

Spriha was a founder at Aviator, and was made aware of her current company while serving her customers. He noticed that all of her customers who used this platform absolutely adored it, to the tune of making infomercials for the platform. She reached out to the founder to let him know... and the rest is history.

This is Spriha's creation story at Buildkite.

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