
Brian Okken
Software Engineer, also on Python Bytes and Python People podcasts
Appears in 228 Episodes
199: Is Azure Right for a Side Project? - Pamela Fox
For a web side project to go from "working on desktop" to "live in the cloud", one decision that needs to be made is where to host everything. One option is Microsoft ...

198: Testing Django Web Applications - Carlton Gibson, Will Vincent
Django has some built in ways to test your application. There's also pytest-django and other plugins that help with testing. Carlton Gibson and Will Vincent from the D...

197: Python project trove classifiers - Do you need this bit of pyproject.toml metadata? - Brett Cannon
Classifiers are one bit of Python project metadata that predates PyPI. Classifiers are weird. They were around in setuptools days, and are still here with pyproject.to...

196: I am not a supplier - Thomas Depierre
Should we think of open source components the same way we think of physical parts for manufactured goods? There are problems with supply chain analogy when applied to ...

195: What would you change about pytest? - Anthony Sottile
Anthony Sottile and Brian discuss changes that would be cool for pytest, even unrealistic changes. These are changes we'd make to pytest if we didn't ahve to care abou...

193: The Good Research Code Handbook - Patrick Mineault
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that software is part of most scientific research now. From astronomy, to neuroscience, to chemistry, to climate models...

192: Learn to code through game development with PursuedPyBear - Piper Thunstrom
The first game I remember coding, or at least copying from a magazine, was in Basic. It was Lunar Lander. Learning to code a game is a way that a lot of people get sta...

191: Running your own site for fun and absolutely no profit whatsoever - Brian Wisti
Having a personal site is a great playground for learning tons of skills. Brian Wisti discusses the benefits of running a his own blog over the years.Links:Random Geek...

190: Testing PyPy - Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick
PyPy is a fast, compliant alternative implementation of Python. cPython is implemented in C. PyPy is implemented in Python. What does that mean? And how do you test so...

189: attrs and dataclasses - Hynek Schlawack
In Python, before dataclasses, we had attrs. Before attrs, it wasn't pretty.The story of attrs and dataclasses is actually intertwined. They've built on each other. A...

188: Python's Rich, Textual, and Textualize - Innovating the CLI
Will McGugan has brought a lot of color to CLIs within Python due to Rich. Then Textual started rethinking full command line applications, including layout with CSS. ...

187: Teaching Web Development, including Front End Testing
When you are teaching someone web development skills, when is the right time to start teaching code quality and testing practices?Karl Stolley believes it's never too ...

186: Developer and Team Productivity
Being productive is obviously a good thing. Can we measure it? Should we measure it? There's been failed attempts, like lines of code, etc. in the past. Currently, the...

185: Python + Django + Rich + Testing == Awesome
Django has a handful of console commands to help manage and develop sites. django-rich adds color and nice formatting. Super cool. In a recent release, django-rich al...

184: Twisted and Testing Event Driven / Asynchronous Applications - Glyph
Twisted has been supporting asynchronous / event driven applications way before asyncio. Twisted, and Glyph, have also been encouraging automated tests for a very long...

183: Managing Software Teams - Ryan Cheley
Ryan Cheley joins me today to talk about some challenges of managing software teams, and how to handle them. We end up talking about a lot of skills that are excellent...

182: An Unorthodox Technical Interview and Hiring Process - Nathan Aschbacher
Don't you just love technical interviews, with someone who just saw your resume or CV 5 minutes ago asking you to write some code on a whiteboard. Probably code that h...

181: Boost Your Django DX - Adam Johnson
We talk with Adam Johnson about his new book, "Boost Your Django DX". Developer experience includes tools and practices to make developers more effective and efficient...

180: Lean TDD
Lean TDD is an attempt to reconcile some conflicting aspects of Test Driven Development and Lean Software Development.I've mentioned Lean TDD on the podcast a few time...

179: Exploratory Testing
Exploratory testing is absolutely an essential part of a testing strategy. This episode discusses what exploratory testing is, its benefits, and how it fits within a f...

178: The Five Factors of Automated Software Testing
"There are five practical reasons that we write tests. Whether we realize it or not, our personal testing philosophy is based on how we judge the relative importance o...

177: Unit Test vs Integration Test and The Testing Trophy
A recent Twitter thread by Simon Willison reminded me that I've been meaning to do an episode on the testing trophy. This discussion is about the distinction between u...

176: SaaS Side Projects - Brandon Braner
The idea of having a software as a service product sound great, doesn't it? Solve a problem with software. Have a nice looking landing page and website. Get paying cus...

175: Who Should Do QA?
Who should do QA?How does that change with different projects and teams?What does "doing QA" mean, anyway?Answering these questions are the goals of this episode.Links...

174: pseudo-TDD - Paul Ganssle
In this episode, I talk with Paul Ganssle about a fun workflow that he calls pseudo-TDD. Pseudo-TDD is a way to keep your commit history clean and your tests passing w...

173: Why NOT unittest?
In the preface of "Python Testing with pytest" I list some reasons to use pytest, under a section called "why pytest?". Someone asked me recently, a different but rela...

172: Designing Better Software with a Prototype Mindset
A prototype is a a preliminary model of something, from which other forms are developed or copied. In software, we think of prototypes as early things, or a proof of c...

171: How and why I use pytest's xfail - Paul Ganssle
Paul Ganssle, is a software developer at Google, core Python dev, and open source maintainer for many projects, has some thoughts about pytest's xfail. He was an early...

170: pytest for Data Science and Machine Learning - Prayson Daniel
Prayson Daniel, a principle data scientist, discusses testing machine learning pipelines with pytest.Prayson is using pytest for some pretty cool stuff, including:unit...

169: Service and Microservice Performance Monitoring - Omri Sass
Performance monitoring and error detection is just as important with services and microservices as with any system, but with added complexity. Omri Sass joins the show...
