Test & Code

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 also adds nice colorized tracebacks to the Django test runner.

Links:

• django-rich · PyPI
• episode 181: Boost Your Django DX - Adam Johnson
• django-crispy-forms
• Python Developers Survey 2020 Results

Tools like error monitoring, crash reporting, and performance monitoring are tools to help you create a better user experience and are fast becoming crucial tools for web development and site reliability. But really what are they? And when do you need them?

You've built a cool web app or service, and you want to make sure your customers have a great experience.

You know I advocate for utilizing automated tests so you find bugs before your customers do. However, fast development lifecycles, and quickly reacting to customer needs is a good thing, and we all know that complete testing is not possible. That's why I firmly believe that site monitoring tools like logging, crash reporting, performance monitoring, etc are awesome for maintaining and improving user experience.

John-Daniel Trask, JD, the CEO of Raygun, agreed to come on the show and let me ask all my questions about this whole field.

Special Guest: John-Daniel Trask.

Sponsored By:

• Raygun: Detect, diagnose, and destroy Python errors that are affecting your customers. With smart Python error monitoring software from Raygun.com, you can be alerted to issues affecting your users the second they happen.

pytest plugins are an amazing way to supercharge your test suites, leveraging great solutions from people solving test problems all over the world. In this episode Michael and I discuss 15 favorite plugins that you should know about.

We also discuss fixtures and plugins and other testing tools that work great with pytest

• tox
• GitHub Actions
• Coverage.py
• Selenium + splinter with pytest-splinter
• Hypothesis

And then our list of pytest plugins:

1. pytest-sugar
2. pytest-cov
3. pytest-stress
4. pytest-repeat
5. pytest-instafail
6. pytest-metadata
7. pytest-randomly
8. pytest-xdist
9. pytest-flake8
10. pytest-timeout
11. pytest-spec
12. pytest-picked
13. pytest-freezegun
14. pytest-check
15. fluentcheck

That last one isn't a plugin, but we also talked about pytest-splinter at the beginning. So I think it still counts as 15.

Special Guest: Michael Kennedy.

Sponsored By:

• PyCharm Professional: Try PyCharm Pro for 4 months and learn how PyCharm will save you time. Promo Code: TESTANDCODE22

Links:

• pytest-sugar — changes the default look and feel of pyptest (e.g. progressbar, show tests that fail instantly)
• pytest-cov — run coverage.py from pytest
• pytest-stress — allows you to loop tests for a user defined amount of time.
• pytest-repeat — for repeating test execution
• pytest-instafail — shows failures and errors instantly instead of waiting until the end of test session.
• pytest-metadata — for accessing test session metadata
• pytest-randomly — randomly order tests and control random.seed
• pytest-xdist — distributed testing
• pytest-flake8 — pytest plugin to run flake8
• pytest-timeout — terminate tests after a certain timeout
• pytest-spec — display test execution output like a specification
• pytest-picked — run the tests related to the changed files (according to Git)
• pytest-freezegun — easily freeze time
• pytest-check — allows multiple failures per test
• fluentcheck — fluent assertions
• episode 104 — Top 28 pytest plugins with Anthony Sottile
• Python Testing with pytest — The easiest way to get up to speed with pytest fast. There's also a chapter dedicated to plugins that also teaches you how to write and test your own plugins.
• tox
• GitHub Actions
• Coverage.py
• pytest-splinter — provides a set of fixtures to use splinter for browser testing
• splinter — makes it easy to write automated tests of web applications
• hypothesis — property-based t...

One of the great things about attending in person coding conferences, such as PyCon, is the hallway track, where you can catch up with people you haven't seen for possibly a year, or maybe even the first time you've met in person.

Nina is starting something like the hallway track, online, on twitch, and it's already going, so check out the first episode of Python Tea.

Interesting coincidence is that this episode is kind of like a hallway track discussion between Nina and Brian.

We've had Nina on the show a couple times before, but it's been a while.

In 2018, we talked about Mentoring on episode 44.
In 2019, we talked about giving Memorable Tech Talks in episode 71.

In this episode, we catch up with Nina, find out what she's doing, and talk about a bunch of stuff, including:

• Live Coding
• Online Conferences
• Microsoft Python team
• Python Tea, an online hallway track
• Q&A with Python for VS Code team
• Python on hardware
• Adafruit
• Device Simulator Express
• CircuitPython
• Tricking out your command prompt
• Zsh and Oh My Zsh
• Emacs vs vi key bindings for shells
• Working from home

Special Guest: Nina Zakharenko.

Sponsored By:

• Python Morsels: Level up your Python skills with challenges and expert advice.
• ConfigCat.com: Release features faster with less risk with ConfigCat feature flags. Promo Code: TESTANDCODE

Links:

• nnjaio - Twitch
• Nina Zakharenko 💜🐍 (@nnja) / Twitter
• Device Simulator Express - Visual Studio Marketplace
• Initial code for Microsoft's PyBadge at PyCon 2020
• Goodbye Print, Hello Debugger! - Nina Zakharenko - PyCon 2020 Talk
• Nina Zakharenko 💜🐍 - DEV.to
• Python Tea Announcement
• The Live Coders Conference

virtualenv supports six shells: bash, csh, fish, xonsh, cmd, posh. Each handles prompts slightly differently. Although the virtualenv custom prompt behavior should be the same across shells, Brian Skinn noticed inconsistencies. He set out to fix those inconsistencies. That was the start of an adventure in open source collaboration, shell prompt internals, difficult test problems, and continuous integration quirks.

Brian Skinn initially noticed that on Windows cmd, a space was added between a prefix defined by --prompt and the rest of the prompt, whereas on bash no space was added.

For reference, there were/are three nominal virtualenv prompt modification behaviors, all of which apply to the prompt changes that are made at the time of virtualenv activation:

1. If the environment variable VIRTUAL_ENV_DISABLE_PROMPT is defined and non-empty at activation time, do not modify the prompt at all. Otherwise:
2. If the --prompt argument was supplied at creation time, use that argument as the prefix to apply to the prompt; or,
3. If the --prompt argument was not supplied at creation time, use the default prefix of "() " as the prefix (the environment folder name surrounded by parentheses, and with a trailing space after the last paren.

Special Guest: Brian Skinn.

Sponsored By:

• Talk Python Training: Online video courses for Python developers
• HoneyBadger: When bad things happen, it's nice to know that Honeybadger has your back. 30% off for first 6 months when you mention Test & Code Podcast when signing up.
• PyCharm Professional: Try PyCharm Pro for 4 months and learn how PyCharm will save you time. Promo Code: TESTANDCODE22

Links:

• virtualenv
• Initial issue that started the adventure
• final PR
• pent: pent Extracts Numerical Text -- Mini-language driven parser for structured numerical data
• Lightening talk on pent