#102 Structure of a Flask Project

Sponsored by DigitalOcean: pythonbytes.fm/digitalocean

Brian #1: QuantEcon

• “Open source code for economic modeling”
• “QuantEcon is a NumFOCUS fiscally sponsored project dedicated to development and documentation of modern open source computational tools for economics, econometrics, and decision making.”
• Educational resource that includes:
  • Lectures, workshops, and seminars
  • Cheatsheets for scientific programming in Python and Julia
  • Notebooks
  • QuantEcon.py : open source Python code library for economics

Michael #2: Structure of a Flask Project

• Flask is very flexible, it has no certain pattern of a project folder structure. Here are some suggestions.
• I always keep this one certain rule when writing modules and packages:
  • “Don't backward import from root __init__.py.”
• Candidate structure:

    project/
      __init__.py
      models/
        __init__.py
        users.py
        posts.py
        ...
      routes/
        __init__.py
        home.py
        account.py
        dashboard.py
        ...
      templates/
        base.html
        post.html
        ...
      services/
        __init__.py
        google.py
        mail.py

• Love it! To this, I would rename routes to views or controllers and add a viewmodels folder and viewmodels themselves.
• Brian, see anything missing?
  • ya. tests. :)
• Another famous folder structure is app based structure, which means things are grouped bp application
• I (Michael) STRONGLY recommend Flask blueprints

Brian #3: Overusing lambda expressions in Python

• lambda expressions vs defined functions
  1. They can be immediately passed around (no variable needed)
  2. They can only have a single line of code within them
  3. They return automatically
  4. They can’t have a docstring and they don’t have a name
  5. They use a different and unfamiliar syntax
• misuses:
  • naming them. Just write a function instead
  • calling a single function with a single argument : just use that func instead
• overuse:
  • if they get complex, even a little bit, they are hard to read
  • has to be all on one line, which reduces readibility
  • map and filter : use comprehensions instead
  • using custom lambdas instead of using operators from the operator module.

Michael #4: Asyncio in Python 3.7

• by Cris Medina
• The release of Python 3.7 introduced a number of changes into the async world.
  • Some may even affect you even if you don’t use asyncio.
• New Reserved Keywords: The async and await keywords are now reserved.
  • There’s already quite a few modules broken because of this. However, the fix is easy: rename any variables and parameters.
• Context Variables: Version 3.7 now allows the use of context variables within async tasks. If this is a new concept to you, it might be easier to picture it as global variables whose values are local to the currently running coroutines.
• Python has similar constructs for doing this very thing across threads. However, those were not sufficient in async-world
• New asyncio.run() function
  • With a call to asyncio.run(), we can now automatically create a loop, run a task on it, and close it when complete.
• Simpler Task Management: Along the same lines, there’s a new asyncio.create_task() function that helps make tasks that inside the current loop, instead of having to get the loop first and calling create task on top of it.
• Simpler Event Loop Management: The addition of asyncio.get_running_loop() will help determine the active event loop, and catch a RuntimeError if there’s no loop running.
• Async Context Managers: Another quality-of-life improvement. We now have the asynccontextmanager() decorator for producing async context managers without the need for a class that implements __aenter__() or __aexit__().
• Performance Improvements: Several functions are now optimized for speed, some were even reimplemented in C. Here’s the list:
  • asyncio.get_event_loop() is now 15 times faster.
  • asyncio.gather() is 15% faster.
  • asyncio.sleep() is two times faster when the delay is zero or negative.
  • asyncio.Future callback management is optimized.
  • Reduced overhead for asyncio debug mode.
• Lots lots more

Brian #5: Giving thanks with **pip thank**

• proposal: https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/5970

Michael #6: Getting Started With Testing in Python

• by Anthony Shaw, 33 minutes reading time according to Instapaper
• Automated vs. Manual Testing
• Unit Tests vs. Integration Tests: A unit test is a smaller test, one that checks that a single component operates in the right way. A unit test helps you to isolate what is broken in your application and fix it faster.
• Compares unittest, nose or nose2, pytest
• Covers things like:
  • Writing Your First Test
  • Where to Write the Test
  • How to Structure a Simple Test
  • How to Write Assertions
  • Dangers of Side Effects
• Testing in PyCharm and VS Code
• Testing for Web Frameworks Like Django and Flask
• Advanced Testing Scenarios
• Even: Testing for Security Flaws in Your Application

Extras:

• MK: Hack ur name — aka Pivot me bro (done in Python: https://github.com/veekaybee/hustlr ) by Vicki Boykis
• MK: Python 3.7.1 and 3.6.7 Are Now Available
• MK: Click-Driven Development (CDD) - via @tombaker
  • Use Python Click package to mock up suite of commands w/options/args.
  • Decorated functions print description of intended results.
  • Replace placeholders with code.