Faster feature delivery and happier developers

There’s always more to learn in the world of Python, an ever-growing number of tools and techniques—but there’s only so much time in the workday. While your team is focusing on shipping the features that matter to your business, it’s easy for their technical skills to fall behind.

Out-of-date tools, stale techniques, and missing skills can kill your velocity. And if they feel their skills are becoming obsolete, your software developers might move on to greener pastures elsewhere.

In contrast, investing in new skills and best practices can speed up your feature delivery—and keep your team happy and engaged.

My training classes build on 20 years’ experience working with Python, and years of experience explaining and teaching complex software concepts:

Interested in upgrading your teams’ skills? Get in touch.

Note: If your team works on software or data models for military use, prisons, fossil fuel extraction, surveillance, national security, or the like, I will not be able to provide you with any training. If this describes your job, I encourage you to find a different one.

Available courses

Docker packaging for Python, part I: Basic packaging

Whether you want reproducible builds, the ability to build isolated environments, or you’re running software with frameworks like Kubernetes, you’re likely using Docker to package your software. Unfortunately, most online tutorials won’t help you understand how Docker works: when builds break, new users won’t know what to do or how to fix it.

This hands-on class will teach your team how Docker packaging works, not just the syntax but also the underlying model of how it works.

Syllabus

  1. What is this Docker thing?
    1. Docker as client/server application.
    2. Containers as isolated processes: networking, filesystem, processes, and users.
    3. Running containers interactively.
    4. Port-forwarding.
    5. Images as self-contained executables.
  2. Minimal packaging, from Python code to runnable image:
    1. Getting an image with Python.
    2. Installing dependencies.
    3. Installing the code.
    4. Setting the entrypoint.
  3. Configuring your application to run in a container:
    1. Understanding port forwarding and its implications for interface binding.
    2. Persistent data: logs.
    3. Persistent data: volumes.
    4. Identifying network servers with environment variables and well-known hostnames.
    5. Command-line arguments.
  4. Sharing images:
    1. Pulling vs. building.
    2. Understanding image names: image registry, image name, tag.
    3. Tagging images.
    4. Pushing images.
    5. The Docker Hub and official images.
  5. Faster and smaller builds, the basics:
    1. The Docker build caching model.
    2. Improving caching by changing Dockerfile order.
    3. Reducing image size with .dockerignore.

Class format

The class utilizes live coding: I demonstrate live how to use Docker, and the students follow along on their laptops. Along the way I will make mistakes—some deliberate, some accidental—and show to work around them.

Each of the five sections then ends with an exercise to help solidify the learned concepts.

Interested in upgrading your teams’ skills? Get in touch.

Docker packaging for Python, part II: Production-ready packaging

Bad packaging can result in security and production problems, not to mention wasted time: waiting for slow builds, debugging the build system, and debugging issues caused by non-reproducible builds.

Your team wants to know best practices, so they can build and ship secure, fast images with confidence. To help you get there, I can teach your team how to build production-ready Docker images for Python applications, based on my extensive guide.

Syllabus

  1. Deterministic, reproducible builds:
    1. Choosing a stable base image.
    2. Making images identifiable (tags, labels, files).
    3. Installing specific versions of Python dependencies.
    4. Maintaining two versions of Python dependencies, logical and pinned.
  2. Securing your images:
    1. Don’t run as root.
    2. Dropping capabilities.
    3. Build secrets.
    4. Ensure security updates, and the problem with caching.
  3. Startup and shutdown:
    1. Why bash is broken, and how to make it a little less so.
    2. Ensuring signal delivery for clean, fast shutdown.
    3. Health checks.
  4. Preparing for failure:
    1. Writing smoke tests for your build.
    2. Debugging C crashes with faulthandler.
    3. A python prompt in your process with Manhole.
    4. Pre-installing useful packages, like glances and pustil.
  5. Faster and smaller builds, using multi-stage builds:
    1. The problem with build tools, and multi-stage builds as a solution.
    2. Setting up virtualenvs in Dockerfiles.
    3. Multi-stage builds for Python.

Class format

The class utilizes live coding: I demonstrate live how to use these techniques, and the students follow along on their laptops. Along the way I will make mistakes—some deliberate, some accidental—and show to work around them.

Each of the five sections then ends with an exercise to help solidify the learned concepts.

Interested in upgrading your teams’ skills? Get in touch.

Software engineering for scientists and data scientists

Scientists and data scientists need to write software, but don’t always have the same software engineering background that software developers do. Based on my experience helping biologists with scientific computing, I can fill in these gaps in ways that are relevant to scientists’ particular uses of software.

Topics might include:

  • Testing data pipelines.
  • Performance for batch processing.
  • Small Big Data—processing data that doesn’t fit in memory.
  • And more!

Interested in upgrading your teams’ skills? Get in touch.

Performance optimization

Slow software is expensive—whether it’s high server costs, or batch processes that take too long. Teach your team the tools and techniques they need to figure out why their Python code is slow—from profilers to logging.

Interested in upgrading your teams’ skills? Get in touch.

Testing

Testing doesn’t just mean unit testing: everything from manual testing to code review has its place. I can help your team with the basics, or collaboratively figure out a strategy that meets your particular situation and goals.

Interested in upgrading your teams’ skills? Get in touch.