Python Test

Nicole is a software engineer and writer, and recently wrote about the trade-offs we make when deciding which tests to write and how much testing is enough...

If you've ever thought about starting a podcast or a SaaS project, you'll want to listen to this episode.
 
Justin is one of the people who motivated me to get started podcasting.
He's also running a successful SaaS company, transistor.fm, which hosts this podcast.

Topics:

• Podcasting
• Building new SaaS (software as a service) products
• Balancing work, side hustle, and family
• Great places to snowboard in British Columbia

BTW...

Charlie Marsh and team are using Rust to make Python tooling faster.

• Ruff can take the place of Flake8, isort, and Black, and so much more.
• uv can take the place of pip, pip-tools, and virtualenv
• Astral is Charlie's venture backed company, and what they have with `ruff` and `uv` is just the start.

Since uv is the newest tool, there's quite a bit of the discussion diving into uv...

Software engineers that move into leadership roles have a struggle between learning leadership skills, maintaining technical skills, and learning new leadership and technical skills. 
Matt Makai went from individual contributor to developer relations to leadership in devrel. 
We discuss how to stay technical, as well as dive into some results of his studies in how companies use developer relationship channels...

If you haven't tried running automated tests, especially with pytest,  in VS Code recently, you should take another look.
The Python for VS Code interface for testing, especially for pytest, has changed recently. 
On this episode we discuss the change with the software engineer working on the pytest changes, Eleanor Boyd, and the product manager, Courtney Webster...

If a test fails in a test suite, I'm going to want to re-run the test. I may even want to re-run a test, or a subset of the suite, a bunch of times.  
There are a few pytest plugins that help with this:

• pytest-repeat
• pytest-rerunfailures
• pytest-flakefinder
• pytest-instafail

We talk about each of these in this episode.

Sponsored by PyCharm Pro

• Use code PYTEST for 20% off PyCharm Professional at jetbrains...

In 2002, Kent Beck released a book called  "Test Driven Development by Example".
In December of 2023, Kent wrote an article called "Canon TDD".
With Kent's permission, this episode contains the full content of the article.

Brian's commentary is saved for a followup episode...

We want to be able to run tests in a suite, and debug them in isolation, and have the behavior be the same.  
If the behavior is different in isolation vs in a suite, it's a nightmare to debug...

Test Driven Development. Red, Green, Refactor. 

• Do we have to do the refactor part? 
• Does the refactor at the end include tests? 
• Or can I refactor the tests at any time?
• Why is refactor at the end? 

This episode is to talk about this with a an example.

Sponsored by PyCharm Pro

• Use code PYTEST for 20% off PyCharm Professional at jetbrains...

How do you test the argument parsing bit of an application that uses argparse?

This episode covers:

• Design for Test: Structuring your app or script so it's easier to test.
• pytest & capsys for testing stdout
• Adding debug and preview flags for debugging and testing
• And reverting to subprocess...