In this last episode of this course, I talk to Itamar Turner-Trauring who created the website PythonSpeed and spent a considerable time on finding ways to make Python code faster and more efficient. Python and its ecosystem also have great tools how you can measure performance.

Links:

• https://pythonspeed.com a set of articles and recommendations on how to improve your performance
• https://blog.sentry.io/python-performance-testing-a-comprehensive-guide/ a general blog post on performance testing
• https://uwpce-pythoncert.github.io/SystemDevelopment/profiling.html
  • https://uwpce-pythoncert.github.io/SystemDevelopment/index.html
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance
• https://python-102.readthedocs.io/en/latest/performance.html
• https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/datastructures.html
• https://www.green-algorithms.org
• https://doi.org/10.1145/356635.356640 Donald Knuth's paper on over optimisation
• https://wiki.python.org/moin/TimeComplexity
• https://blog.jetbrains.com/dataspell/2023/08/polars-vs-pandas-what-s-the-difference/ comparing Polars with Panda

Profiling tools

• https://pyinstrument.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
• https://docs.python.org/3/library/profile.html
• https://docs.python.org/3/library/time.html the time function in Python
• https://docs.python.org/3/library/timeit.html another function to measure time in Python
• https://jiffyclub.github.io/snakeviz/ a graphic profile viewer
• https://bloomberg.github.io/memray/ flexible memory profiler
• https://github.com/benfred/py-spy
  • https://www.wrighters.io/profiling-python-code-with-py-spy/
• https://github.com/P403n1x87/austin-python The Python wrapper for the Austin profiler

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This podcast is brought to you by the Advanced Research Computing Centre of the University College London, UK.
Producer and Host: Peter Schmidt

In this episode I talk to Jeremiah Miller - a software engineer - and Max Albert - a research software engineer in the research software group at the University of Southampton about refactoring and design patterns.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_code
• https://www.distributed-systems.net/index.php/books/ds4/ book by A Tanenbaum
• https://refactoring.com The Refactoring book by Martin Fowler
  • https://martinfowler.com/architecture/
  • https://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/
  • https://martinfowler.com
• https://www.patternlanguage.com the original book by Christopher Alexander on design patterns in architecture - for towns, cities etc. This book inspired software engineers to define a set of design patterns on how to structure code
• https://refactoring.guru/design-patterns Max recommended Sandi and her tips and recommendations on coding
• https://sandimetz.com/99bottles the idea of making things as identical as possible to sniff out design breaks or changes
• https://refactoring.guru/design-patterns another website on design patterns and refactoring

Some books:

• Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides, Addison-Wesley, 1995, ISBN 0-201-63361-2
• Enterprise Integration Patterns Gregor Hohpe, Bobby Woole, Addison-Wesley, 2004, ISBN 0-321-20068-3

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This podcast is brought to you by the Advanced Research Computing Centre of the University College London, UK.
Producer and Host: Peter Schmidt

In this episode I talk to Monika Byrne Svata, Agile Delivery Manager at UCL about project management and in particular Scrum and Kanban. GitHub has features, like Issues and Projects that can help you stay on top of your software projects.

Links

• http://www.linkedin.com/in/monikabyrnesvata Monika's LinkedIn profile
• https://docs.github.com/en/issues/planning-and-tracking-with-projects/learning-about-projects/about-projects GitHub projects documentation
• https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira JIRA
• https://trello.com/home Trello
• https://agilemanifesto.org Agile Manifesto
• https://www.scrum.org/resources/what-scrum-module Scrum, a popular agile methodology
  • https://www.agile42.com/en/blog/scrum-history Scrum history
• https://www.atlassian.com/agile/kanban Kanban methodology
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban a bit of background to Kanban
• https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/waterfall.html Waterfall methods
• https://digital.ai/resource-center/analyst-reports/state-of-agile-report/ annual report on all things agile

Don't be shy - say Hi

This podcast is brought to you by the Advanced Research Computing Centre of the University College London, UK.
Producer and Host: Peter Schmidt