Codon for Faster Python Code

Interesting. Unsure if Condon helps with async or threaded applications, though. Probably most useful for linear number-crunching scientific or data science applications.

Regular interpreted Python is pretty fast as is. I encountered at least one race condition issue, where the Python code was beating an API having low double-digit msec response times - was that a surprise! 😄

There's also Cython, which compiles to C, but this is a new approach which is at least as fast (or faster!)

Update Raspbian OS on the Raspberry Pi

I have an early Raspberry Pi model running the Raspbian OS "jessie" release (which lacks Python 3.6 and its useful "f-string" format syntax.) So, I wanted to upgrade to the contemporary "buster" release to resolve that issue. Here's what worked:

1. Follow these excellent instructions (Use the section "Update Raspbian to the Latest Version") to manually update OS releases sequentially. So, in my case, I upgraded from "jessie" to "stretch" and then from "stretch" to "buster."
2. You'll likely want to upgrade the Docker packages, too. To do it, refer to the following steps:
   
• Remove the existing Docker installation (See "Uninstall old versions.")
  
• Download and run the "Convenience Script" (See "Install using the convenience script") to do the upgrade installation.

Now, "You're Good to Go" with the latest release ("buster" in this example!) Enjoy 😀👍

The Raspberry Pi Story

Ever wonder how those little boards got created and who was behind them? Check out this article from TechRepublic.

Most popular GitHub programming languages in 2018

Interesting! 😀 See GitHub's blog post concerning the most popular programming languages for GitHub projects in 2018.

Don't get upset about CPython concurrency - just get Grumpy!

Here's a short recommended read that was brought to my attention by a teammate. If you've grumbled about poor concurrency support in conventional Python, Grumpy looks like it's coming to the rescue.

I suspect this break-through reflects the benefits of new concurrency approaches, as reflected in recent packages (like Akka) and languages (Go).

It's a fundamental shift, since Go extensions will be supported over C extensions. I assume that means Grumpy and CPython will co-exist for some time, unless most existing C extensions get re-coded in Go? It will be interesting to see how this unfolds!

Installing Robot Framework on a MacBook

I recently faced challenges getting the open source Robot Framework to work on my MacBook, which is running OS X El Capitan. In general, the installation process should be trivial, but here's what finally worked:

1. If you have the brew package manager installed, update it:
   
       brew update
   
2. Use brew to install (or upgrade) the chromedriver program:
   
     brew upgrade chromedriver
   
3. Make and use a Python virtualenv for the framework installation:
   
     pip install --upgrade virtualenv
     source virtualenvwrapper.sh  # Note: Depends on where virtualenvwrapper.sh was installed to.
     mkvirtualenv robotframework
     workon robotframework
     cdvirtualenv
4. Install the necessary framework packages:
   
     pip install --upgrade robotframework
     pip install --upgrade robotframework-selenium2library
     pip install --upgrade requests

Now, you'll be able to use the robot command to run test scripts OK :-)