What the episode covers
It was created by a Dutch guy: Guido van Rossum. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability. The language's core philosophy is summarized in the document The Zen of Python (PEP 20), which includes aphorisms such as:
- Beautiful is better than ugly.
- Explicit is better than implicit.
- Simple is better than complex.
- Complex is better than complicated.
- Readability counts.
All well, but what do we do with it? What do we use it for?
In the earlier episode “How we tame Google Cloud resources with R2D2” we discussed the Deployment tool we built for our Software Engineers. This tool has been built in Python.
But we do more great stuff in bol.com with python, at least that’s what we heard in our tech community. We asked around and, not surprisingly, ended up in the Data Science area. So time to introduce our guests to the show….
Guests
- Olaf Meuwese – A software engineer who has worked mostly with and in Data Science teams in the last years.
- Bas Dunn – Data scientist, econometrician in Assortment and earlier in Partner Performance Management.
- Jasper Adegeest - Data scientist, since September 2019 at bol.com in the Personalization team.
Show notes
Pythonic: When a veteran Python developer (a Pythonista) calls portions of code not “Pythonic”, they usually mean that these lines of code do not follow the common guidelines and fail to express its intent in what is considered the best (hear: most readable) way.
SKlearn: Machine learning module for Python
Tensorflow: The core open source library to help you develop and train ML models
Jupyter Notebook: The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text.
Flask: a lightweight WSGI web application framework
Fastapi: a modern, fast (high-performance), web framework for building APIs with Python 3.6+ based on standard Python type hints.
Django: a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design
Axle - the opinionated framework to build Java apps within bol.com