PyCon.de: keeping grip on decoupled code with CLIs - Anne Matthies¶

Tags: pycon, python

(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2017 PyCon.de conference).

Anne is writing Python since 1996 already! She mostly builds data pipelines for analysts. In a big company, those pipelines start to get messy quickly.

Her solution: chop everything in those pipelines up.

The biggest problem in software that is in use for more than a year: humans. The problems like performance are relatively easy and solvable.

She showed some code:

# uncomment what you need

That was in infrastructure code that deployed something. Everyting is code. Deployment is code. Infrastructure is code. Intalling is code.

And all that became messy. And others (like ruby programmers) needed to be able to use those tools/pipelines.

The solution: chop everything up in individual packages with a proper setup.py and with command line tools. Everyone can install a python package and call a command line tool!

For the command line, they use cliff, a “command line interface formulation framework”.

With setuptools entry points she could get extra installed libraries to inject their commands into the generic CLI.

Photo explanation: picture from our recent cycling holiday (NL+DE). Small stream near Renkum (NL).