Avoiding Error Culture and Getting Help Inside Python | Real Python Podcast

What is error culture, and how do you avoid it within your organization? How do you navigate alert and notification fatigue? Hey, it's episode #200! Real Python's editor-in-chief, Dan Bader, joins us this week to celebrate. Christopher Trudeau also returns to bring another batch of PyCoder's Weekly articles and projects.
👉 Links from the show: realpython.com/podcasts/rpp/200/
We discuss an article series about error culture. We dig into false positives, hero culture, and the tendency to start ignoring alerts. We contrast our personal experiences and propose possible remedies. Dan describes configuring Real Python's alert system.
We also share several other articles and projects from the Python community, including a news roundup, reading and writing WAV files in Python, moving beyond flat files toward SQLite and SQLAlchemy, getting help in Python, exploring four kinds of optimization, a framework for building web scrapers, and a project to simply subprocesses.
This week's episode is brought to you by Sentry.
Topics:
- 00:00:00 -- Introduction
- 00:02:42 -- PyPI Hiring a Support Specialist
- 00:03:19 -- PyPI Temporarily Halted New Users and Projects
- 00:04:14 -- What we know about the xz Utils backdoor
- 00:05:38 -- CPython, PyPI, and the backdoor of xz
- 00:07:18 -- Episode 200 appreciation and the journey
- 00:09:18 -- A visit from Dan
- 00:14:14 -- Reading and Writing WAV Files in Python
- 00:19:56 -- Sponsor: Sentry
- 00:21:03 -- SQLite and SQLAlchemy in Python
- 00:27:36 -- Getting Help (In Python)
- 00:32:49 -- Laurence Tratt: Four Kinds of Optimization
- 00:40:54 -- Video Course Spotlight
- 00:42:26 -- Discussion: Error Culture
- 00:58:03 -- botasaurus: All in One Framework to Build Awesome Scrapers
- 01:01:04 -- suby: Slightly Simplified Subprocesses
- 01:02:50 -- Thanks and goodbye
👉 Links from the show: realpython.com/podcasts/rpp/200/

[@stevehageman6785]

I hear you on the 'Ignore Alerts' stuff: I was at a very large firm and their code base had some 7500 compiler warnings. Most of them were for stupid things like mangled comments, etc. So I went in and added about five 'Global Ignores' to the build files and got down to about 400 perhaps real warnings - which I was slowly analyzing to see if there were any other non-critical warnings that could be ignored. A few days later a system admin rebuilt all the build files and hence reversed my 'Global Ignores' - Warnings went back up to 7500. So I contacted them and suggested that we should perhaps not be ignoring the compiler warnings. Their solution was to turn off "ALL Warnings". So I said: "I mean seriously, what kind of solution is that? Because their code base crashed all the time - perhaps we should not be ignoring warnings?" Nope, Crickets from them.... Just left all the warnings off. I left soon after.

[@rishiraj2548]

🙂👍