FLOSS Project Planets

A new release of the anytime package arrived on CRAN today—the first is well over four years. The package is fairly feature-complete, and code and functionality remain mature and stable, of course.

anytime is a very focused package aiming to do just one thing really well: to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, … input format to either POSIXct (when called as anytime) or Date objects (when called as anydate) – and to do so without requiring a format string as well as accomodating different formats in one input vector. See the anytime page, or the GitHub repo for a few examples, and the beautiful documentation site for all documentation.

This release slowly matured over four years. It combines a number of strictly internal repository maintenance such as changes to continuous integration with small enhancements (adding for example some new formats, responding better to an error condition, dealing with logical input as an error) with a relaxation of the C++ compilation standard. While we once needed C++11, it is now a constraint as as R itself is quite proactive (the last two releases defaulted already to C++17, suitable compiler permitting) we can now relax this constraint. The documentation site is new, as some other small changes. See the full list of changes which follows.

Changes in anytime version 0.3.10 (2024-12-02)

• A new documentation site was added.

• Continuous Integration now uses run.sh from r-ci with bspm

• Logical input vectors are now recognised as an error (#121)

• Additional dot-separated format '%Y.%m.%d' is supported

• Other small updates were made throughout the package

• No longer set a C++ compilation standard as the default choices by R are sufficient for the package

• Switch Rcpp include file to Rcpp/Lightest

• We recommend ~/.R/Makevars compiler flag options -Wno-ignored-attributes -Wno-nonnull -Wno-parentheses

• The tinytest runner was simplified

• NA values from conversion now trigger a warning

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report of changes relative to the previous release. The issue tracker tracker off the GitHub repo can be use for questions and comments. More information about the package is at the package page, the GitHub repo and the documentation site. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

I thought it had been a full year since I last shared a playlist, but it's been two! I had a plan to produce more, but it seems I haven't. Instead here's a few tracks I've discovered recently which share a common theme.

In August I stumbled across a Sound on Sound video interviewing Pete Cannon, who creates authentically old-school Jungle music using tools and techniques from the time, including AKAI samplers and the Commodore Amiga computer.

Here's three tracks that I found since then. Some 8-bit Amiga-jungle,

by

some slower-paced acid house from someone ostensibly based on Whitley Bay,

by

and a darker piece I heard on the radio.

by

Join the FSF and friends on Friday, December 6 from 12:00 to 15:00 EST (17:00 to 20:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory.

I just looked at our GitLab page today and thought: Amazing!

I thank you all for the great contributions of the last years.

Let's hope we see even more contributions in the future.

If you are unsure how to contribute, just take a look at the existing merged stuff as reference.

The upcoming 24.12 release will be a good one, we did polish Kate a lot.

I know not all is well on the world, but I still hope you have a good end of the year and an even better start in the new one!

Today we are talking about WEBAssembly, How it’s used, and cool things you can use it for with Drupal with guest Matt Glaman. We’ll also cover Darkmode JS as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/478

Topics

• What is WebAssembly
• Progressive Web Aoos
• Open source
• Does it have a community
• Browser support
• How does it work
• Common use cases
• How can you use this with Drupal
• This was an early concept for Drupal trial
• Challenges
• Wordpress playground
• Pieces that do not work for PHP
• Are there risks
• Are there resources for people that want to use WebAssembly
• Do you see it being used with Drupal

Resources

• WEBAssembly
• WEBAssembly history
• Browser support
• 2038
• WordPress Playground
  • https://playground.wordpress.net
  • https://github.com/adamziel
• Slides from Barcelona: The Web APIs powering the Starshot trial:
  • https://mglaman.dev/sites/default/files/2024-09/The Web APIs powering the Starshot trial experience.pdf
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJVM_uDGD5I&list=PLpeDXSh4nHjQOfQV-BUgoxHXlr4tHlhPO&index=64

Guests

Matt Glaman - mglaman.dev mglaman

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Suzanne Dergacheva - evolvingweb.com pixelite

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted your Drupal site to provide a widget that allows visitors to go over to the dark side of your theme? There’s a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Darkmode JS
• Brief history
  • How old: created in May 2022 by Arthur Baghdasaryan (arthur.baghdasar) of Last Call Media
  • Versions available: 1.0.7 which works with Drupal 9, 10, and 11
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Security coverage
  • Number of open issues: 1 open issues which is a bug against the current branch, but is postponed, waiting for more info
• Usage stats:
  • 89 sites
• Module features and usage
  • The module is a wrapper for the DarkmodeJS library which gets 1,000 weekly downloads, according to NPM. That library does have its own demo / tutorial site, so if you want to understand the options it exposes, we will add a link in the show notes
  • The module provides options to control where on the page you want the widget to appear, what colors it should use, whether or not to store a user’s choices in cookies, and whether or not to automatically match a visitor’s OS theme setting of light/dark
  • Installing the module currently requires making some changes to your site’s composer.json file, then configuring how you want the widget to appear, and then placing the block in your site theme
  • The module also doesn’t currently include a schema file for its configuration, which can cause challenges particularly for sites that run automated tests

Watch as I fix a bug in a contrib Drupal module!

Follow along as I (Ashraf Abed of DebugAcademy.com) fix a bug in the contributed Drupal module, Responsive Menus. This embedded video follows as I diagnose the problem, research the issues, create a branch on gitlab, fix the issue locally, test the fix, and submit my fix to Drupal.org for the community to benefit from.

This was done as part of Debug Academy's Drupal Training course.

ashrafabed Mon, 12/02/2024

We’re thrilled to announce Azure Developers – Python Day! Join us on December 5th for a full day of online training and discover the latest services and features in Azure designed specifically for Python developers. You’ll learn cutting-edge cloud development techniques that can save you time and money while providing your customers with the best experience possible.

December 5, 2024 from 9:30 am – 4:00 pm (Pacific Time) / 17:30 – 00:00 (UTC)

Select “Notify Me” on the YouTube Video to ensure you don’t miss the event!

During the event, you’ll hear directly from the experts behind the latest features in Azure designed for Python developers, techniques to save time and money, and a special session on our recently announced AI Toolkit for VS Code.

Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced Python developer, this event is for you. We’ll cover six main topic areas: Application Development, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Native, Data Services, Security, Serverless, and Developer Productivity.

Agenda Session Title Theme Speaker Time( PT/ UTC) Welcome to Azure Developers – Python Day Dawn Wages, Senior Program Manager

Jay Gordon, Principal Product Manager

9:50 AM / 16:50 Dev Containers and Codespaces for quick skilling and deployments Developer Productivity Sarah Kaiser, Senior Cloud Developer Advocate 10:00 AM / 17:00 Cloudy with a Chance of Jupyter – Install JupyterHub on Azure in 30 mins Data Services Dharhas Pothina, CTO, Quansight 10:30 AM / 17:30 Langchain on Azure SQL to enlighten AI with your own data AI Davide Mauri, Principal Program Manager 11:00 AM / 18:00 Integrating AI into your Python apps with App Service Sidecars AI, App Development Byron Tardif, Principal Mgr, Product Manager

Tulika Chaudharie, Principal Product Manager

Jeff Martinez, Product Manager

11:30 AM / 18:30 Getting started with Python on Azure Cosmos DB App Development Theo Van Kraay, Principal Program Manager 12:00 PM / 19:00 Transforming AI development in VS Code AI, App Development, Developer Productivity Rong Lu, Principal Mgr, Product Manager

Zhidi Shang, Principal Program Manager Lead

12:30 PM / 19:30 Building Scalable GenAI Apps with Azure Cosmos DB & LangChain AI, App Development James Codella, Principal Product Mgr 1:00 PM / 20:00 Python + Azure for Absolute Beginners App Development Rohit Ganguly, Product Manager II 1:30 PM / 20:30 Deploying Python apps with GitHub Copilot for @azure AI, Developer Productivity Pamela Fox, Principal Cloud Developer Advocate 2:00 PM / 21:00 Securing Python Applications Security, Cloud Native Joylynn Kirui, Senior Security Cloud Advocate 2:30 PM / 21:30 Your First Full Stack Python Web Application App Development Renee Noble, Senior Cloud Developer Advocate 3:00 PM / 22:00 Deploying a scalable Django app with Microsoft Azure App Development Velda Kiara, Senior Software Engineer, Python MVP

Abigail Gbadago, Senior Software Engineer, Python MVP

3:30 PM / 22:30 Closing Remarks Dawn Wages, Senior Program Manager

Jay Gordon, Principal Product Manager

4:00 PM / 23:00

Don’t miss this opportunity to build the best applications with Python. Join us on December 5th on the Azure Developers YouTube and Twitch channels. See you there!

The post Announcing: Azure Developers – Python Day appeared first on Python.

Dear Readers,

Ever put your heart and soul into a project, be it an art project back in school or a work thing that sustains your corporate existence? Then you all will be able to relate that more than the work itself, it was the happiness and pride in the eyes of those who saw you, that made all the difference.  For all of us, it's that 'pat on the back' that pushes us to do better each day — the recognition, a token of appreciation. The fuel for motivation is not any different for Drupal, its agencies, and the community.

Did you know the Splash Award made its debut a decade ago? This time it is widening its ambit with the first-ever Splash Awards Drupal Asia at DrupalCon Singapore 2024. 10 years of an exemplary institution for recognizing and inspiring innovation through acknowledging the outstanding websites and digital experiences built with Drupal. The much relevant, nod of approval for the Drupal agencies to tread on. To put organizations and users who are doing extraordinary things in the field of Drupal in the spotlight and add a feather to their hat.

Esmeralda Tijhoff had an opportunity to interview Bert Boerland, one of the pioneers of the award about the genesis and growth of the Splash Awards. The prestigious accord stemmed from the need to promote Drupal better.

“Our dream is to grow into a kind of Eurosplash Awards with the best European entries!"

Drupal Splash Awards Asia will take place on Monday, December 9, 2024, at 5:15 PM inside the Garden Ballroom at PARKROYAL COLLECTION Marina Bay. The evening promises to be a night of glamour and inspiration, as Drupal developers and agencies gather to celebrate the exceptional work being done in the community. 

20 projects by various organizations have been shortlisted across five different categories along with Drupal’s Founder and Project Lead, Dries Buytaert, announcing the "Best in Show" award. This week The DropTimes will bring you a comprehensive overview of all the finalists in the series 'Splash Award Finalists'.

Along with these, other important stories from the last week include;

DrupalCon Singapore 2024 is less than a week away. If you are a first-time attendee, here are a few tips for you to smoothly navigate your first DrupalCon Experience: Countdown to DrupalCon Singapore 2024: Tips for First-Time Attendees

Adding to our happiness in efficiently collaborating with DrupalCon Singapore 2024, The DropTimes is now the official media partner for DrupalCon Vienna 2025. We will act as the prime location for all content surrounding the biggest Drupal event in Europe. This is the third time TDT has been named the official media partner for the European DrupalCon. 

Pantheon has introduced the Content Publisher, bridging Google Docs with WordPress, Drupal, and Next.js for seamless content publishing. The tool streamlines workflows with live previews, robust editorial features, and AI-assisted enhancements. Sign up for the beta to explore this CMS integration solution.

Developed by Anand Toshniwal and recognized by Dries Buytaert himself, a Python script now automates the creation of .component.yml files for Single Directory Components in Drupal. Simplifying workflows and improving accuracy, this tool supports projects like the Starshot Demo Design System, enhancing efficiency for developers.

MidCamp 2025 has opened its call for session proposals, inviting speakers to share their expertise at the annual event. Scheduled for May 20-22, 2025, the proposals are being accepted until January 12, 2025.

Drupal Developer Days 2025 is inviting sponsors to help make the event a success. Scheduled to attract over 200 attendees from across Europe, this four-day gathering is a prime opportunity for organizations to showcase their support for one of the fastest-growing open-source communities. The event is in Leuven, Belgium, from 15 - 18 April 2025.

Read this week’s edition of Events of the Week by The DropTimes, where we highlight notable Drupal gatherings happening around the globe. Whether you're a seasoned developer, site builder, or just starting your Drupal journey, there's something for everyone in this vibrant community.  

Carlos Ospina shared an update on the progress of the IXP Initiative, an effort to support company-IXP engagements within the Drupal community. Carlos replaced the proposed Google Forms tracking system with a proof-of-concept site. Utilizing the ECA and Group modules for the first time, he developed a working solution within two days to handle the entire engagement process.

Artisan, a new Drupal base theme created by Alejandro Cabarcos introduces a robust framework for building customizable and reusable Drupal themes. Developed by Metadrop, Artisan is built on Bootstrap 5 and Sass, offering extensive use of CSS variables to streamline customization and ensure consistent design across projects.  

Nigel Kersten has been appointed Chief Product Officer at Platform.sh to lead Product Strategy and Upsun Development. An influential figure in the DevOps community, Nigel co-founded the State of DevOps Report, introducing DORA metrics that have elevated software delivery practices across the industry. Serving as the primary co-author for 11 years, he pioneered best practices for modernizing complex IT environments through DevOps and platform engineering.

We acknowledge that there are more stories to share. However, due to selection constraints, we must pause further exploration for now.

To get timely updates, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. You can also join us on Drupal Slack at #thedroptimes.

Thank you, 
Sincerely 
Alka Elizabeth 
Sub-editor, The DropTimes.

After the huge success of the DrupalCon Portland competition, the Drupal Association is excited to announce that the t-shirt design contest will be returning for DrupalCon Atlanta! 

We want to see the Drupal community's design ideas for the official t-shirt, available for all attendees to wear and enjoy. Do you have a fantastic idea in mind? Let’s see your creativity!

The winner will get THEIR design on the front of the official t-shirt for DrupalCon Atlanta 2025!

What the judges are looking for

Judges are looking for a combination of creativity, impact, and relevance to the Drupal community. A design that tells a story and aligns with the values and aspirations of DrupalCon attendees is likely to capture attention.

While exploring bold ideas, consider how your design will resonate with a diverse audience. Think of classic elements that make a T-shirt memorable while pushing creative boundaries.  Avoid overcomplicating things; sometimes less is more, especially if every element adds value to the message. 

Now, for the finer details…

Your design must include the DrupalCon Atlanta Logo and will only be featured on the front of the t-shirt. Sponsor logos will be added to the t-shirt sleeves after the design is finalized. 

Specs: 

• PNG or PDF preferred
• 16 inches tall, 13 inches wide
• graphics need to be 300 dpi

All designs must be submitted by 31 December 2024 at 23:59 UTC, after which the submission form will close.

The Drupal Association will then select four designs to go forward to a public vote.

The top four designs, as chosen by the Drupal Association, will then be voted upon by the public, with voting closing on 18 January at 23:59 UTC. 

The winning design will be printed on the front of the official DrupalCon Atlanta 2025 t-shirt and the winner will receive a complimentary ticket to their choice of either DrupalCon Atlanta 2025 or DrupalCon North America 2026.

How to enter

Simply create your design, then fill out our submission form by 18 December to submit your final design. We also ask that you include a sentence or two describing why you chose your design and how it represents the Drupal community.

So, what are you waiting for? Submit your design now, and please help us spread the word throughout the Drupal community!

Good luck!

** Drupal Association staff and members of the DrupalCon Atlanta Steering Committee will not be permitted to enter this contest.**

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 15!

Qt Creator 15 is here, bringing native support for Windows on ARM, refreshed visuals, and improvements to enhance your productivity. Dive in and explore the enhancements!

Alex Moreno recounts his experience at DrupalCamp Berlin, held at the historic Alte Münze, where vibrant discussions on Drupal’s future, AI integration, and PHP’s evolution took centre stage. The event showcased the Drupal community's commitment to innovation and collaboration, from inspiring sessions by industry leaders to the retro-futuristic charm of Berlin’s C-base hackerspace. Sponsored by Pantheon, Alex reflects on how the event, the city, and people left a lasting impression.

For a program to be useful, it often needs to communicate with the outside world. In Python, the input() function allows you to capture user input from the keyboard, while you can use the print() function to display output to the console.

These built-in functions allow for basic user interaction in Python scripts, enabling you to gather data and provide feedback. If you want to go beyond the basics, then you can even use them to develop applications that are not only functional but also user-friendly and responsive.

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll know how to:

• Take user input from the keyboard with input()
• Display output to the console with print()
• Use readline to improve the user experience when collecting input on UNIX-like systems
• Format output using the sep and end keyword arguments of print()

To get the most out of this tutorial, you should have a basic understanding of Python syntax and familiarity with using the Python interpreter and running Python scripts.

Get Your Code: Click here to download the free sample code that you’ll use to learn about basic input and output in Python.

Take the Quiz: Test your knowledge with our interactive “Basic Input and Output in Python” quiz. You’ll receive a score upon completion to help you track your learning progress:

Interactive Quiz

Basic Input and Output in Python

In this quiz, you'll test your understanding of Python's built-in functions for user interaction, namely input() and print(). These functions allow you to capture user input from the keyboard and display output to the console, respectively.

Reading Input From the Keyboard

Programs often need to obtain data from users, typically through keyboard input. In Python, one way to collect user input from the keyboard is by calling the input() function:

The input() function pauses program execution to allow you to type in a line of input from the keyboard. Once you press the Enter key, all characters typed are read and returned as a string, excluding the newline character generated by pressing Enter.

If you add text in between the parentheses, effectively passing a value to the optional prompt argument, then input() displays the text you entered as a prompt:

Python >>> name = input("Please enter your name: ") Please enter your name: John Doe >>> name 'John Doe' Copied!

Adding a meaningful prompt will assist your user in understanding what they’re supposed to input, which makes for a better user experience.

The input() function always reads the user’s input as a string. Even if you type characters that resemble numbers, Python will still treat them as a string:

Python 1>>> number = input("Enter a number: ") 2Enter a number: 50 3 4>>> type(number) 5<class 'str'> 6 7>>> number + 100 8Traceback (most recent call last): 9 File "<python-input-1>", line 1, in <module> 10 number + 100 11 ~~~~~~~^~~~~ 12TypeError: can only concatenate str (not "int") to str Copied!

In the example above, you wanted to add 100 to the number entered by the user. However, the expression number + 100 on line 7 doesn’t work because number is a string ("50") and 100 is an integer. In Python, you can’t combine a string and an integer using the plus (+) operator.

You wanted to perform a mathematical operation using two integers, but because input() always returns a string, you need a way to read user input as a numeric type. So, you’ll need to convert the string to the appropriate type:

Python >>> number = int(input("Enter a number: ")) Enter a number: 50 >>> type(number) <class 'int'> >>> number + 100 150 Copied!

In this updated code snippet, you use int() to convert the user input to an integer right after collecting it. Then, you assign the converted value to the name number. That way, the calculation number + 100 has two integers to add. The calculation succeeds and Python returns the correct sum.

Note: When you convert user input to a numeric type using functions like int() in a real-world scenario, it’s crucial to handle potential exceptions to prevent your program from crashing due to invalid input.

The input() function lets you collect information from your users. But once your program has calculated a result, how do you display it back to them? Up to this point, you’ve seen results displayed automatically as output in the interactive Python interpreter session.

However, if you ran the same code from a file instead, then Python would still calculate the values, but you wouldn’t see the results. To display output in the console, you can use Python’s print() function, which lets you show text and data to your users.

Writing Output to the Console

In addition to obtaining data from the user, a program will often need to present data back to the user. In Python, you can display data to the console with the print() function.

Read the full article at https://realpython.com/python-input-output/ »

[ Improve Your Python With 🐍 Python Tricks 💌 – Get a short & sweet Python Trick delivered to your inbox every couple of days. >> Click here to learn more and see examples ]

In the above video, we’ll take our first look at Drupal CMS Beta, part of the Drupal Starshot initiative. This initiative aims to provide a downloadable packaged version of Drupal with pre-installed and configured contributed modules.

In the show notes below, you’ll learn about the Drupal Starshot Initiative, Drupal CMS, and how to install it using DDEV.

We’ll then explore Drupal CMS’s functionality and examine some modules included in the packaged solution.

Generative AI and LLMs have been hot topics this year, but are they affecting trends in data science and machine learning? What new trends in data science are worth following? Every year, JetBrains collaborates with the Python Software Foundation to carry out the Python Developer Survey, which can offer some useful insight into these questions.

The results from the latest iteration of the survey, collected between November 2023 and February 2024, included a new Data Science section. This allowed us to get a more complete picture of data science trends over the past year and highlighted how important Python remains in this domain. 

While 48% of Python developers are involved in data exploration and processing, the percentage of respondents using Python for data analysis dropped from 51% in 2022 to 44% in 2023. The percentage of respondents using Python for machine learning dropped from 36% in 2022 to 34% in 2023. At the same time, 27% of respondents use Python for data engineering, and 8% use it for MLOps – two new categories that were added to the survey in 2023. 

Let’s take a closer look at the trends in the survey results to put these numbers into context and get a better sense of what they mean. Read on to learn about the latest developments in the fields of data science and machine learning to prepare yourself for 2025.

Data processing: pandas remains the top choice, but Polars is gaining ground

Data processing is an essential part of data science. pandas, a project that is 15 years old, is still at the top of the list of the most commonly used data processing tools. It is used by 77% of respondents who do data exploration and processing. As a mature project, its API is stable, and many working examples can be found on the internet. It’s no surprise that pandas is still the obvious choice. As a NumFOCUS sponsored project, pandas has proven to the community that it is sustainable and its governance model has gained user trust. It is a great choice for beginners who may still be learning the ropes of data processing, as it’s a stable project that does not undergo rapid changes.

On the other hand, Polars, which pitches itself as DataFrames for the new era, has been in the spotlight quite a bit both last year and this year, thanks to the advantages it provides in terms of speed and parallel processing. In 2023, a company led by the creator of Polars, Ritchie Vink, was formed to support the development of the project. This ensures Polars will be able to maintain its rapid pace of development. In July of 2024, version 1.0 of Polars was released. Later, Polars expanded its compatibility with other popular data science tools like Hugging Face and NVIDIA RAPIDS. It also provides a lightweight plotting backend, just like pandas.

So, for working professionals in data science, there is an advantage to switching to Polars. As the project matures, it can become a load-bearing tool in your data science workflow and can be used to process more data faster. In the 2023 survey, 10% of respondents said that they are using Polars as their data processing tool. It is not hard to imagine this figure being higher in this year’s survey.

Whether you are a working professional or just starting to process your first dataset, it is important to have an efficient tool at hand that can make your work more enjoyable. With PyCharm, you can inspect your data as interactive tables, which you can scroll, sort, filter, convert to plots, or use to generate heat maps. Moreover, you can get analytics for each column and use AI assistance to explain DataFrames or create visualizations. Apart from pandas and Polars, PyCharm provides this functionality for Hugging Face datasets, NumPy, PyTorch, and TensorFlow.

Try PyCharm for free An interactive table in PyCharm 2024.2.2 Pro provides tools for inspecting pandas and Polars DataFrames

The popularity of Polars has led to the creation of a new project called Narwhals. Independent from pandas and Polars, Narwhals aims to unite the APIs of both tools (and many others). Since it is a very young project (started in February 2024), it hasn’t yet shown up on our list of the most popular data processing tools, but we suspect it may get there in the next few years.

Also worth mentioning are Spark (16%) and Dask (7%), which are useful for processing large quantities of data thanks to their parallel processes. These tools require a bit more engineering capability to set up. However, as the amount of data that projects depend on increasingly exceeds what a traditional Python program can handle, these tools will become more important and we may see these figures go up.

Data visualization: Will HoloViz Panel surpass Plotly Dash and Streamlit within the next year?

Data scientists have to be able to create reports and explain their findings to businesses. Various interactive visualization dashboard tools have been developed for working with Python. According to the survey results, the most popular of them is Plotly Dash.

Plotly is most known in the data science community for the ggplot2 library, which is a highly popular visualization library for users of the R language. Ever since Python became popular for data science, Plotly has also provided a Python library, which gives you a similar experience to ggplot2 in Python. In recent years, Dash, a Python framework for building reactive web apps developed by Plotly, has become an obvious choice for those who are used to Plotly and need to build an interactive dashboard. However, Dash’s API requires some basic understanding of the elements used in HTML when designing the layout of an app. For users who have little to no frontend experience, this could be a hurdle they need to overcome before making effective use of Dash.

Second place for “best visualization dashboard” goes to Streamlit, which has now joined forces with Snowflake. It doesn’t have as long of a history as Plotly, but it has been gaining a lot of momentum over the past few years because it’s easy to use and comes packaged with a command line tool. Although Streamlit is not as customizable as Plotly, building the layout of the dashboard is quite straightforward, and it supports multipage apps, making it possible to build more complex applications.

However, in the 2024 results these numbers may change a little. There are up-and-coming tools that could catch up to – or even surpass – these apps in popularity. One of them is HoloViz Panel. As one of the libraries in the HoloViz ecosystem, it is sponsored by NumFocus and is gaining traction among the PyData community. Panel lets users generate reports in the HTML format and also works very well with Jupyter Notebook. It offers templates to help new users get started, as well as a great deal of customization options for expert users who want to fine-tune their dashboards.

ML models: scikit-learn is still prominent, while PyTorch is the most popular for deep learning

Because generative AI and LLMs have been such hot topics in recent years, you might expect deep learning frameworks and libraries to have completely taken over. However, this isn’t entirely true. There is still a lot of insight that can be extracted from data using traditional statistics-based methods offered by scikit-learn, a well-known machine learning library mostly maintained by researchers. Sponsored by NumFocus since 2020, it remains the most important library in machine learning and data science. SciPy, another Python library that provides support for scientific calculations, is also one of the most used libraries in data science.

Having said that, we cannot ignore the impact of deep learning and the increase in popularity of deep learning frameworks. PyTorch, a machine learning library created by Meta, is now under the governance of the Linux Foundation. In light of this change, we can expect PyTorch to continue being a load-bearing library in the open-source ecosystem and to maintain its level of active community involvement. As the most used deep learning framework, it is loved by Python users – especially those who are familiar with numpy, since “tensors”, the basic data structures in PyTorch, are very similar to numpy arrays. 

You can inspect Pytorch tensors in PyCharm 2024.2.2 Pro just like you inspect Numpy arrays

Unlike TensorFlow, which uses a static computational graph, PyTorch uses a dynamic one – and this makes profiling in Python a blast. To top it all off, PyTorch also provides a profiling API, making it a good choice for research and experimentation. However, if your deep learning project needs to be scalable in deployment and needs to support multiple programming languages, TensorFlow may be a better choice, as it is compatible with many languages, including C++, JavaScript, Python, C#, Ruby, and Swift. Keras is a tool that makes TensorFlow more accessible and is also popular for deep learning frameworks.

Another framework we cannot ignore for deep learning is Hugging Face Transformers. Hugging Face is a hub that provides many state-of-the-art pre-trained deep learning models that are popular in the data science and machine learning community, which you can download and train further yourself. Transformers is a library maintained by Hugging Face and the community for state-of-the-art machine learning with PyTorch, TensorFlow, and JAX. We can expect Hugging Face Transformers will gain more users in 2024 due to the popularity of LLMs. 

With PyCharm you can identify and manage Hugging Face models in a dedicated tool window. PyCharm can also help you to choose the right model for your use case from the large variety of Hugging Face models directly in the IDE. 

One new library that is worth paying attention to in 2024 is Scikit-LLM, which allows you to tap into Open AI models like ChatGPT and integrate them with scikit-learn. This is very handy when text analysis is needed, and you can perform analysis using models from scikit-learn with the power of modern LLM models.

MLOps: The future of data science projects

One aspect of data science projects that is essential but frequently overlooked is MLOps (machine learning operations). In the workflow of a data science project, data scientists need to manage data, retrain the model, and have version control for all the data and models used. Sometimes, when a machine learning application is deployed in production, performance and usage also need to be observed and monitored.

In recent years, MLOps tools designed for data science projects have emerged. One of the issues that has been bothering data scientists and data engineers is versioning the data, which is crucial when your pipeline constantly has data flowing in. 

Data scientists and engineers also need to track their experiments. Since the machine learning model will be retrained with new data and hyperparameters will be fine-tuned, it’s important to keep track of model training and experiment results. Right now, the most popular tool is TensorBoard. However, this may be changing soon. TensorBoard.dev has been deprecated, which means users are now forced to deploy their own TensorBoard installations locally or share results using the TensorBoard integration with Google Colab. As a result, we may see a drop in the usage of TensorBoard and an uptick in that of other tools like MLflow and PyTorch.

Another MLOps step that is necessary for ensuring that data projects run smoothly is shipping the development environment for production. The use of Docker containers, a common development practice among software engineers, seems to have been adopted by the data science community. This ensures that the development environment and the production environment remain consistent, which is important for data science projects involving machine learning models that need to be deployed as applications. We can see that Docker is a popular tool among Python users who need to deploy services to the cloud.

This year, Docker containers is slightly ahead of Anaconda in the “Python installation and upgrade” category.

2023 survey results 2022 survey results Big data: How much is enough?

One common misconception is that we will need more data to train better, more complex models in order to improve prediction. However, this is not the case. Since models can be overfitted, more is not always better in machine learning. Different tools and approaches will be required depending on the use case, the model, and how much data is being handled at the same time.

The challenge of handling a huge amount of data in Python is that most Python libraries rely on the data being stored in the memory. We could just deploy cloud computing resources with huge amounts of memory, but even this approach has its limitations and would sometimes be slow and costly.

When handling huge amounts of data that are hard to fit in memory, a common solution is to use distributed computing resources. Computation tasks and data are distributed over a cluster to be performed and handled in parallel. This approach makes data science and machine learning operations scalable, and the most popular engine for this is Apache Spark. Spark can be used with PySpark, the Python API library for it.

As of Spark 2.0, anyone using Spark RDD API is encouraged to switch to Spark SQL, which provides better performance. Spark SQL also makes it easier for data scientists to handle data because it enables SQL queries to be executed. We can expect PySpark to remain the most popular choice in 2024.

Another popular tool for managing data in clusters is Databricks. If you are using Databricks to work with your data in clusters, now you can benefit from the powerful integration of Databricks and PyCharm. You can write code for your pipelines and jobs in PyCharm, then deploy, test, and run it in real time on your Databricks cluster without any additional configuration.

Communities: Events shifting focus toward data science

Many newcomers to Python are using it for data science, and thus more Python libraries have been catering to data science use cases. In that same vein, Python events like PyCon and EuroPython are beginning to include more tracks, talks, and workshops that focus on data science, while events that are specific to data science, like PyData and SciPy, remain popular, as well.

Final thoughts

Data science and machine learning are becoming increasingly active, and together with the popularity of AI and LLMs, more and more new open source tools have become available for use in data science. The landscape of data science continues to change rapidly, and we are excited to see what becomes most popular in the 2024 survey results.

Enhance your data science experience with PyCharm

Modern data science demands skills for a wide range of tasks, including data processing and visualization, coding, model deployment, and managing large datasets. As an integrated development environment (IDE), PyCharm helps you efficiently build this skill set. It provides intelligent coding assistance, top-tier debugging, version control, integrated database management, and seamless Docker integration. For data science, PyCharm supports Jupyter notebooks, as well as key scientific and machine learning libraries, and it integrates with tools like the Hugging Face models library, Anaconda, and Databricks.

Start using PyCharm for your data science projects today and enjoy its latest improvements, including features for inspecting pandas and Polars DataFrames, and for the layer by layer inspection of PyTorch tensors, which is handy when exploring data and building deep learning models.

Try PyCharm for free

We are excited to announce Qt for MCUs 2.9, which comes with many key features to enable Qt for MCUs to support more use cases in the IoT,  Consumer and Automotive segments. Here are few of the major highlights from the 2.9 release. 

Drupal Advent Calendar day 2 - Starshot Installer james Mon, 12/02/2024 - 09:00

It’s day 2 of the Drupal Advent calendar and today we’re taking a look at the first step to any new website built with Drupal CMS, the site installer.

The previous Drupal installer wasn’t terrible, but it required a lot of steps, and typically needed a lot more work, finding and installing modules, when the initial install was complete.

The new installer has tried to simplify the process as much as possible, and offers a friendlier interface.

The primary question it asks is what are the main goals of your site:

At present, there are six options, but these are expected to be expanded in the future…

Tags

• Drupal CMS
• Installer

<strong>Topics covered in this episode:</strong><br> <ul> <li><a href="https://nedbatchelder.com/blog/202411/loop_targets.html?featured_on=pythonbytes"><strong>Loop targets</strong></a></li> <li><strong><a href="https://github.com/maxfischer2781/asyncstdlib?featured_on=pythonbytes">asyncstdlib</a></strong></li> <li><strong><a href="https://github.com/EnhancedJax/Bagels?featured_on=pythonbytes">Bagels: TUI Expense Tracker</a></strong></li> <li><strong><a href="https://github.com/gi0baro/rloop?featured_on=pythonbytes">rloop:</a> An AsyncIO event loop implemented in Rust</strong></li> <li><strong>Extras</strong></li> <li><strong>Joke</strong></li> </ul><a href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DsfLm4MiWw' style='font-weight: bold;'data-umami-event="Livestream-Past" data-umami-event-episode="412">Watch on YouTube</a><br> <p><strong>About the show</strong></p> <p>Sponsored by us! Support our work through:</p> <ul> <li>Our <a href="https://training.talkpython.fm/?featured_on=pythonbytes"><strong>courses at Talk Python Training</strong></a></li> <li><a href="https://courses.pythontest.com/p/the-complete-pytest-course?featured_on=pythonbytes"><strong>The Complete pytest Course</strong></a></li> <li><a href="https://www.patreon.com/pythonbytes"><strong>Patreon Supporters</strong></a></li> </ul> <p><strong>Connect with the hosts</strong></p> <ul> <li>Michael: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@mkennedy"><strong>@mkennedy@fosstodon.org</strong></a> <strong>/</strong> <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/mkennedy.codes?featured_on=pythonbytes"><strong>@mkennedy.codes</strong></a> <strong>(bsky)</strong></li> <li>Brian: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@brianokken"><strong>@brianokken@fosstodon.org</strong></a> <strong>/</strong> <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/brianokken.bsky.social?featured_on=pythonbytes"><strong>@brianokken.bsky.social</strong></a></li> <li>Show: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/@pythonbytes"><strong>@pythonbytes@fosstodon.org</strong></a> <strong>/</strong> <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/pythonbytes.fm"><strong>@pythonbytes</strong></a><a href="https://bsky.app/profile/pythonbytes.fm"><strong>.fm</strong></a> <strong>(bsky)</strong></li> </ul> <p>Join us on YouTube at <a href="https://pythonbytes.fm/stream/live"><strong>pythonbytes.fm/live</strong></a> to be part of the audience. Usually <strong>Monday</strong> at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too.</p> <p>Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to <a href="https://pythonbytes.fm/friends-of-the-show">our friends of the show list</a>, we'll never share it. </p> <p><strong>Brian #1:</strong> <a href="https://nedbatchelder.com/blog/202411/loop_targets.html?featured_on=pythonbytes"><strong>Loop targets</strong></a></p> <ul> <li>Ned Batchelder</li> <li>I don’t think I would have covered this had it not been the surprising opposition to Ned’s code.</li> <li><p>Here’s the snippet:</p> <pre><code>params = { "query": QUERY, "page_size": 100, } *# Get page=0, page=1, page=2, ...* **for** params["page"] in itertools.count(): data = requests.get(SEARCH_URL, params).json() **if** not data["results"]: **break** ... </code></pre></li> <li><p>Ned is utilizing the assignment in the for loop to use the value of count() and store it into the params["page"].</p></li> <li>The article includes another version with a temp variable page_num, which I think the naysayers would prefer.</li> <li>But frankly, I think both are fine. Why not put the value right where you want it?</li> </ul> <p><strong>Michael #2:</strong> <a href="https://github.com/maxfischer2781/asyncstdlib?featured_on=pythonbytes">asyncstdlib</a></p> <ul> <li>The asyncstdlib library re-implements functions and classes of the Python standard library to make them compatible with async callables, iterables and context managers. </li> <li>It is fully agnostic to async event loops and seamlessly works with asyncio, third-party libraries such as trio, as well as any custom async event loop.</li> <li>Full set of async versions of advantageous standard library helpers, such as zip, map, enumerate, functools.reduce, itertools.tee, itertools.groupby and many others.</li> <li>Safe handling of async iterators to ensure prompt cleanup, as well as various helpers to simplify safely using custom async iterators.</li> <li>Small but powerful toolset to seamlessly integrate existing sync code into async programs and libraries.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Brian #3:</strong> <a href="https://github.com/EnhancedJax/Bagels?featured_on=pythonbytes">Bagels: TUI Expense Tracker</a></p> <ul> <li>Jax Tam</li> <li><p>“Bagels expense tracker is a TUI application where you can track and analyse your money flow, with convenience oriented features and a complete interface.</p></li> <li><p><strong>Why an expense tracker in the terminal?</strong> I found it easier to build a habit and keep an accurate track of my expenses if I do it at the end of the day, instead of on the go. So why not in the terminal where it's fast, and I can keep all my data locally?”</p></li> <li><p>Who hasn’t wanted to write their own expense tracker?</p></li> <li>This implementation is fun for lots of reasons <ul> <li>It’s still new and pretty small, so forking it for your own uses should be easy</li> <li>Built on textual is fun</li> <li>install instructions based on uv tool seems to be the new normal: <ul> <li>uv tool install --python 3.13 bagels</li> </ul></li> <li>test suite started</li> <li>pretty useful as is, actually</li> <li>Nice that it includes a roadmap of future goals</li> <li>Would be a fun project to help out with for anyone looking for anyone looking for a shiny new codebase to contribute to.</li> </ul></li> </ul> <p><strong>Michael #4:</strong> <a href="https://github.com/gi0baro/rloop?featured_on=pythonbytes">rloop:</a> An AsyncIO event loop implemented in Rust</p> <ul> <li>An AsyncIO event loop implemented in Rust</li> <li>From Giovanni Barillari, Creator of Granian</li> <li>RLoop is an <a href="https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio.html?featured_on=pythonbytes">AsyncIO</a> event loop implemented in Rust on top of the <a href="https://github.com/tokio-rs/mio?featured_on=pythonbytes">mio crate</a>.</li> <li><strong>Disclaimer</strong>: This is a work in progress and definitely not ready for production usage.</li> <li>Run asyncio.set_event_loop_policy(rloop.EventLoopPolicy()) and done.</li> <li>Similar to <a href="https://github.com/MagicStack/uvloop?featured_on=pythonbytes">uvloop</a>.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Extras</strong> </p> <p>Brian:</p> <ul> <li>I’m currently listening to <a href="https://www.oliverburkeman.com/fourthousandweeks?featured_on=pythonbytes">Four Thousand Weeks - Time Management for Mortals</a> by Oliver Burkeman for the second time. Highly recommend. </li> <li><a href="https://adrianroselli.com/2024/12/development-advent-calendars-for-2024.html?featured_on=pythonbytes">Development Advent Calendars for 2024</a> - Adrian Roselli</li> <li><a href="https://courses.pythontest.com?featured_on=pythonbytes">Black Friday at PythonTest.com</a></li> </ul> <p>Michael:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://github.com/mikeckennedy/dockerclustermon?featured_on=pythonbytes">Docker cluster monitor</a></li> <li>Compare engagement across Mastodon / Bsky / Twitter <ul> <li>https://bsky.app/profile/pythonbytes.fm/post/3lbseqgr5m22z</li> <li>https://fosstodon.org/@pythonbytes/113545509565796190</li> <li>https://x.com/pythonbytes/status/1861166179236319288</li> </ul></li> <li>Back on #277 we talked <a href="https://github.com/irgeek/StrEnum?featured_on=pythonbytes">about StrEnum</a>. Got a nice chance to use it this weekend.</li> <li><a href="https://maybe.co/?featured_on=pythonbytes">Maybe Finance</a></li> <li><a href="https://github.com/mikeckennedy?featured_on=pythonbytes">Go sponsor a bunch of projects on GitHub</a></li> <li><a href="https://training.talkpython.fm/courses/all?featured_on=pythonbytes">Black Friday at Talk Python</a></li> </ul> <p><strong>Joke:</strong> <a href="https://devhumor.com/media/ctrl-x-onion?featured_on=pythonbytes">CTRL + X onion</a></p>

A few months ago, I blogged about a change for Plasma 6.2 to show a once-a-year system notification asking for a donation, starting on December 1st. Various reasons and justifications were given in that post, so I won’t repeat them here. Instead, since December 1st was yesterday in most of the world, it’s time to check in on the day 1 experience! So let’s get right into it:

Did it work?

Well, I woke up to an email inbox that looked like this:

And by the end of the day, the graph on https://kde.org/community/donations/previousdonations (which by the way only counts direct Paypal donations and still doesn’t include those made using Donorbox or direct bank transfer) wound up looking like this:

Yes that’s right, KDE e.V. received double the prior two months’ Paypal donations in a single day!!!

Do people hate us now?

So far, indications point to no! I scoured https://www.reddit.com/r/kde and https://discuss.kde.org all day yesterday and literally only found one non-positive comment about it, dwarfed by a large volume of mildly to highly positive ones. I wasn’t looking at Mastodon or other social media, but a colleague reported something similar.

In addition, a large number of the donations themselves were accompanied by positive messages from the donors. Here are some of my favorites:

KDE is more than just software, it’s a family. Least I can donate, but it’s coming from someone that pirates every other thing or uses the free alternative.

Thanks for all your incredible work over the years.

KDE Plasma is a big part of why I have grown to love Linux as my daily driver

Thanks for all you have done for the linux desktop community

Thanks for Plasma! Couldn’t work without it! (Visually impaired user).

Thanks for your efforts to make the world a little more independent from Big Tech

Love the work, KDE is my daily driver and I’m glad I can help

Just got the Notification to donate in KDE and after thinking about it for a bit decided to donate for the first time, since I’ve been using Linux and specifically KDE for almost a year now. Thanks for your hard work!

Thanks for all of the work and effort put into making KDE the best DE ever!

So, yeah. On the contrary, it feels like our users really, really love us!

Is this repeatable?

It’s too early to say at this point, but I hope so. It will be interesting to see how fast the donations drop off. Will it be relatively fast because everyone who was going to donate after seeing to the notification already saw it yesterday? Or will the drop-off take a while because there are more notification-based potential donors who didn’t turn on their Plasma 6.2-using computer yet, or opened the donations page in a browser tab to action later? We don’t know; we’ll have to wait and see.

However it’s also worth mentioning that these donations are coming entirely from people using distros that include Plasma 6.2. Right now that’s pretty much limited to fast-paced distros like Arch, Fedora KDE, KDE Neon, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, and their derivatives. Notably, it excludes traditional heavy hitters like Kubuntu and Debian. So there are reasons to expect the donation notification to reach even more eyeballs in 2025 than it has this year.

Now that you’re rich are you going to buy a bunch of leopard-print Porsche steering wheel covers and other KDE e.V. board junkets?

No board junkets. It’s too early to make a projection based on the performance of single day, and especially if the donations drop off quickly, this isn’t “Thunderbird money” yet. But it does look quite possible that all these donations may push KDE e.V. into ending up with a balanced budget for the 2024 financial year. That would be pretty fantastic, as we weren’t predicting a balanced budget until 2025 or 2026, instead originally expecting a deficit of over €50k in 2024. And that was already an improvement over the 110k deficit in 2023.

Balancing the budget early is huge, and opens up opportunities. As you may know, German nonprofits like KDE e.V. are required to avoid stockpiling money (hence the intentional deficits), so moving into the realm of positive cashflow means we’ll need to increase our expenditures. Thankfully, KDE e.V. has become very good at spending money over the past few years, largely by expanding our hiring on personnel in technical roles: basically sponsoring community members to improve our products directly.

The easiest way to spend more money is to simply lean into that harder: hire another person, sponsor another project, stuff like that — pretty much what I mentioned in the original post. More money means more tech work financed by KDE itself, directly increasing our institutional ability to control our own destiny. It’s pretty great stuff if you ask me. But again, this is a collective board decision, not up to me alone. And if you disagree with me that this is the right use for KDE’s money, that’s fine too, and I’ll mention that I’m up for re-election on the board next year, so please do feel free to run or vote against me if you’re a KDE e.V. member! The organization works best with a board that reflects its membership’s preferences. I have zero desire to occupy that seat if I’m not representing people properly.

Anyway, it works. It appears to really work. My conclusion is that KDE has built up enough goodwill that our user community loves and trusts us, which made this outpouring of financial support possible. It’s humbling and kind of overwhelming. But it all strengthens my conviction that KDE is pointing in the right direction and amounts to a strong positive force for humanity!

Want to help out? In addition to donating your money which is what we’ve been talking about, an arguably more impactful approach is to donate your time directly, bypassing any institutional middleman that buys time with money! It’s not hard to get started, and there are loads of resources and mentorship opportunities. So help make the world a better place through KDE today!

Graph for my furusato tax. Exceeding 150-man will inevitably exceed 50-man limit for Ichiji-shotoku. So added some rough calculation there. graph.

Review: Long Live Evil, by Sarah Rees Brennan

Series: Time of Iron #1 Publisher: Orbit Copyright: July 2024 ISBN: 0-316-56872-4 Format: Kindle Pages: 433

Long Live Evil is a portal fantasy (or, arguably more precisely, a western take on an isekai villainess fantasy) and the first book of a series. If the author's name sounds familiar, it's possibly because of In Other Lands, which got a bunch of award nominations in 2018, She has also written a lot of other YA fantasy, but this is her first adult epic fantasy novel.

Rae is in the hospital, dying of cancer. Everything about that experience, from the obvious to the collapse of her friendships, absolutely fucking sucks. One of the few bright points is her sister's favorite fantasy series, Time of Iron, which her sister started reading to her during chemo sessions. Rae mostly failed to pay attention until the end of the first book and the rise of the Emperor. She fell in love with the brooding, dangerous anti-hero and devoured the next two books. The first book was still a bit hazy, though, even with the help of a second dramatic reading after she was too sick to read on her own.

This will be important later.

After one of those reading sessions, Rae wakes up to a strange woman in her hospital room who offers her an option. Rather than die a miserable death that bankrupts her family, she can go through a door to Eyam, the world of Time of Iron, and become the character who suits her best. If she can steal the Flower of Life and Death from the imperial greenhouse on the one day a year that it blooms, she will wake up, cured. If not, she will die. Rae of course goes through, and wakes in the body of Lady Rahela, the Beauty Dipped in Blood, the evil stepsister. One of the villains, on the night before she is scheduled to be executed.

Rae's initial panic slowly turns to a desperate glee. She knows all of these characters. She knows how the story will turn out. And she has a healthy body that's not racked with pain. Maybe she's not the heroine, but who cares, the villains are always more interesting anyway. If she's going to be cast as the villain, she's going to play it to the hilt. It's not like any of these characters are real.

Stories in which the protagonists are the villains are not new (Nimona and Hench come to mind just among books I've reviewed), but they are having a moment. Assistant to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer came out last year, and this book and Django Wexler's How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying both came out this year. This batch of villain books all take different angles on the idea, but they lean heavily on humor. In Long Live Evil, that takes the form of Rae's giddy embrace of villainous scheming, flouncing, and blatant plot manipulation, along with her running commentary on the various characters and their in-story fates.

The setup here is great. Rae is not only aware that she's in a story, she knows it's full of cliches and tropes. Some of them she loves, some of them she thinks are ridiculous, and she isn't shy about expressing both of those opinions. Rae is a naturally dramatic person, and it doesn't take her long to lean into the opportunities for making dramatic monologues and villainous quips, most of which involve modern language and pop culture references that the story characters find baffling and disconcerting.

Unfortunately, the base Time of Iron story is, well, bad. It's absurd grimdark epic fantasy with paper-thin characters and angst as a central character trait. This is clearly intentional for both in-story and structural reasons. Rae enjoys it precisely because it's full of blood and battles and over-the-top brooding, malevolent anti-heroes, and Rae's sister likes the impossibly pure heroes who suffer horrible fates while refusing to compromise their ideals. Rae is also about to turn the story on its head and start smashing its structure to try to get herself into position to steal the Flower of Life and Death, and the story has to have a simple enough structure that it doesn't get horribly confusing once smashed. But the original story is such a grimdark parody, and so not my style of fantasy, that I struggled with it at the start of the book.

This does get better eventually, as Rae introduces more and more complications and discovers some surprising things about the other characters. There are several delightful twists concerning the impossibly pure heroine of the original story that I will not spoil but that I thought retroactively made the story far more interesting. But that leads to the other problem: Rae is both not very good at scheming, and is flippant and dismissive of the characters around her. These are both realistic; Rae is a young woman with cancer, not some sort of genius mastermind, and her whole frame for interacting with the story is fandom discussions and arguments with her sister. Early in the book, it's rather funny. But as the characters around her start becoming more fleshed out and complex, Rae's inability to take them seriously starts to grate. The grand revelation to Rae that these people have their own independent existence comes so late in the book that it's arguably a spoiler, but it was painfully obvious to everyone except Rae for hundreds of pages before it got through Rae's skull.

Those are my main complaints, but there was a lot about this book that I liked. The Cobra, who starts off as a minor villain in the story, is by far the best character of the book. He's not only more interesting than Rae, he makes everyone else in the book, including Rae, more interesting characters through their interactions. The twists around the putative heroine, Lady Rahela's stepsister, are a bit too long in coming but are an absolute delight. And Key, the palace guard that Rae befriends at the start of the story, is the one place where Rae's character dynamic unquestionably works. Key anchors a lot of Rae's scenes, giving them a sense of emotional heft that Rae herself would otherwise undermine.

The narrator in this book does not stick with Rae. We also get viewpoint chapters from the Cobra, the Last Hope, and Emer, Lady Rahela's maid. The viewpoints from the Time of Iron characters can be a bit eye-roll-inducing at the start because of how deeply they follow the grimdark aesthetic of the original story, but by the middle of the book I was really enjoying the viewpoint shifts. This story benefited immensely from being seen from more angles than Rae's chaotic manipulation. By the end of the book, I was fully invested in the plot line following Cobra and the Last Hope, to the extent that I was a bit disappointed when the story would switch back to Rae.

I'm not sure this was a great book, but it was fun. It's funny in places, but I ended up preferring the heartfelt parts to the funny parts. It is a fascinating merger of gleeful fandom chaos and rather heavy emotional portrayals of both inequality and the experience of terminal illness. Rees Brennan is a stage four cancer survivor and that really shows; there's a depth, nuance, and internal complexity to Rae's reactions to illness, health, and hope that feels very real. It is the kind of book that can give you emotional whiplash; sometimes it doesn't work, but sometimes it does.

One major warning: this book ends on a ridiculous cliffhanger and does not in any sense resolve its main plot arc. I found this annoying, not so much because of the wait for the second volume, but because I thought this book was about the right length for the amount of time I wanted to spend in this world and wish Rees Brennan had found a way to wrap up the story in one book. Instead, it looks like there will be three books. I'm in for at least one more, since the story was steadily getting better towards the end of Long Live Evil, but I hope the narrative arc survives being stretched out across that many words.

This one's hard to classify, since it's humorous fantasy on the cover and in the marketing, and that element is definitely present, but I thought the best parts of the book were when it finally started taking itself seriously. It's metafictional, trope-subverting portal fantasy full of intentional anachronisms that sometimes fall flat and sometimes work brilliantly. I thought the main appeal of it would be watching Rae embrace being a proper villain, but then the apparent side characters stole the show. Recommended, but you may have to be in just the right mood.

Content notes: Cancer, terminal illness, resurrected corpses, wasting disease, lots of fantasy violence and gore, and a general grimdark aesthetic.

Rating: 7 out of 10