Python on code.kiwi.com

Enterprise Python: Software That Lives Long and Prosper 🖖

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 07:59:42 +0000

Let me explain.

5 years ago, I was working for a small enterprise software company in Barcelona. This company developed products for tax advisors, and made almost all of its revenue from a car registration product.

Codename Tulip: The Making of Async

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 07:59:49 +0000

Here's a loose transcript of the talk, with the slides.

Today I’m going to talk about asynchronous programming. I promise you that after this talk, you’ll be able to write software under this paradigm much more effectively, thanks to a better intuition about it.

Working in Units

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 10:38:24 +0000

See the whole talk on YouTube!

Do you deal with Data problems at work, or with CPU problems? It's an absurd question. But engineers used to raise the most hands at the second question, not the first.

Pytest Cassettes: Forget about mocks or live requests

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 19:12:00 +0000

What if I told you that you can simply record API communication on cassette and replay it anytime you want? Setup takes literally minutes, but imagine all the saved time on mocking all external communication? Priceless!

Schemathesis: property-based testing for API schemas

Tue, 26 Nov 2019 18:14:00 +0000

Photo by Chris Keats on Unsplash

Many companies have moved from monoliths to microservices for better scalability and faster development cycles and so have we at Kiwi.com. We still have monolithic applications, however they are melting away over time and a swarm of shiny microservices is gradually replacing them.

Kiwi.com sponsors one of the biggest IT hackathons in the Czech Republic

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 18:31:00 +0000

From programming a drone to speech recognition to car race, tech enthusiasts enjoyed a weekend full of hacking, learning, and networking

The weekend of 9 and 10 November has marked a special event for all tech enthusiasts. Some 150 international and local techies gathered at Impact Hub Brno to form teams and enjoy 36 hours programming, hacking, and learning.

5 reasons you cannot miss the Global Travel Hackathon

Tue, 27 Aug 2019 17:56:00 +0000

The next big thing in hackathons? A global one!

Did you know? 27 September is World Tourism Day. We decided to celebrate the day by attending and organising travel hackathons all over the globe on that day. We want to bring together engineers, designers, and innovators: providing them with a creative and supportive environment and encouraging their ideas on how to hack travel.

Kiwi.com at EuroPython 2019

Wed, 31 Jul 2019 21:53:00 +0000

The biggest European Python conference previously saw the sunny Italian beaches and the rocky cliffs of Scotland. In 2019, it moved again — this time to the Swiss city of Basel famous for raclette, pocket knives and enormously high beer prices.

Building a Python CI pipeline

Mon, 08 Jul 2019 21:51:00 +0000

Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development methodology where multiple team members ship their code to a shared repository. A fundamental part of this process is running automated tests, covering both functionality and integration.

At Kiwi.com, we use continuous integration mostly for testing, but it also helps us make sure our code style is consistent. It checks imports order, and we count on it for several other checks.

5 reasons you should apply for Kiwi.com’s Summer Camp for senior devs

Tue, 25 Jun 2019 21:48:00 +0000

The Summer Camp for senior devs is back. This year again we’re taking engineers to Barcelona on 22–28 July to boost their programming skills and enjoy the summer. We cover accommodation, travel expenses, afternoon activities and sightseeing and give you 1,000€ as a reward.

Pushing static type checking in Python one step further

Mon, 27 May 2019 21:41:30 +0000

Type annotations can help catch tricky bugs in your Python code. In this article, you’ll find how you can do the extra push over the cliff up to eleven.

Note: although there are multiple static type checkers for Python available nowadays (such as pyre and pyright), this article assumes the usage of mypy.

PyCon2018, the BLKN style

Thu, 22 Nov 2018 12:11:00 +0000

Or what to check out after the conference

Belgrade fortress view.

Hello, folks!

Over the weekend of 16-18 November, the first ever PyCon conference took place in the Balkans! To be more exact, it was held in Belgrade, Serbia. A few colleagues of mine and I were quite excited about this and we decided to join the conference. And I can only say that it was an awesome experience.

Testable code: making the (testing) world better

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 11:34:00 +0000

Testable code: making the (testing) world better

What does it mean to have testable code? In general, it means, that the code is easy to test and it’s easy to set up a testing environment. Sometimes it’s tough to make code testable, especially in a large, legacy codebase, but I’d like to tell you some approaches and tips, that could help you make your code more maintainable, understandable, and reliable.

Takeaways from EuroPython 2018 in Edinburgh

Fri, 17 Aug 2018 11:51:00 +0000

We couldn't miss this year's EuroPython in Edinburgh, and we'd like to share some highlights with you. Read on to discover some of our key learnings and how we enjoyed the entire conference. Below you can:

Coding at the Kiwi.com Summer Camp in Barcelona

Mon, 06 Aug 2018 11:47:00 +0000

It’s always fun to discover a new city and meet new people that are interested in the stuff you like and the technologies you work with.

To share what it’s like to code for Kiwi.com, we organised a Summer Camp for Senior Devs. We invited nine non-Kiwi devs to Barcelona to work on some projects with us, get to know our offices, and taste our beloved cava.

20 Things To Do After Returning From PyCon 2018

Thu, 24 May 2018 11:15:00 +0000

As always, this year’s PyCon was full of interesting technologies and ideas. I took notes diligently and thought hey, why not just share them with all of you? Here’s a no-bullshit, no-filler list of all the actionable items that I noted down on my trip; in chronological order (and not order of importance).

Memory efficiency of parallel IO operations in Python

Tue, 13 Mar 2018 10:59:00 +0000

Python allows for several different approaches to parallel processing. The main issue with parallelism is knowing its limitations. We either want to parallelise IO operations or CPU-bound tasks like image processing. The first use case is something we focused on in the recent Python Weekend* and this article provides a summary of what we came up with.

Our Comprehensive Guide to Python Dependencies

Thu, 15 Feb 2018 10:52:00 +0000

The following article is from Kiwi.com’s internal engineering handbook. We thought it could come in handy for others as well, so we decided to share it with the world here, like we’ve done before.

A refresher on the basics

What are requirements?

They are usually stored in requirements.txt as a list of 3rd party apps which your project depends on. An example of a requirements file:

code.kiwi.com’s 2017 in numbers: growing our tech community

Tue, 09 Jan 2018 10:47:00 +0000

We're right in the middle of planning all the big events we want to deliver in 2018. However, that doesn’t prevent us from summing up last year because 2017 was a really good one!

Python Brazil 2017: “People > Technology”

Tue, 21 Nov 2017 22:24:00 +0000

At the beginning of October, I attended the Python Brazil Conference, in Belo Horizonte — MG, Brazil. ????????

The event happened over 6 days — with 3 days of talks, 2 days of tutorials and a 1 day Sprint. I gave a talk on the second day about Django Migrations — but that’s a topic for another article. ????

Helping the Python community grow

Wed, 02 Aug 2017 22:00:00 +0000

It must be at least 30 degrees outside but in the center of Brno with all the concrete and stone, it feels like 50. However, this is nothing for the two dozen programmers and tech enthusiasts who gathered in Nest, a cozy design studio with a beautiful view of the roofs and church towers of Brno. They don’t mind the temperature, they don’t care about the view. The only thing occupying their mind is code. They came to gain new Python skills and meet new people at code.kiwi.com’s Python weekend.

Python Hackathon II

Mon, 26 Jun 2017 21:42:00 +0000

Fifty participants attended our second Python Hackathon organised by Engeto, PwC and Kiwi.com. The proceedings were supervised by more than a dozen Python gurus at the Impact Hub Brno.

Serious levels of concentration

The purpose of these hackathons is to expand and share knowledge with the community. Python fans of all skill levels were able to learn a thing or two from the quality mentorship that was available.

SourceLift: flights for open source teams

Mon, 12 Jun 2017 21:36:00 +0000

Kiwi.com is giving away flights to open source teams that need to travel!

To boost the progress of FOSS projects and reward contributors with a well-deserved trip, we’re offering tickets to teams that need to:
a) Attend a conference, or
b) Organise a sprint / a workshop

Kiwi.com’s new Barcelona office

Fri, 19 May 2017 21:29:00 +0000

Our CTO Jozef Képesi answers questions about Kiwi.com’s new Development office in Barcelona, Spain.

Barcelona the sixth city to development offices of Kiwi.com.

Why are you opening an office in Spain?

The launch of Kiwi.com in Spain is part of our global expansion process. We actually want to make Barcelona one of our most trusted international destinations because of its enormous potential for business innovation and the presence of lots of tech startups. It’s the sixth city that we’ve opened an office in and we’re convinced that we’ll find extremely talented local professionals there.

Кiwi.com Brno-Moscow Python Meetup

Tue, 24 Jan 2017 21:09:00 +0000

On March 23, at 19:00, there is going to be a special event in Moscow — The Brno-Moscow Python Meetup sponsored by Kiwi.com.

Three Kiwi.com Python pros will visit Moscow to present their keynotes on this day.

Django Under The Hood 2016: Performance Debugging

Thu, 12 Jan 2017 21:06:00 +0000

After Django validation, debugging was another interesting presentation from the Django Under the Hood conference by Aymeric Augustin.

The introduction covered the Browser Console and the Django Debug Toolbar: both show the Page load time of a website, split into multiple stages. We use the Django Debug Toolbar pretty often, however mostly for inspecting SQL queries. It is easy to get too many SQL queries without the proper use of select_related and prefetch_related, which are very popular and almost necessary Django methods on Querysets. At this point, we have no need to improve our Page load time but the detailed stages description and DOM loading in Django were useful concepts to learn about.

Django Under The Hood 2016 : Validation

Fri, 06 Jan 2017 20:58:00 +0000

One of many great perks of working for Kiwi.com is that the company provides you with opportunities to get as much education and self-improvement as you can. That means — attending conferences!

Here’s what I learned at Django Under The Hood talk from Loïc Bistuer about Django Validation.

Python weekend

Thu, 10 Nov 2016 20:14:00 +0000

Kiwi.com organised our third intensive Python weekend course.

You can see pictures from the event here.

How to Find a “Silent” Bug

Tue, 25 Oct 2016 19:32:00 +0000

Now and again, some very weird bugs occur.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

In the case of Django, and out internal Kiwibase project, I spent half a day fighting with a particularly weird bug.

What Happened

A colleague had prepared a branch for our shiny new feature
Tests were passed (okay, I’m lying slightly; there was one minor bug in the HTML content which was not related to this issue)
I was able to successfully run it on my computer

So I tried to deploy it on the server and it didn’t work. The only screen I could see was this:

Python Hackathon

Mon, 24 Oct 2016 20:01:00 +0000

We partnered with the Engeto Python Hackathon, which took place during the weekend of November 19–20, 2016 in the Impact Hub Brno.

Two our top developers participated as mentors and we also supported the advanced attendees with free Kiwi.com promo codes.