#405: Testing in Radio Astronomy with Python and pytest

Talk Python To Me

Michael Kennedy

Technology

4.8 • 635 Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2023

⏱️ 59 minutes

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Summary

So you know about dependencies and testing, right? If you're talking to a DB in your app, you have to decide how to approach that with your tests. There are lots of solid options you might pick and they vary by goals. Do you mock out the DB layer for isolation or do you use a test DB to make it as real as possible? Do you just punt and use the real DB for expediency? What if your dependency was a huge array of radio telescopes and a rack of hundreds of bespoke servers? That's the challenge on deck today were we discuss testing radio astronomy with pytest with our guest James Smith. He's a Digital Signal Processing engineer at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory and has some great stories and tips to share.

Transcript

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0:00.0	So you know about dependencies and testing, right?
0:02.9	If you're going to talk to your database in your app,
0:05.1	you have to decide how to approach that with your test.
0:08.2	There are a lot of solid options you might pick from,
0:10.3	and they vary by goals.
0:12.0	Do you mock out the DB layer for isolation?
0:14.7	Or do you use a test DB to make it as real as possible?
0:19.0	Or do you even just punt and use the real DB for expediency?
0:23.6	What if your dependency was a huge array of radio telescopes in a rack of hundreds of bespoke servers?
0:30.7	That's the challenge on deck for today, where we discussed testing radio astronomy with
0:36.0	PiTest and our guest, James Smith.
0:38.7	He's a digital signal processing engineer at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory
0:43.2	and has some great stories and tips to share.
0:46.4	This is Talk Python, Episode 405, recorded February 13th, 2003.
1:05.1	Thank you. February 13th, 2020. Welcome to Talk Python, a weekly podcast on Python.
1:08.7	This is your host, Michael Kennedy.
1:10.6	Follow me on Macedon, where I'm
1:12.1	at M. Kennedy, and follow the podcast using at TalkPython, both on bossedon.org. Be careful with
1:18.5	impersonating accounts on other instances. There are many. Keep up with the show and listen to over
1:23.0	seven years of past episodes at Talk Python.fm. We've started streaming most of our episodes live on YouTube.
1:30.7	Subscribe to our YouTube channel over at TalkPython.fm slash YouTube to get notified
1:35.0	about upcoming shows and be part of that episode.
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