WEBVTT 00:00:00.001 --> 00:00:04.620 Open source has permeated much of the software industry, but what about healthcare? 00:00:04.620 --> 00:00:09.880 This highly regulated and important industry might seem to be the domain of huge specialized 00:00:09.880 --> 00:00:14.480 software companies. On this episode, Fred Kingham is here to introduce us to a project called 00:00:14.480 --> 00:00:20.640 Opal. It was born out of NHS Hack Days in the UK and is a full-stack web framework for building 00:00:20.640 --> 00:00:25.320 healthcare applications. It's based on Django and has a ton of interesting features as a framework 00:00:25.320 --> 00:00:31.220 in general. This is Talk Python To Me, episode 241, recorded November 30th, 2019. 00:00:31.220 --> 00:00:49.520 Welcome to Talk Python To Me, a weekly podcast on Python, the language, the libraries, the ecosystem, 00:00:49.520 --> 00:00:54.200 and the personalities. This is your host, Michael Kennedy. Follow me on Twitter where I'm at 00:00:54.200 --> 00:00:59.340 and Kennedy. Keep up with the show and listen to past episodes at talkpython.fm and follow the show 00:00:59.340 --> 00:01:04.900 on Twitter via at Talk Python. This episode is sponsored by Linode and the University of San 00:01:04.900 --> 00:01:09.040 Francisco. Please check out what they're offering during their segments. It really helps support the 00:01:09.040 --> 00:01:13.980 show. Hi there. Thanks for listening to this episode. Before we get to the interview, I have 00:01:13.980 --> 00:01:18.920 something to share with you. We just launched a new course. It's called Python for Decision Makers and 00:01:18.920 --> 00:01:24.000 Business Leaders. If you're a team lead or deciding whether to use Python for your next project, 00:01:24.080 --> 00:01:30.040 or even the next stage in your career, this course is a great fit for you. It's super unique. Most 00:01:30.040 --> 00:01:36.000 courses teach you how to program with Python. This course is a guided discussion and exploration of 00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:41.440 the Python ecosystem through the lens of your organization and your team. It's full of fact-based 00:01:41.440 --> 00:01:46.640 presentations for the Python ecosystem, covering things like frameworks, types of apps you can build, 00:01:46.640 --> 00:01:51.600 developer jobs, and more. And it explores some of the tools making Python so popular in the data 00:01:51.600 --> 00:01:57.540 science space. It's written both for developers and non-developers alike. So check it out at 00:01:57.540 --> 00:02:04.960 talkpython.fm/decision or just click the link in the show notes. But wait, there's more. I'm working 00:02:04.960 --> 00:02:10.060 on a few interactive events as well. So I'm putting together this live event to help kick off the course. 00:02:10.060 --> 00:02:16.560 It's a free webcast on an interactive platform with lots of QA that's happening in January of 2020. 00:02:16.560 --> 00:02:23.320 Check that out at talkpython.fm/python dash decision dash webcast, or just click it in the show 00:02:23.320 --> 00:02:28.660 notes. Go ahead and register now. Hopefully you can make the live event. But if you can't, you can 00:02:28.660 --> 00:02:34.120 still ask questions, participate in polls and chat. All that stuff will be available on demand afterward 00:02:34.120 --> 00:02:39.480 once the recording is there on that platform. Super fun. So I hope you love both of these things, 00:02:39.480 --> 00:02:45.120 the course and the webcast. Now let's get onto that interview. Fred, welcome to Talk Python To Me. 00:02:45.120 --> 00:02:48.360 Hi. Hey, it's great to have you here. We're going to cover some stuff that, you know, I don't think 00:02:48.360 --> 00:02:53.060 we spent any time on the show before. Healthcare and open source. It'll be fun. Sounds great. Yeah. 00:02:53.060 --> 00:02:59.240 Yeah. Now you guys are working on this project called Opal, which has an interesting origin story 00:02:59.240 --> 00:03:06.920 out of the UK healthcare industry and whatnot, which is great. And lots of Python involved. But before we 00:03:06.920 --> 00:03:10.720 get into all that interesting stuff, let's start with your story. How'd you get into programming in Python? 00:03:10.720 --> 00:03:18.200 I started programming on the Atari ST, that venerable computer of the 1980s. I was using something 00:03:18.200 --> 00:03:22.060 called Stoff when I was sort of like seven or eight, you know, when you're creating little 00:03:22.060 --> 00:03:26.500 games, drive the L's through the X's, that kind of thing. Right. 00:03:26.500 --> 00:03:34.580 Full of go-tos, go-tubs and all the joys that come with it. Then I did a philosophy degree and I did a 00:03:34.580 --> 00:03:38.920 conversion course into a master's conversion course into computer science. 00:03:38.920 --> 00:03:42.060 Wow. Philosophy to computer science, huh? That's quite the transition. 00:03:42.060 --> 00:03:46.540 It is. But I don't know. A lot of people, I know a lot of people who've done it. 00:03:46.540 --> 00:03:46.760 Yeah. 00:03:46.760 --> 00:03:54.220 I think there's something about conceptualization, maybe formal logic. There's a whole branch philosophy 00:03:54.220 --> 00:04:00.500 called, what's it called? Logical atomism, I think. Which tries to structure, tries to work 00:04:00.500 --> 00:04:07.200 out Boolean responses to arguments based on conjunctions. Sort of like, if I like trees 00:04:07.200 --> 00:04:14.820 and people who like things are liked, somebody likes me. That kind of weird sort of set logic, 00:04:14.820 --> 00:04:16.560 very Russell-based. 00:04:16.560 --> 00:04:21.080 Right, right. Is it true that I do this or does it follow that I do this? Yeah. Yeah. I think 00:04:21.080 --> 00:04:26.500 actually, now that you say it, there's a lot of thinking. You know, I studied math. I didn't really 00:04:26.500 --> 00:04:31.220 do much programming. I took a couple, like two programming courses in college for little sub 00:04:31.220 --> 00:04:36.880 prerequisites. But I don't feel like I do math at all these days, even though I was in a PhD program 00:04:36.880 --> 00:04:43.860 working on it, right? But I feel like that process that I went through, the type of thinking and the 00:04:43.860 --> 00:04:48.280 way of approaching problems and all that, like, I use that every day. And that seems like it came straight 00:04:48.280 --> 00:04:51.840 out of there, even though I couldn't do math to save my life these days. 00:04:51.840 --> 00:04:52.880 Yeah, exactly. 00:04:52.880 --> 00:04:56.160 All right. Before we move on to philosophy, who's your favorite philosopher? 00:04:56.160 --> 00:05:04.920 David Hume, who is the father of empiricism, who, he writes very interesting books about 00:05:04.920 --> 00:05:10.500 skepticism and causality, the notion of how do you know if something is connected to that, 00:05:10.500 --> 00:05:15.600 to something else? You know, causality does causality equal causation, does correlation equal 00:05:15.600 --> 00:05:20.300 causation. And his books are very readable, and I highly recommend them. He writes them as a 00:05:20.300 --> 00:05:25.160 discourse between, like, two or three people quite often. Discourse is concerning natural religion, 00:05:25.160 --> 00:05:27.980 I think. Dialogue concerning natural religion, exactly. 00:05:27.980 --> 00:05:31.620 Yeah, that's a tough question. There's so many choices throughout the years. All right, 00:05:31.620 --> 00:05:35.500 so you studied philosophy, and then you did this conversion course over to computer science, 00:05:35.500 --> 00:05:35.640 huh? 00:05:35.720 --> 00:05:41.220 I finished my philosophy course, I went traveling for a bit, had a small little accident, ended 00:05:41.220 --> 00:05:45.400 up in a hospital for a bit, came out of that, did a master's conversion course, went into 00:05:45.400 --> 00:05:52.040 banking, because it seemed like a good thing for five odd years. Sort of Wall Street, I guess, 00:05:52.040 --> 00:05:57.500 the investment side, what we would call the city. And then I did some contracting for a few 00:05:57.500 --> 00:06:03.600 years for sort of marketing companies, you know, marketing websites, that kind of thing. And then 00:06:03.600 --> 00:06:11.880 I went to NHS Hack Day, which is a series of hack days that exists in the UK, where clinicians come up 00:06:11.880 --> 00:06:16.880 and they're like, we have this problem. At the moment, there's nothing available at our hospital. 00:06:16.880 --> 00:06:22.860 In a weekend, can you sort of push something out so that I can take it back to my hospital IT 00:06:22.860 --> 00:06:28.060 people who are saying, we can't have this and say, well, these guys have done something similar 00:06:28.060 --> 00:06:33.420 in a weekend, make it happen kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. Like, it's so funny that sometimes 00:06:33.420 --> 00:06:36.600 that's the way it is, right? Oh, you can't do that. There's no way. This is impractical. Do you 00:06:36.600 --> 00:06:41.320 know how long this will take? Yeah, it'll take a couple of weeks. Let's just do it. And you know, 00:06:41.320 --> 00:06:45.920 like, sometimes the debate about whether something is possible takes longer than actually doing it. 00:06:45.920 --> 00:06:50.940 But you need this sort of outside perspective, right? So this NHS Hack Days, what is the goal? I mean, 00:06:50.940 --> 00:06:55.200 you said the goal is to like, show what is possible. Is the goal to go there and try to like, 00:06:55.200 --> 00:07:00.000 learn what is needed to maybe I could do a startup? Is it a charitable thing? Like, 00:07:00.000 --> 00:07:04.520 I want to create the software and I want to give it back to the health industry in my country to just 00:07:04.520 --> 00:07:09.760 help everyone what's going on there? It's quite open source. It's not really about the businesses, 00:07:09.760 --> 00:07:14.420 people have tried to launch businesses based on the ideas that have come out of it. People, 00:07:14.420 --> 00:07:19.760 some people go there to learn, some people go there just to learn, you know, experiment in 00:07:19.760 --> 00:07:24.320 technology. It's quite a common reason to go to Hack Day anyway. The idea is definitely to make the NHS 00:07:24.320 --> 00:07:29.760 better in this country or healthcare better. But as I say, people have tried to make companies out of 00:07:29.760 --> 00:07:35.300 their stuff on one side. But on the other side, there's a one in one of the first one, a great 00:07:35.300 --> 00:07:42.520 example is people who essentially have to type in like a series of strings based on whether they see 00:07:42.520 --> 00:07:49.080 certain cells, certain things within a cell. And it was taking people ages. And the solution was 00:07:49.080 --> 00:07:55.720 literally, well, we'll just remap your keyboard, so that you press J and this weird string comes out. 00:07:55.720 --> 00:08:01.960 And suddenly what you've got is people who are taking days at something being able to do it in, 00:08:01.960 --> 00:08:08.920 less than an hour. And it's such a simple solution. And yeah, you could turn that into a business model. 00:08:08.920 --> 00:08:17.160 But realistically, this is just, it's just an easy way of making somebody's life so much easier. And 00:08:17.160 --> 00:08:20.360 it's not hard. Anyone can write that, right? It's not. 00:08:20.520 --> 00:08:26.760 Right. On the other hand, I think I know some people who they did. One of the big problems is 00:08:26.760 --> 00:08:31.720 people who don't take their medications, specifically if they're ill. I know some people who tried to 00:08:31.720 --> 00:08:37.720 create a company. I don't know how I was doing. I've lost track of them. But that was take your meds. 00:08:37.720 --> 00:08:42.360 So essentially people getting a text message when they should take their medication because 00:08:42.360 --> 00:08:48.600 people don't take their medication. It tends to make the whole system right because things, you know, 00:08:48.600 --> 00:08:53.320 suddenly what should be very cheap is super expensive because you then have to go in there 00:08:53.320 --> 00:08:54.840 and make, you know, real. 00:08:54.840 --> 00:09:01.160 Yeah. Do some kind of intervention. Yeah. So like schizophrenic stuff or medication or 00:09:01.160 --> 00:09:06.440 depression medication. I feel like people take that stuff and then they're like, oh, I feel better now. 00:09:06.440 --> 00:09:10.920 I'm better. I don't need my meds. Right. But maybe, you know, maybe it's because you're taking the 00:09:10.920 --> 00:09:14.920 medication. As soon as you stop, you're like, oh, my gosh, it's all back to beginning. 00:09:14.920 --> 00:09:20.360 It's often for like geriatric, well, geriatric, like old people who, you know, they're required 00:09:20.360 --> 00:09:25.560 to take medication once every three hours. And it's so easy to forget. And as soon as you don't, 00:09:25.560 --> 00:09:31.000 well, suddenly you haven't taken, I don't know, that medication and you're at risk of a heart attack. 00:09:31.000 --> 00:09:35.720 Yeah, of course. Yeah. I guess if the frequency is a couple of hours, it's tricky. Yeah. 00:09:35.720 --> 00:09:41.080 Yeah. Cool. So we've, you've got these NHS hack days, which sounds like a really good idea. I don't 00:09:41.080 --> 00:09:47.400 know if we have that in the US. Maybe we do, but I've never heard of it. You know, I probably one of 00:09:47.400 --> 00:09:53.480 these cool benefits of government healthcare. Interesting. So, so, you know, it's not all just 00:09:53.480 --> 00:09:59.880 for profit. Like who wants to go help? I don't know, like your local HMO make more money or that 00:09:59.880 --> 00:10:04.520 local health insurance company. Right. I'm not going to go do a hack day for any insurance company 00:10:04.520 --> 00:10:09.400 whatsoever. Right. Unless it's just weird. Anyway, this is cool. So you guys have these 00:10:09.400 --> 00:10:15.160 and you went there and, Opal was born out of it, huh? So yeah, Opal was born out of, 00:10:15.160 --> 00:10:20.840 out of that by, by my, my wife, a colleague, like a couple of years before, 00:10:20.840 --> 00:10:27.880 before I joined open healthcare. And then I was contracting. I was, I went to a couple of these 00:10:27.880 --> 00:10:33.000 hack days and been to a couple of years in a row. And then I went to work for, went to an interview at 00:10:33.000 --> 00:10:37.960 quite a sort of prestigious startup. it was quite as intense a process. Like, I don't know, 00:10:37.960 --> 00:10:42.360 six hours of continuous interviews. And then in the last one, the founder of the company said, 00:10:42.360 --> 00:10:48.520 where do you see yourself in 10 years? And I said, writing software for open source software for the 00:10:48.520 --> 00:10:55.880 NHS. So then I turned down their offer and went to work for open healthcare. Cause I realized by going 00:10:55.880 --> 00:10:59.240 through that process, that was actually what I wanted to do. So why not do it now? 00:10:59.240 --> 00:11:00.840 It's pretty grand. 00:11:00.840 --> 00:11:06.360 That's grand. So I think this is a good test. People should give themselves periodically, 00:11:06.360 --> 00:11:11.900 right? The five year, the 10 year test, you know, in this case, it was where do you see yourself? Like 00:11:11.900 --> 00:11:16.320 in the broad sense, but it could also be, you know, look at the people that are five or 10 years more 00:11:16.320 --> 00:11:21.440 senior than you and your company. What do they do? Do you, do you want to do that? If you don't want to 00:11:21.440 --> 00:11:26.580 be doing that, the time to like start finding a different path is now, right? Because that's, 00:11:26.700 --> 00:11:29.580 that could be right where you're headed. I think that's a great motivation. 00:11:29.580 --> 00:11:33.040 When you go into an interview and you see the people who are interviewing you, 00:11:33.040 --> 00:11:37.120 the first thing you should think is, do I want to be these people? Do these people 00:11:37.120 --> 00:11:39.740 seem happy with their lives and their life choices? 00:11:39.740 --> 00:11:46.580 Yeah, that's really great. I totally agree with that. All right. So that's a pretty big goal. And 00:11:46.580 --> 00:11:53.080 I think it's a very cool thing, but I also see it as challenging just as a career, right? 00:11:53.620 --> 00:11:59.220 I want to go write open source software for NHS. How did you tie that back to the career in your 00:11:59.220 --> 00:12:01.840 mind? Like, how are you going to pay the bills while doing that? 00:12:01.840 --> 00:12:07.160 The business model is essentially quite clearly there. Like if you can create a good service, 00:12:07.160 --> 00:12:14.740 medical software is big business. I don't see the open source as in any way a blocker to this. 00:12:14.740 --> 00:12:20.720 I want to, like the NHS are paying us money. We're not doing this out of the goodness of our hearts. 00:12:20.720 --> 00:12:26.580 the open source means that the quality of the software can be more rigorously tested, 00:12:26.580 --> 00:12:34.260 that there's not so much of a contractual lock-in because one of the problems that you get, I was 00:12:34.260 --> 00:12:41.560 talking to a hospital that will remain nameless and a lot of the medical data is with one system and 00:12:41.560 --> 00:12:46.020 they want to shift to another system. And they said, how much to move it across? And they were told 10 00:12:46.020 --> 00:12:51.320 million quid, 10 million pounds. Yeah. The hospital was like, we can't afford that. 00:12:51.320 --> 00:12:58.200 So we just dumped the data and the sort of computer proprietor said, well, it'll be 10 million pounds to 00:12:58.200 --> 00:13:00.300 delete the data. That's rough. 00:13:00.300 --> 00:13:06.040 Yeah. Right. There's a bad system of contractual lock-ins. So by being open source, 00:13:06.440 --> 00:13:11.840 we can provide great quality software, we can charge for great quality software, but if they 00:13:11.840 --> 00:13:16.580 don't like us, they're not locked into us because anyone can look at the source code that we've 00:13:16.580 --> 00:13:22.400 written and sort of take it over if necessary. Hopefully that's never happened so far and we'd 00:13:22.400 --> 00:13:23.020 like to think it won't. 00:13:23.020 --> 00:13:28.780 I think so. And you know, it's based on super popular stuff, right? Things that most people 00:13:28.780 --> 00:13:36.780 who know Python could walk in and get up to speed on in a week or so, at least. And you know, Python 00:13:36.780 --> 00:13:42.600 being the most popular language or at least contending not for that, that's a pretty solid 00:13:42.600 --> 00:13:45.960 statement that people can just pick this up. So tell us what Opal is. 00:13:45.960 --> 00:13:51.820 Opal is a web framework for building healthcare applications that store medical data about people. 00:13:51.820 --> 00:13:57.460 Cool. So we have Django, we have Flask, we have Pyramid, we have Starlet, we have these other 00:13:57.460 --> 00:14:05.160 frameworks. Why do we need Opal? What does it do in addition to just, you know, Django, you know, 00:14:05.160 --> 00:14:08.480 create app or cookie cutter, Pyramid or Flask? 00:14:08.480 --> 00:14:14.420 Yeah. So that's a super interesting question because in the levels, Opal is kind of, it's a domain 00:14:14.420 --> 00:14:21.360 specific framework. So you have Django, Django is do anything on the web. So Django, 00:14:21.360 --> 00:14:26.720 Django arrives on the scene. And I don't know if you're too young to remember this. But Django 00:14:26.720 --> 00:14:30.960 arrives on the scene and suddenly you were able to say, well, I want to create a polls app. And 00:14:30.960 --> 00:14:36.880 you know, I was able to do it in a lunch break. And I was able to do a week's work in a, in a 00:14:36.880 --> 00:14:43.120 lunch break. And that's, that's amazing. And it revolutionized things, right? And then from 00:14:43.120 --> 00:14:48.480 there, you don't have that too many sort of domain specific, I guess, blogging software is the, 00:14:48.480 --> 00:14:54.580 is the most domain specific where you have software, which is a framework, which are, 00:14:54.580 --> 00:14:57.980 I'm just going to build a blog. I'm going to do one thing. So you've taken, right? 00:14:57.980 --> 00:15:00.820 Got something like Django and then you're super specialized on top of that. 00:15:01.480 --> 00:15:05.720 Right. Like WordPress or ghost or something. I hadn't even really considered blogging, 00:15:05.720 --> 00:15:11.900 blog frameworks, platforms as, you know, domain specific. But yeah, you're right. They, 00:15:11.900 --> 00:15:14.940 they definitely are. And it makes a ton of sense, right? I'm just, you know, 00:15:14.940 --> 00:15:20.500 thinking about what you get. So this is built on Django, Opal is. So it's not like 00:15:20.500 --> 00:15:24.320 another framework in the sense of that it's trying to compete with those, but it's, 00:15:24.480 --> 00:15:30.220 let's take Django and let's, let's take all the boilerplate junk that you have to write 00:15:30.220 --> 00:15:37.080 to build something in the clinical domain, make that happen. And now get started, right? 00:15:37.080 --> 00:15:42.480 What we can do is we can say, we know you're going to have patients. We know you're going to have 00:15:42.480 --> 00:15:48.540 episodes of care. We know, yeah, we know you're probably going to have these bunch of clinical models. 00:15:50.400 --> 00:15:57.120 And we can therefore make loads of assumptions, which means that we can scaffold things out quite 00:15:57.120 --> 00:16:03.520 quickly. So we know that you're going to have a patient list page, patient detail pages of different 00:16:03.520 --> 00:16:09.380 types of episodes of care. We know that you're going to want forms for, forms for, for example, 00:16:09.380 --> 00:16:14.760 conditions for diagnoses that are going to hang off an episode of care. So we can say, 00:16:15.660 --> 00:16:22.820 we can scaffold you up forms for the condition. We can scaffold you display templates. We can give 00:16:22.820 --> 00:16:27.640 you a rest endpoint for an episode, which will give you all of the things which are hanging off that. 00:16:27.640 --> 00:16:33.680 So you've got that for your treatment, your diagnosis, maybe your treatments, maybe your blood cultures, 00:16:33.680 --> 00:16:39.400 maybe your lab tests. We can just do that super quickly because we know that's what the modeling 00:16:39.400 --> 00:16:40.860 structure that you're going to want. 00:16:41.660 --> 00:16:46.600 That's great. So you don't have to think about all those things. You just start using them. And these 00:16:46.600 --> 00:16:53.420 are all classes. These are Django entities, right? In the Django ORM. But you could create ones that are 00:16:53.420 --> 00:16:58.260 more specialized. You could create other ones that go in there, right? So it's, it sounds like a lot of 00:16:58.260 --> 00:17:01.740 the core data models already put together and, and things like that, right? 00:17:01.860 --> 00:17:10.720 We have sort of a specialized model called a sub record that we know that you, you can use, which we 00:17:10.720 --> 00:17:15.540 know will have a relationship to a patient or relationship to an episode. And because we know 00:17:15.540 --> 00:17:22.500 that model structure, we can automatically wire that into forms and stuff, as I said, but also into 00:17:22.500 --> 00:17:30.500 search, into data extract. We don't, Opal doesn't enforce like a model structure. It offers this. And this, 00:17:30.500 --> 00:17:37.220 uh, a lot of what these kinds of frameworks do is they, and what Opal tries to do is get you 80% of 00:17:37.220 --> 00:17:41.300 the way there. You know, once you're there, once you've done, once you've started prototyping, you 00:17:41.300 --> 00:17:46.580 might be like, Oh, I want to just use more sort of vanilla Django stuff. Opal doesn't stop any of that. 00:17:46.580 --> 00:17:51.300 It just gives you a helping hand in what we think the right direction. 00:17:51.540 --> 00:17:58.260 Yeah. I just that quick, quick boost. And even though this came out of those NHS hack 00:17:58.260 --> 00:18:03.540 weeks, I suspect somebody could take this as the starting point for another one of those and really 00:18:03.540 --> 00:18:07.680 bust out something pretty amazing, pretty quickly. It sounds like, cause it just puts all this stuff 00:18:07.680 --> 00:18:13.380 together for you. So one of the things that these episodes, sub records, which are the Django models 00:18:14.100 --> 00:18:20.740 do that. I don't know. It's kind of interesting to me is it creates a relationship between the 00:18:20.740 --> 00:18:26.580 entities already, right? Which is pretty cool. But it also creates a JSON API for creating and updating and 00:18:26.580 --> 00:18:32.980 searching them. It creates, make sure that the angular layer, we'll talk about angular in a little 00:18:32.980 --> 00:18:39.060 bit, the angular front end layer knows about it. bunch of stuff like that, right? That's pretty cool. 00:18:39.060 --> 00:18:43.380 Any modern develop web developer knows that you're probably going to want to have Django rest framework 00:18:43.380 --> 00:18:49.780 endpoints for a Django app. So exactly right at Spox, it gives you those. It does some schema 00:18:49.780 --> 00:18:56.100 description so that if you're looking for other developers to use to like programmatically read 00:18:56.100 --> 00:19:00.420 your endpoints, you can give them that description and they'll have an understanding of 00:19:00.420 --> 00:19:04.580 what data is going to be available. so yeah, I think, I think it's all right. 00:19:04.580 --> 00:19:08.420 That's pretty sweet. So it comes with batteries included, but these batteries are more like 00:19:08.420 --> 00:19:13.540 stethoscopes and tongue depressors. That's excellent. I'm stealing that. That's fine. 00:19:13.540 --> 00:19:17.220 Feel free to steal it. It's all good. I'm sure there's better, better, 00:19:17.220 --> 00:19:19.700 analogies in the health space, but that's a good start. 00:19:19.700 --> 00:19:27.300 This portion of Talk Python To Me is brought to you by Linode. Are you looking for hosting that's fast, 00:19:27.300 --> 00:19:31.860 simple, and incredibly affordable? 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Do you want a dedicated server for free for the next four months? 00:20:10.340 --> 00:20:20.020 Just visit talkpython.fm/linode. When I think of this project, it sounds cool. Like if I, as a primarily 00:20:20.020 --> 00:20:25.540 web developer, when I'm writing code, when I'm thinking of like, how would I use this? Obviously, 00:20:25.540 --> 00:20:31.220 I would go out and I would build some cool healthcare app if that was the domain I wanted to spend some 00:20:31.220 --> 00:20:37.780 time on. But when you think about this project, who do you have in mind? Like, have you made this for 00:20:37.780 --> 00:20:43.460 people like me? Have you made this for the IT folks inside the company? Have you made it for doctors? 00:20:43.460 --> 00:20:47.860 Like, who do you have in mind using or who's ended up using Opal? 00:20:47.860 --> 00:20:55.060 That's a nice question. So in reality, we use this ourselves. Obviously, we exist in a number of 00:20:55.060 --> 00:21:03.540 major hospitals for sort of a whole bunch of teams. And I think that when building a framework, you know, 00:21:03.540 --> 00:21:08.660 you need to, what is it? Eat your dog food? Yeah, we are the dog. And this is designed for other 00:21:08.660 --> 00:21:15.300 dogs like us. So other developers being brought into hospitals or who already work in hospitals 00:21:15.300 --> 00:21:23.460 to develop healthcare applications. That being said, doctors, as it turns out, incredibly smart, 00:21:23.460 --> 00:21:30.500 technically minded individuals. And a number of them have picked up an experiment with Opal for their own 00:21:30.500 --> 00:21:37.220 sort of side project and for projects for their hospitals. I'm not sure a doctor has ever released an 00:21:37.220 --> 00:21:41.700 local application into a hospital. And maybe you'd want to give it a code review first. 00:21:41.700 --> 00:21:47.300 It's going to need some refactoring. I'm not so sure about this. But you know, I think that's really 00:21:47.300 --> 00:21:53.060 cool. And I do think that's one of the things that Python makes more possible for folks who are really 00:21:53.060 --> 00:21:57.860 smart and technically minded like doctors to just say, you know, I have this problem. And it's got to be 00:21:57.860 --> 00:22:03.460 frustrating to go to work, at least in the US, it's you never log into your computer, you log into like some 00:22:03.460 --> 00:22:09.860 Citrix, remote desktop thing. And you know, it just there's probably all these frustrating like layers. 00:22:09.860 --> 00:22:14.340 And they're just like, you know what, if I could just have this thing, it seems so easy. 00:22:14.340 --> 00:22:19.700 And you know, they probably just, you know, start busting something out, right. And then they can bring 00:22:19.700 --> 00:22:24.420 that in and be that proof that you talked about, like from the NHS hack days sort of example. 00:22:24.420 --> 00:22:26.580 Exactly. They can just say, look, it's not that hard. 00:22:26.580 --> 00:22:32.020 I have a funny story. I'll tell you real quick about a doctor and programming. I was at the doctor. 00:22:32.020 --> 00:22:36.020 I don't remember why it was nothing major, just some random thing with the doctor. 00:22:36.020 --> 00:22:44.420 Maybe 2010, something like that, quite a while ago. And the doctor said, what do you do? 00:22:44.420 --> 00:22:47.460 So I'm a programmer. And I said, what language do you program at the time? I'm like, well, 00:22:47.460 --> 00:22:50.260 programming this language called C#, which I was at the time. 00:22:50.260 --> 00:22:54.180 And he says, pauses for a second. He looks at me. And I thought he was just trying to make small 00:22:54.180 --> 00:22:57.700 talk. Right. So he could like, before he stabbed me with a needle or something, looks over, goes, 00:22:57.700 --> 00:23:03.700 you excited about the new release of Visual Studio? I'm like, excuse me? He's like, yeah, 00:23:03.700 --> 00:23:07.460 this new stuff they're doing is so great. I'm really, I'm like, are you a real doctor? Who are you? 00:23:07.460 --> 00:23:10.260 Like, who gave you that robe? I'm not sure I want that. 00:23:10.260 --> 00:23:14.740 Yeah. Did this make you trust him more or less? What's the, 00:23:14.740 --> 00:23:20.020 both, both, but it's so interesting because you like at the time, I'm like, oh, sure. 00:23:20.020 --> 00:23:23.700 They're surely they don't care. But the more I interact with doctors, the more I realize, 00:23:23.700 --> 00:23:27.860 you know, yeah, for sure. They, they have these challenges and you can bring in programming 00:23:27.860 --> 00:23:31.620 languages to solve those at some point, like the pressure gets too high. You're just like, 00:23:31.620 --> 00:23:34.980 I'm going to write this website. That's going to solve this problem. I do see it as an extra 00:23:34.980 --> 00:23:39.540 challenge in the healthcare space over, you know, some other, I said, say accounting or something, 00:23:39.540 --> 00:23:43.380 right? And then maybe it kind of is not even the best counter example, but in healthcare, 00:23:43.380 --> 00:23:47.620 you have to be a little more careful with your data and stuff. So you can't just like, 00:23:47.620 --> 00:23:51.540 I just threw it on like a random server on the internet and it's easy now. Like, 00:23:51.540 --> 00:23:53.300 well, maybe that's not going to fly. 00:23:53.300 --> 00:23:58.020 To me, one of the interesting things about the medical space in relation to other space. So 00:23:58.020 --> 00:24:01.220 as I say, I used to just sort of do some investment banking stuff. 00:24:01.220 --> 00:24:04.980 what you have there and what you have in a lot of places, you have things like stocks, 00:24:04.980 --> 00:24:12.420 stocks are essentially manmade inventions, right? And therefore they've already like a man's mind can 00:24:12.420 --> 00:24:17.220 comprehend what they were and, or a person's mind can comprehend what they were and draw the 00:24:17.220 --> 00:24:21.860 limitations around that. And there's, there are legal entity in that to describe. Whereas when you look 00:24:21.860 --> 00:24:30.980 at modeling in a medical sense, it's such a, a broad, we're just ascribing concepts to real world 00:24:30.980 --> 00:24:37.300 conditions. That means that modeling comes far, far fuzzier. Sort of when you're saying sort of like 00:24:37.300 --> 00:24:43.460 obesity, somebody's dying of like drowning, well, nobody dies of drowning. They die of like an oxygen 00:24:43.460 --> 00:24:45.300 deficit kind of thing. Right, right. 00:24:45.300 --> 00:24:50.100 So when you're filling in your medical notes, what do you do? Well, you know, like, which I think 00:24:50.100 --> 00:24:57.060 means and different doctors will put in different things because if you're a blood cancer specialist, 00:24:57.060 --> 00:25:03.140 then your concepts of dying of this, I don't, okay, maybe I don't know that. Maybe I don't know blood 00:25:03.140 --> 00:25:09.140 cancer for certain, but definitely when describing a blood cancer, describing a blood test, if you work 00:25:09.140 --> 00:25:13.620 in microbiology, your description is going to be different from a doctor who was another specialist, 00:25:14.260 --> 00:25:15.540 which I think is super interesting. 00:25:15.540 --> 00:25:21.300 It is. And, you know, I think it really makes the modeling challenging, right? And we already talked 00:25:21.300 --> 00:25:26.900 that there are some of the sub model, some episode, sub episode classes, like the Django model 00:25:26.900 --> 00:25:32.980 classes that model these things, but they're coming from a certain perspective, right? Like one of the 00:25:32.980 --> 00:25:37.460 things that you talked about on the, maybe on the tutorial, I can't remember where I saw this, but 00:25:37.460 --> 00:25:43.620 to, you know, a cough, it could be a symptom of a condition or the cough itself could be a 00:25:43.620 --> 00:25:47.700 condition. So if they come and say, Hey, I need you to treat me because I have a cough, 00:25:47.700 --> 00:25:54.020 then that's probably the condition. But if they have a cold, then it's just a symptom, right? 00:25:54.020 --> 00:25:56.820 So how do you record that in your database? 00:25:56.820 --> 00:26:01.780 Which is it a symptom or a condition, right? These are, these are challenging. 00:26:01.780 --> 00:26:07.860 I sat in a room with doctors having full blown arguments at each other about exactly this. And 00:26:07.860 --> 00:26:10.900 it's kind of like, well, if you don't know, how do you expect us to know that? 00:26:10.900 --> 00:26:17.060 Yeah. Well, that's the problem or the challenge of building something for a domain, especially if you're 00:26:17.060 --> 00:26:23.300 not yourself a doctor or you're a specialist in that domain, it makes it harder to model stuff in that 00:26:23.300 --> 00:26:27.540 domain as a programmer. But it's also the value, right? 00:26:27.540 --> 00:26:34.100 That is one of the things that I will try to say, you know, the programmers, I, well, I've been a 00:26:34.100 --> 00:26:40.260 programmer for 12 years now. I've been around the block. A doctor has had, what, at least five years 00:26:41.060 --> 00:26:46.340 a university, probably two years after that, still sort of learning the ropes, you know, 00:26:46.340 --> 00:26:52.260 they're going to be eight, nine years down the line. And so the, what Opal tries to do is trying to 00:26:52.260 --> 00:26:59.380 create through, essentially the, in some levels, the Django sort of modeling, Django models is to kind of 00:26:59.380 --> 00:27:05.700 create a bridge where two very, very complicated domains can kind of meet and discuss in a way that 00:27:05.700 --> 00:27:08.980 they can understand each other. I guess it's that shared experience, right? 00:27:08.980 --> 00:27:15.940 So maybe an interesting way to talk about, to give people a sense of what this is and how it works. 00:27:15.940 --> 00:27:23.060 Maybe we could talk through a getting started story. So you have a tutorial on the website and it says, 00:27:23.060 --> 00:27:27.620 as a doctor, you want to know what's going on with your patients under your care so you can treat them 00:27:27.620 --> 00:27:33.540 effectively and whatnot. So you need some kind of app or something to manage that. Let's build that in, 00:27:33.540 --> 00:27:38.580 in Opal, which is pretty interesting. So do you want to maybe just talk us through, 00:27:38.580 --> 00:27:45.060 like this whole getting started story here? Opal does similar thing to, I guess, Django app and start 00:27:45.060 --> 00:27:52.500 projects, but again, more specific for, for medical applications. So out of the box, we essentially 00:27:52.500 --> 00:27:58.260 give you some core clinical models that we think are pretty good and you might like, and we give you some 00:27:58.260 --> 00:28:04.900 reference data that you might want to change, but it's the kind of thing that you want loaded in this 00:28:04.900 --> 00:28:11.060 table. So we give you a list of conditions that doctors have given us in the past and said, 00:28:11.060 --> 00:28:17.220 these are the kind of conditions we want to record. We give you sort of basic sort of demographic lookup 00:28:17.220 --> 00:28:23.060 lists. So again, you know, like gender, ethnicity, you might want to change them, but out of the box, 00:28:23.060 --> 00:28:31.220 give me something sensible. When you run the create project, you get sensible defaults and it gives you a 00:28:31.220 --> 00:28:38.580 patient list and episode detail page and a way of adding patients because we know from the domain 00:28:38.580 --> 00:28:42.500 that these things that you're going to want. Yeah. And it feels very much like getting started with 00:28:42.500 --> 00:28:48.180 Django itself. So the way you get Opal is you just pip install it. That's cool. All right. You just pip 00:28:48.180 --> 00:28:53.220 install this or put it as a requirement. And then you say, Opal start project, and you give it a name, 00:28:53.220 --> 00:29:00.100 very Django-esque. Go in there and go in that folder and you say, Python manage that py run server, 00:29:00.100 --> 00:29:05.140 right? Like you could just replace Opal with Django. And so far you're on the same path, right? 00:29:05.140 --> 00:29:10.820 I mean, that might just be for a good reason. Exactly. We've taken what Django, we think Django did 00:29:10.820 --> 00:29:18.020 well and hopefully extended that. So yeah, exactly. So it gives you the Django settings, which are probably 00:29:18.020 --> 00:29:22.900 going to be the ones you want. It gives you an S you like, you know, it sets you up with a S you like. 00:29:22.900 --> 00:29:28.100 Right. So basically, if I'm a Django developer, it's super easy for me to drop in and get started with 00:29:28.100 --> 00:29:33.300 Opal. I just have to learn the new batteries that you've added, right? And the conventions that you 00:29:33.300 --> 00:29:38.580 follow. We've given you some sugar. But if you're a Django developer, it really shouldn't take you, 00:29:38.580 --> 00:29:43.780 it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out what we're doing. And I will say, once, you know, 00:29:43.780 --> 00:29:48.020 if you want, if you're a Django developer, you're like, I like what you've done with this, 00:29:48.020 --> 00:29:53.460 but I'd like to do this in vanilla Django. We don't stop you from defining your own views and 00:29:53.460 --> 00:29:59.220 doing what you like. How much of what Opal gives you in terms of this scaffolding business here, 00:29:59.220 --> 00:30:05.620 how much of it is a, at the beginning of my project, one time only, or is there a way to 00:30:06.260 --> 00:30:13.780 periodically add new entities and new views? Right. So maybe I have like, like I have demographics 00:30:13.780 --> 00:30:17.860 and treatments and diagnosis and all that stuff comes out of the box, but then say like, oh, 00:30:17.860 --> 00:30:22.980 I need a surgery and I'm going to add that. Is there a way to run like a command line option to, 00:30:22.980 --> 00:30:27.620 to do all that magic to add it in? Or do I, am I kind of on my own once I started? 00:30:27.620 --> 00:30:34.420 So you add in a carer model, for example, for a patient, for an episode, you add in your Django 00:30:34.420 --> 00:30:41.460 model and then you run managed applied scaffold. What we'll do is we will create you a form template 00:30:41.460 --> 00:30:48.900 and a display template. And then you have to go into your patient detail and which will already have 00:30:48.900 --> 00:30:54.420 a list of similar sort of record panels as we call them. And you can just add in that, 00:30:54.420 --> 00:31:03.300 but with care instead of what that gives you is a display template and a way of adding automatically 00:31:03.300 --> 00:31:08.100 wires you in like a modal form. So you click add one and it would bring you up a modal form. 00:31:08.100 --> 00:31:13.300 And then what we do is we look at a method called underscore is Singleton. We look at a property 00:31:13.300 --> 00:31:18.660 called underscore is Singleton on model. And that tells us if it's a one to one model or a one to many 00:31:18.660 --> 00:31:23.940 models. So obviously like demographics, you're only going to have one, but you're only going to have one 00:31:23.940 --> 00:31:28.500 name, right? Well, it's not be true. You're only going to have one demographics model related to 00:31:28.500 --> 00:31:33.540 a person, whereas you may have multiple treatments. And so that tells the record panel whether to allow, 00:31:33.540 --> 00:31:38.980 let me add many treatments or just let me edit the single demographics model. 00:31:38.980 --> 00:31:44.820 That is awesome because then you could just keep adding these Django models and then just rerun 00:31:44.820 --> 00:31:47.300 scaffold and it does all the stuff for you, right? All the magic. 00:31:47.300 --> 00:31:52.580 Exactly. So it just ellips your model and then creates your form, a whole bunch of point fields 00:31:52.580 --> 00:31:59.700 off the back of that. We are different from vanilla Django. We use a template tag for our form fields 00:31:59.700 --> 00:32:04.740 because under the covers, this is all, there's, there's a whole bunch of angular that's happening. 00:32:04.740 --> 00:32:09.140 So we're not refreshing the page. We're bringing up a model. We're editing it. We're changing it. 00:32:09.140 --> 00:32:13.940 We're saving it. Everything just working with the doctor the other day. And what was really lovely is 00:32:13.940 --> 00:32:22.820 they changed one of the models and then they looked at form. And personally, I really like API design. 00:32:23.380 --> 00:32:28.100 And when somebody like doesn't even need to look at the dots and they're like, oh, I just need to change 00:32:28.100 --> 00:32:33.620 this to this. And you're like, that's grand. Yeah. My work here is done. Yeah. You know, 00:32:33.620 --> 00:32:38.900 you build a good API when they're their first guess, their first intuition is exactly what you'd hope 00:32:38.900 --> 00:32:42.900 they would do. Exactly. Super cool. So one of the things I saw in the tutorial that was pretty 00:32:42.900 --> 00:32:48.740 interesting is you have these relationships like, you know, what problem or symptom did this person 00:32:48.740 --> 00:32:54.900 have, and there's probably a big pre-filled list, like a dropdown select. You can pull down and choose, 00:32:54.900 --> 00:32:59.460 you know, they've got a fever, their foot is broken, whatever their bone is broken. 00:32:59.460 --> 00:33:05.860 But it's, it also allows you to type in free text. So you have this column type field type, 00:33:05.860 --> 00:33:09.940 foreign key or free text. That was really interesting to me is that you guys came up with that, 00:33:09.940 --> 00:33:15.060 right? That's not part of Django. Yeah, that's all our pattern. I've seen like different people in 00:33:15.060 --> 00:33:20.260 different places, all of them having to roll their own sort of customized implementation of 00:33:20.260 --> 00:33:25.540 exactly the same thing. It's such a common thing that I want to put in a sort of a foreign key 00:33:25.540 --> 00:33:32.420 relationship or free text. And what this does is it does exactly that. It's a free text box, 00:33:32.420 --> 00:33:36.420 you can type in whatever you like, but there'll be an auto complete bunch of options. And you can 00:33:36.420 --> 00:33:41.220 select one of those and it'll save it as a relational, as a foreign key method. And one of the things 00:33:41.220 --> 00:33:50.580 that's nice is that they, it also supports symptoms. So say you can have a cough or a sore throat or, 00:33:50.580 --> 00:33:57.460 I don't know, a pain, pain throat. I don't know. Yeah. You kind of get the idea that quite often 00:33:57.460 --> 00:34:04.260 there's two terms for the same thing, symptoms and what the doctors can do or what they can tell us to do 00:34:04.260 --> 00:34:10.900 is say, wheezyness and breathlessness are the same thing. And it will reconcile those so that you have 00:34:10.900 --> 00:34:13.860 a consistent view of what the patient might have if they both fit in. 00:34:13.860 --> 00:34:17.780 Okay. That's a really cool feature. I love it. That's that's, I think that's great. And it seems 00:34:17.780 --> 00:34:23.780 like it shows up really nicely in the UI. So let's talk about, you know, you mentioned Angular and whatnot, 00:34:23.780 --> 00:34:26.660 we've obviously been talking about Django, but let's dig into some of the tech. 00:34:26.660 --> 00:34:30.100 Want to tell us what's involved? What, how you built it? 00:34:30.100 --> 00:34:34.660 We've got Django on the back end. And then at the moment, we've got AngularJS on the front end 00:34:34.660 --> 00:34:41.140 and Bootstrap. A lot of these, as I say, it's, it's framework for people who come to Opal aren't 00:34:41.140 --> 00:34:44.980 necessarily going to have a background with Opal and the technologies are very much well, 00:34:44.980 --> 00:34:49.620 just stack overflow will answer my question. That's super easy for that. So yes, we've got 00:34:49.620 --> 00:34:56.980 AngularJS and then there's a bunch of magic that wires things together for you. So as I say, there's 00:34:56.980 --> 00:35:03.940 a schema that you can get out for particular for each of your models, which describes the model and 00:35:03.940 --> 00:35:07.460 AngularJS consumes that and it uses that when constructing forms. 00:35:07.460 --> 00:35:09.540 Does it talk back over Django rest framework? 00:35:09.540 --> 00:35:15.620 Yeah. And then Angular, because we have the concept of form templates and display templates, 00:35:15.620 --> 00:35:20.980 and they're all scaffolded out for you. We can make reasonable assumptions and Angular can, 00:35:20.980 --> 00:35:28.260 ideally, you don't even have to like touch Angular that much, but you can. So we use a model for the 00:35:28.260 --> 00:35:35.860 front end, which I haven't really used that much before. It's one that my colleague sort of did, 00:35:35.860 --> 00:35:41.940 which is actually what I want is I want all of a patient. So whereas in previous projects I've worked 00:35:41.940 --> 00:35:48.740 on, I'd be like, well, the patient, they want treatments, they want diagnoses, do separate 00:35:48.740 --> 00:35:54.980 API endpoints for that. When you go for a patient or an episode, it's like using a DRF. I think they 00:35:54.980 --> 00:36:00.420 like using a nested serializer. We don't use a nested serializer. So essentially, you get an episode, 00:36:00.900 --> 00:36:06.580 then it serializes everything under it. So when you're doing front end code, you know what is 00:36:06.580 --> 00:36:11.300 available without having to worry about, well, this loaded, this didn't load, which is really nice. 00:36:11.300 --> 00:36:12.100 It's a lovely fact. 00:36:12.100 --> 00:36:16.900 I see. So it like traverses the foreign key relationships and it creates a hierarchical 00:36:16.900 --> 00:36:18.180 JSON response type of thing. 00:36:18.180 --> 00:36:18.980 Exactly. Exactly. 00:36:18.980 --> 00:36:24.740 Okay. And so we serialize everything for that episode in one go because experience is showing 00:36:24.740 --> 00:36:29.460 that's what doctors want. And that makes it a lot easier in the front end to know that the model is 00:36:29.460 --> 00:36:30.340 going to be similar to the back end. 00:36:30.340 --> 00:36:34.660 It's worth just saying, you know what, we'll pay the extra price and we'll ship the episode 00:36:34.660 --> 00:36:39.620 along with the patient and it's going to be fine because you don't have two ways to do it. 00:36:39.620 --> 00:36:44.100 You can pre-fetch related all of the things and the number of database queries you're doing is 00:36:44.100 --> 00:36:45.140 pretty efficient. 00:36:45.140 --> 00:36:51.380 This portion of Talk Python To Me is brought to you by the University of San Francisco. 00:36:51.380 --> 00:36:57.140 Learn how to use Python to analyze the digital economy in the new master's in applied economics 00:36:57.140 --> 00:37:01.380 at the University of San Francisco. 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You can just say you have basically a full database. 00:38:05.140 --> 00:38:09.300 But you don't have to do anything. Can you make a file? All right, let's go with that. You know what I mean? 00:38:09.300 --> 00:38:09.940 I love it. 00:38:09.940 --> 00:38:11.140 Yeah, I do too. 00:38:11.140 --> 00:38:16.100 I think it should be used more. A lot of the times when people are exchanging like CSBs in like big 00:38:16.100 --> 00:38:21.860 app institutions, I'm kind of like, oh, why don't you just stick it in an FDLite database and ship an FDLite database? 00:38:21.860 --> 00:38:23.140 Yeah, it's super great. 00:38:23.140 --> 00:38:23.620 For sure. 00:38:24.260 --> 00:38:28.580 So it sounds like it's a pretty good project in terms of how it's all put together, some of the technologies. 00:38:28.580 --> 00:38:38.740 What's the deployment story look like? Is this, you got to make sure you set up Postgres, you set up Celery, you set up, I don't know, Microwiskey or G-Unicorn or whatever it is you're going to set up. 00:38:38.740 --> 00:38:45.140 And then is it a bunch of steps or is there some pre-canned way that people can run a magic script and have the infrastructure? 00:38:45.140 --> 00:38:50.660 So at the moment, we don't have that pre-canned script. I mean, we do for our own deployments in-house. 00:38:50.660 --> 00:38:51.060 Sure. 00:38:51.060 --> 00:39:01.860 Obviously all scripted up. But the reason why we haven't is because hospitals vary quite a lot in the sort of VPN technologies. 00:39:01.860 --> 00:39:10.900 So what we tend to do is have boxes on the hospital sites that are running the software that sort of gets us around any sort of security issues. 00:39:11.700 --> 00:39:23.460 And depending on the VPN, sometimes you can only log in on the VPN via a Windows machine doing this, the other, whereas others you can wire together with Ansible and do your deploy scripts with Ansible. 00:39:23.460 --> 00:39:31.220 So sometimes you've got the fabric scripts, sometimes Ansible scripts. So we don't have that vanilla out of the box deployment scripts, which would be quite nice. 00:39:31.220 --> 00:39:37.620 What I've been hearing a lot lately for setups like this is what we're going to do is use Docker. 00:39:38.100 --> 00:39:46.580 I mean, I'm a fan of Docker, but I feel like that adds another layer of like, okay, you did have to know Python web frameworks and you have to know Postgres. 00:39:46.580 --> 00:39:50.500 Well, now you kind of sort of have to know this, but you also have to know Docker. 00:39:50.500 --> 00:39:57.140 You know what I mean? It's like, on one hand, it gets simpler. On the other, it like expands out the things you have to maintain and manage. 00:39:57.140 --> 00:39:59.180 So I don't know. It's tricky. 00:39:59.340 --> 00:40:06.420 No, I think that's great. I think we have been looking at that. I think I looked at it a while back and maybe I'm wrong. I could be wrong with my memory. 00:40:06.420 --> 00:40:14.320 But I think that the version of Ubuntu that they were running it on was not going to casually allow us to run Docker on it. 00:40:14.320 --> 00:40:14.760 Right. 00:40:14.760 --> 00:40:16.580 But maybe, maybe that's exactly. 00:40:16.580 --> 00:40:21.720 Yeah. Speaking more broadly, I mean, because this is healthcare, it has special constraints on where it can live. 00:40:21.800 --> 00:40:32.340 Right. But if you were building this kind of thing for something that wasn't so regulated, it might be cool to build some sort of Kubernetes thing and you could just plug it into one of these managed Kubernetes clusters. 00:40:32.340 --> 00:40:33.980 Yeah, that would be cool. 00:40:33.980 --> 00:40:39.180 Right. Like that, that would be cool. That seems like a pretty easy way to say, look, you don't have to actually worry about running it. 00:40:39.180 --> 00:40:44.240 You just get this service and you just jam it in there and you can scale it with these knobs. You're good. 00:40:44.640 --> 00:40:51.180 Right. But when it's down to you running the clusters, we talk to clinicians a lot because we deal with a lot of sort of like new services. 00:40:51.180 --> 00:40:55.960 And as I say, we're not the greatest judges of when we don't have a clinician's experience. 00:40:55.960 --> 00:41:05.180 So we do a lot of like just roll up a hierarchy box with this branch, roll up a hierarchy as well through this branch, send them both over to the doctors and say, try these, play both of these. 00:41:05.180 --> 00:41:09.200 But we haven't, we haven't branched out to Kubernetes, which is what the cool kids are using. 00:41:09.420 --> 00:41:19.440 For now, anyway, you never know. You chose a JavaScript front end framework. And, you know, what is the lifetime half-life maybe of one of those things? 00:41:19.440 --> 00:41:26.080 I mean, Angular has been going for a while, but we had Angular 1 and Angular 2. I feel like those are almost different things with different programming languages. 00:41:26.080 --> 00:41:30.080 And that's a big decision, but you got to pick one, right? Like that's how it goes. 00:41:31.080 --> 00:41:40.000 Well, I mean, we are, we are, we're now rolling, we're, we're now working on Opal 1. So previously been on zero point star releases. 00:41:40.000 --> 00:41:46.040 And as such, we are aiming to move off the AngularJS because it's end of life. 00:41:47.040 --> 00:41:56.740 And we are currently doing, we're essentially practicing experimenting with Vue, React, just, you know, to, it's just progressively building off sort of, 00:41:56.740 --> 00:41:58.960 the Angular forms with some, with some extra sugar. 00:41:58.960 --> 00:41:59.460 That's cool. 00:41:59.460 --> 00:42:04.800 It's the whole experimenting with those. I've heard you like Vue. I'm a big fan of Vue. 00:42:04.800 --> 00:42:05.140 Yeah. 00:42:05.380 --> 00:42:13.880 So I have a version of Opal that just runs Vue, but it's making sure that what we've got is easy and simple for the developer. 00:42:13.880 --> 00:42:19.980 And, you know, I can't make it, I, just because I like Vue, do well, have I experimented enough with React? It's tricky. 00:42:19.980 --> 00:42:23.060 And I mean, I think more of the problem is shipping it. 00:42:23.060 --> 00:42:29.100 So, you know, now what we've got at the moment and what's quite nice is static assets. 00:42:29.100 --> 00:42:39.420 You declare your static assets, the file names into, into either plugins or into an application and Django compressor just does it all for you. 00:42:39.420 --> 00:42:50.100 Whereas now, if you're looking at something like Vue or React commonly, you need to, you don't need to, but Webpack is kind of the assumed approach. 00:42:50.440 --> 00:43:03.820 And then you've got the Django webpack loader, but the Django webpack loader, based on what I've currently seen, I don't tend to be an expert at this, is doesn't necessarily load from packages. 00:43:03.820 --> 00:43:14.840 So, for example, you pit installed Opal, or you don't, if you want the static files, which are coming through with that, the Django webpack loader won't actually pick those up. 00:43:15.320 --> 00:43:20.500 So then you have to say, well, so do we then store the static files on NPM? 00:43:20.500 --> 00:43:32.820 And so we then put, you pip install Opal and through some magic, we'll bring in the static files from npm. 00:43:32.820 --> 00:43:36.900 But then obviously then you're supporting two different packages and you need to concentrate that. 00:43:36.900 --> 00:43:38.700 It's a super interesting problem. 00:43:39.340 --> 00:43:41.220 And I'm quite enjoying playing with it. 00:43:41.220 --> 00:43:42.180 It sounds challenging. 00:43:42.180 --> 00:43:45.900 It sounds a little bit, I don't know, in the UK, if you know the game Whack-A-Mole. 00:43:45.900 --> 00:43:49.980 It's like this arcade game where you be, you know, it reminds me of that, right? 00:43:49.980 --> 00:43:52.020 Like, I'm going to, bam, I solved this problem. 00:43:52.020 --> 00:43:53.440 Oh, it pops up over there. 00:43:53.440 --> 00:43:54.860 Whack, I solved that problem. 00:43:54.860 --> 00:43:55.600 Now it's back here. 00:43:55.600 --> 00:43:58.380 Like, you know, you squeeze on one side and it pops out the other. 00:43:58.380 --> 00:44:00.320 And, you know, it's challenging, right? 00:44:00.320 --> 00:44:01.320 It seems challenging. 00:44:01.320 --> 00:44:04.440 But yeah, to be honest, I don't know. 00:44:04.440 --> 00:44:07.540 Different programmers find different problems interesting. 00:44:07.540 --> 00:44:08.840 I do find this interesting. 00:44:08.840 --> 00:44:11.520 I do sometimes think it could all be simpler. 00:44:11.520 --> 00:44:14.920 But that is probably my own ignorance. 00:44:14.920 --> 00:44:23.640 Yeah, I feel like JavaScript went from being like, oh, it's the most easy, simple little thing to, oh, this is, there's a lot of stuff going on here. 00:44:23.640 --> 00:44:26.060 I'm not really sure why, how this is happening here. 00:44:26.060 --> 00:44:29.520 Yeah, well, it's like, oh, I'll just run npm install. 00:44:29.520 --> 00:44:31.400 Suddenly my computer gets hot. 00:44:31.400 --> 00:44:31.800 Yeah. 00:44:31.800 --> 00:44:32.180 Exactly. 00:44:32.180 --> 00:44:33.500 Yeah, interesting. 00:44:33.500 --> 00:44:35.400 Okay, well, I'm a big fan of you. 00:44:35.400 --> 00:44:37.640 I definitely think it's special. 00:44:37.640 --> 00:44:39.120 I like that as well. 00:44:39.120 --> 00:44:40.540 Now, let's see. 00:44:40.540 --> 00:44:42.200 Let me ask you a couple other questions. 00:44:42.200 --> 00:44:45.080 We're getting a little towards the end of the show here. 00:44:45.080 --> 00:44:52.260 One thing I guess it's interesting to talk about, just real briefly, is Opal is open source. 00:44:52.260 --> 00:44:53.780 Go to GitHub. 00:44:53.780 --> 00:44:55.440 I can get it, do whatever I want, right? 00:44:55.440 --> 00:44:56.200 I can pip install it. 00:44:56.380 --> 00:44:56.600 Yeah. 00:44:56.600 --> 00:45:04.860 But you work at Open Healthcare UK, which is that like a boutique app shop for the healthcare industry? 00:45:04.860 --> 00:45:05.960 Or how would you describe it? 00:45:06.100 --> 00:45:15.260 The way the healthcare in hospitals commonly works is that what you have is the productization, 00:45:15.260 --> 00:45:22.480 if that's a word, is massive, large-scale EPI are pumped in and it aims to be a data repository 00:45:22.480 --> 00:45:26.460 for all teams in the hospital doing all things. 00:45:26.460 --> 00:45:28.860 It's like the SAP of hospitals. 00:45:28.860 --> 00:45:30.280 It's going to do everything. 00:45:30.280 --> 00:45:32.240 Just install this and it'll be fine, right? 00:45:32.400 --> 00:45:32.840 Exactly. 00:45:32.840 --> 00:45:33.380 Okay. 00:45:33.380 --> 00:45:42.980 And what you find is that it does a pretty good job, but for, it does 80%, but for the 00:45:42.980 --> 00:45:49.860 extra 20%, what you've got is Word docs flying around, Excel spreadsheet, the occasional access 00:45:49.860 --> 00:45:52.300 database, or good old-fashioned pen and paper. 00:45:52.300 --> 00:45:52.660 Yeah. 00:45:52.660 --> 00:45:55.580 And sometimes this 20% is pretty darn useful. 00:45:55.580 --> 00:46:00.580 So we have, what we do is we fix up that 20%. 00:46:00.580 --> 00:46:06.960 So you're a, we do microbiology, for example, we do some of that sort of stuff, which is 00:46:06.960 --> 00:46:10.160 sort of teams which specialize in blood cultures. 00:46:10.160 --> 00:46:17.180 We go in there and we're like, and we talk to the doctors and we get their requirements and 00:46:17.180 --> 00:46:21.200 we tailor stuff as sort of kind of specific to them. 00:46:21.200 --> 00:46:23.540 And yeah, we cover that 20%. 00:46:23.540 --> 00:46:23.880 That's cool. 00:46:23.880 --> 00:46:29.880 So basically the role of Opal is this thing that you guys have built, it'll let you quickly, 00:46:29.880 --> 00:46:35.360 it'll, you know, supercharge your creation of these apps to cover that 20% that you talk 00:46:35.360 --> 00:46:39.180 about, but it's also awesome that it's open source and other people can take it and run 00:46:39.180 --> 00:46:39.440 with it. 00:46:39.440 --> 00:46:39.780 Is that right? 00:46:39.780 --> 00:46:40.260 That's right. 00:46:40.260 --> 00:46:41.260 That's exactly right. 00:46:41.260 --> 00:46:44.340 This is not that much of a specific problem. 00:46:44.340 --> 00:46:45.240 This is a general problem. 00:46:45.240 --> 00:46:49.720 I think worldwide, I don't think, I don't think in the States they've kind of got a magical 00:46:49.720 --> 00:46:51.520 EPR that fixes all problems either, right? 00:46:51.600 --> 00:46:53.040 No, no, no, no, of course not. 00:46:53.040 --> 00:46:53.340 Yeah. 00:46:53.340 --> 00:46:53.680 Cool. 00:46:53.680 --> 00:46:59.420 So it seems like a solid blend of here's this open source thing that people can work on and 00:46:59.420 --> 00:47:02.680 they can use, but is also there to support your business. 00:47:02.680 --> 00:47:08.800 And, you know, one of the things I feel like just doesn't seem to work really well is the 00:47:08.800 --> 00:47:12.220 PayPal donate button on open source projects, right? 00:47:12.220 --> 00:47:16.580 It's just my experience of hearing folks who seem like they have pretty popular projects 00:47:16.580 --> 00:47:20.740 is like, you know, it's definitely not a career at that point. 00:47:20.780 --> 00:47:21.600 There's got to be something else. 00:47:21.600 --> 00:47:24.200 And this seems like a really nice synergy around that. 00:47:24.200 --> 00:47:24.720 So that's cool. 00:47:24.720 --> 00:47:27.020 Our motivation for open source isn't. 00:47:27.020 --> 00:47:35.440 It's open source because healthcare applications deserve the rigor that being open source allows 00:47:35.440 --> 00:47:37.700 you to have and the inspection. 00:47:37.700 --> 00:47:44.900 Open source is kind of like a function for you should buy our software because it's open source 00:47:44.900 --> 00:47:47.140 and therefore hopefully you can trust it more. 00:47:47.140 --> 00:47:50.500 And yeah, that's the sales feel, I guess. 00:47:50.500 --> 00:47:54.840 It's the antidote to that 10 million quid problem. 00:47:54.840 --> 00:47:58.480 10 million to convert and 10 million to delete. 00:47:58.480 --> 00:47:59.760 Which one do you prefer? 00:47:59.760 --> 00:48:01.280 Exactly. 00:48:01.380 --> 00:48:05.040 Well, I guess on that, are you looking for contributors to this project? 00:48:05.040 --> 00:48:08.960 You know, are there restrictions that people want to take it and run with it and do something else? 00:48:08.960 --> 00:48:14.620 I'll sort of, what we would like is, as I say, we're moving front-end framework. 00:48:14.960 --> 00:48:19.320 I don't think, I think everyone has, I think every developer right now probably has experience 00:48:19.320 --> 00:48:21.580 between moving between different jobs for front-end framework. 00:48:21.580 --> 00:48:23.620 We'd love some opinions on that. 00:48:23.620 --> 00:48:26.140 We'd love anyone to come and have a look. 00:48:26.140 --> 00:48:31.520 Come and have a look at the GitHub repo, offer suggestions, any breaks in docs, any breaks in 00:48:31.520 --> 00:48:32.400 anything really. 00:48:32.400 --> 00:48:33.980 That would be super interesting. 00:48:33.980 --> 00:48:38.880 Also, you know, we've come at this from having years of experience with building healthcare 00:48:38.880 --> 00:48:40.520 applications in the UK. 00:48:40.520 --> 00:48:45.980 Well, does that necessarily create an international, something that's internationally applicable? 00:48:45.980 --> 00:48:46.520 Sure. 00:48:46.520 --> 00:48:50.840 At the moment, we have NHS number as a field on a model. 00:48:50.840 --> 00:48:52.760 That will not be happening soon. 00:48:52.760 --> 00:48:54.440 We are going to move off that. 00:48:54.440 --> 00:49:01.220 But that kind of thing, you know, this should be a global solution to a global problem, not 00:49:01.220 --> 00:49:02.980 a UK solution. 00:49:02.980 --> 00:49:04.680 Congratulations on this project, Fred. 00:49:04.680 --> 00:49:07.420 It looks really useful for folks out there. 00:49:07.420 --> 00:49:08.340 Thank you very much. 00:49:08.520 --> 00:49:09.600 It's been quite short to you. 00:49:09.600 --> 00:49:10.480 It's quite a little grand. 00:49:10.480 --> 00:49:10.820 Yeah. 00:49:10.820 --> 00:49:15.280 Now, before you get out of here, though, I've got the two final questions I've got to ask 00:49:15.280 --> 00:49:15.460 you. 00:49:15.460 --> 00:49:20.120 So if you're going to work on Opal and write some code over there, what editor do you use? 00:49:20.120 --> 00:49:26.160 I use the Vim plugin on VS Code, which is interesting. 00:49:26.160 --> 00:49:29.360 I occasionally go back into pure Vim. 00:49:29.360 --> 00:49:33.100 Before VS Code, I used Sublime. 00:49:33.100 --> 00:49:38.160 I used IntelliJ when I was a Java programmer or using the Vim plugin. 00:49:38.160 --> 00:49:38.600 Vim plugin. 00:49:38.600 --> 00:49:45.040 And so I think I feel like I've spent my life doing this sort of weird hybrid of helpful 00:49:45.040 --> 00:49:48.920 Vim versus a more integrated environment. 00:49:48.920 --> 00:49:49.740 A constant pool. 00:49:49.740 --> 00:49:50.020 Yeah. 00:49:50.020 --> 00:49:52.260 But VS Code sounds like a good one these days. 00:49:52.260 --> 00:49:53.800 It's got a lot of momentum for sure. 00:49:54.320 --> 00:49:56.000 And then notable PyPI baggage? 00:49:56.000 --> 00:50:01.960 I really like cache properties in Django, which are, if you've never used them, essentially 00:50:01.960 --> 00:50:05.140 it's an annotation that says, here's a method. 00:50:05.140 --> 00:50:08.780 Store the results of this method on the object. 00:50:09.460 --> 00:50:15.120 And then whenever I call this method, first time I call it, calculate it and return the 00:50:15.120 --> 00:50:15.380 answer. 00:50:15.380 --> 00:50:17.660 Subsequently, store the results of the method. 00:50:17.660 --> 00:50:20.260 I just think it's a beautiful pattern. 00:50:20.260 --> 00:50:25.680 It's been something that's been discussed as part of core Python for some time. 00:50:26.480 --> 00:50:28.160 Danny Greenfield, I think. 00:50:28.160 --> 00:50:29.000 Hi, Danny. 00:50:29.000 --> 00:50:34.100 He has a package on PyPy that does this because it's such a common function. 00:50:34.100 --> 00:50:41.600 And then in Python 3.8, just a few weeks ago, we now have functools cache property. 00:50:42.280 --> 00:50:44.020 So it's been moved into core. 00:50:44.020 --> 00:50:49.660 So I was hoping to have functools.cache property as my notable package, which is potentially 00:50:49.660 --> 00:50:51.240 cheating because part of the core library. 00:50:51.240 --> 00:50:52.380 But it's super useful. 00:50:52.380 --> 00:50:53.580 It's new enough, right? 00:50:53.580 --> 00:50:54.320 It just got shipped. 00:50:54.320 --> 00:50:55.060 I think that's cool. 00:50:55.060 --> 00:50:58.480 I think that's one of the really easy ways to speed up things. 00:50:58.480 --> 00:51:03.580 The only challenge with that is you have to be careful on what cache invalidation means, 00:51:03.580 --> 00:51:04.100 right? 00:51:04.100 --> 00:51:06.260 That can be challenging to deal whenever you're doing caching. 00:51:06.260 --> 00:51:09.440 And if you look at the pet, there's a long discussion about it. 00:51:09.440 --> 00:51:10.180 I can imagine. 00:51:10.820 --> 00:51:15.140 But, you know, it can just dramatically, it can just completely change the way the performance 00:51:15.140 --> 00:51:15.680 looks, right? 00:51:15.680 --> 00:51:18.960 So it's so easy to do those types of things. 00:51:18.960 --> 00:51:19.560 Pretty cool. 00:51:19.560 --> 00:51:19.960 Good one. 00:51:19.960 --> 00:51:20.760 All right. 00:51:20.760 --> 00:51:21.480 Final call to action. 00:51:21.480 --> 00:51:22.640 People want to get started with Opal. 00:51:22.640 --> 00:51:23.260 What do they do? 00:51:23.260 --> 00:51:24.180 Pick and install it. 00:51:24.180 --> 00:51:25.260 Take a look at the docs. 00:51:25.260 --> 00:51:27.200 We've kind of covered them a little bit today. 00:51:27.200 --> 00:51:29.020 I think they're pretty good. 00:51:29.020 --> 00:51:30.140 So pick and install it. 00:51:30.140 --> 00:51:33.440 Go through the tutorial and let us know what you think. 00:51:33.440 --> 00:51:37.740 The code is all at openhealthcare.com on GitHub. 00:51:37.740 --> 00:51:38.940 GitHub.com. 00:51:40.300 --> 00:51:43.180 So, yeah, you can go and just browse the code as well. 00:51:43.180 --> 00:51:43.740 Sounds good. 00:51:43.740 --> 00:51:44.700 Thanks for being on the show. 00:51:44.700 --> 00:51:45.440 It was great to talk with you. 00:51:45.440 --> 00:51:45.960 Great, Michael. 00:51:45.960 --> 00:51:46.620 Thanks very much. 00:51:46.620 --> 00:51:47.120 Yeah, bye. 00:51:47.900 --> 00:51:50.560 This has been another episode of Talk Python To Me. 00:51:50.560 --> 00:51:54.980 Our guest on this episode was Fred Kingham, and it's been brought to you by Linode and the 00:51:54.980 --> 00:51:56.300 University of San Francisco. 00:51:56.300 --> 00:52:00.720 Linode is your go-to hosting for whatever you're building with Python. 00:52:00.720 --> 00:52:04.260 Get four months free at talkpython.fm/linode. 00:52:04.260 --> 00:52:06.160 That's L-I-N-O-D-E. 00:52:06.840 --> 00:52:12.140 Learn how to use Python to analyze the digital economy in the Masters of Applied Economics at 00:52:12.140 --> 00:52:13.440 the University of San Francisco. 00:52:13.440 --> 00:52:18.280 Just go to talkpython.fm/USF to find out more. 00:52:18.280 --> 00:52:20.540 Want to level up your Python? 00:52:20.540 --> 00:52:25.340 If you're just getting started, try my Python Jumpstart by Building 10 Apps course. 00:52:25.340 --> 00:52:30.440 Or if you're looking for something more advanced, check out our new async course that digs into 00:52:30.440 --> 00:52:33.500 all the different types of async programming you can do in Python. 00:52:33.500 --> 00:52:37.460 And of course, if you're interested in more than one of these, be sure to check out our 00:52:37.460 --> 00:52:38.160 Everything Bundle. 00:52:38.160 --> 00:52:40.060 It's like a subscription that never expires. 00:52:40.060 --> 00:52:42.200 Be sure to subscribe to the show. 00:52:42.200 --> 00:52:44.600 Open your favorite podcatcher and search for Python. 00:52:44.600 --> 00:52:45.840 We should be right at the top. 00:52:45.840 --> 00:52:51.380 You can also find the iTunes feed at /itunes, the Google Play feed at /play, and the 00:52:51.380 --> 00:52:54.820 direct RSS feed at /rss on talkpython.fm. 00:52:54.820 --> 00:52:56.900 This is your host, Michael Kennedy. 00:52:56.900 --> 00:52:58.400 Thanks so much for listening. 00:52:58.400 --> 00:52:59.440 I really appreciate it. 00:52:59.440 --> 00:53:01.220 Now get out there and write some Python code. 00:53:01.220 --> 00:53:02.220 Bye. 00:53:02.220 --> 00:53:03.220 Bye. 00:53:03.220 --> 00:53:03.220 Bye. 00:53:03.220 --> 00:53:03.220 Bye. 00:53:03.220 --> 00:53:04.220 Bye. 00:53:04.220 --> 00:53:34.200 Thank you.